As a worker at a casino, I play blackjack and other games with a whole variety of different people. Many people go there just for fun every once in a while, but there are a few particularly memorable “regulars” that I always seem to end up playing with. Not knowing their names, I’m forced to come up with my own nicknames for them, such as Overly Religious Guy.
This post is dedicated to one customer, who I’ve dubbed Conspiracy Guy. He’s really nice and polite, but unfortunately blessed with the view that the casino’s game odds are against the player. I mean, he’s right; the casino’s game odds are different to true odds, because how else would a casino derive a profit? The problem is, his theories are really out there.
Now, I’ve only ever dealt blackjack and pontoon to CG, so I’m not sure if he has theories concerning other games. I’ve never seen him play anything else apart from those and ironically, pokies, anyway.
Conspiracy Guy believes that the machines we have on the table to constantly shuffle the cards, are counting the cards.
The shuffling machines are there for at least two reasons. Reason number one, is that with all the cards constantly active and not in the discard rack, it’s impossible to count cards. Also, we don’t ever need to shuffle, ensuring the game is constantly in motion and the casino makes more money. In training, we got shown the insides of the machines, and got shown how it shuffles; it’s all completely random. Of course, telling him that is impossible, because any argument made against him just gets thrown aside because he’s been playing “for x amount of years”.
That being said, he has the theory that it somehow counts the cards and organizes them, counts how many bets there are, how much is being bet, and what boxes are open. From there, the people upstairs also alter the shuffling machine in their computers, much like in The Flintstones In Viva Rock Vegas, when the head of the casino had a switch that could make all the games win, and all the games lose (but apparently more complicated).
If you take too long to start the hand after he has placed his bets (5 seconds) he gets fidgety and will start randomly grabbing his bets back, throwing more chips on, and opening and closing boxes because he thinks this will “throw the people upstairs off”. Spoiler: it never works. It’s quite amusing to watch though.
Conspiracy Guy never used to be this bad, but over time he seems to have gotten more and more paranoid about how the casino works.
The trick with all his theories is that they can’t be true, or we’d be breaking laws and legislation set by the Government to stop this very stuff. We have a Government Inspector in the casino all the time making sure we do everything above the line, and when we introduce something like the shuffling machines (which are made by a whole different company to us), they have to be checked to make sure they comply with legislation. If they didn’t, we’d end up as corrupt as the casinos in the movies (which is probably where Conspiracy Guy gets his ideas from).
The photo used is from the SkyCity Adelaide website; amateur photos aren’t allowed to be taken inside the gaming areas of the Casino, making it difficult to get a suitable image for this post.
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lol what a twat!
I heard about a US company that was caught making pokies where the jackpot never comes up. They got fined so hard they went bankrupt.
And the moral of that story is that the US are a bunch of corrupt bastards :D
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