Casinos aren't illegal though. Instead they're a legal business where you can come and play gambling games with negative expected value. The casino in turn pays for the space, staff, insurance, and profit from the expected value you've implicitly agreed to leave on the table by playing there.

Cheating the casino is, in spirit, fraudulently violating that agreement to play games with a negative expected value. Letting people break agreements like that isn't good for society, so it's criminal.

Criminal charges seem like the right outcome to me.

Also, we really ought to ban casinos. If we must allow gambling, we ought to require that it be 0 expected value make the casinos make their money by just charging an entrance fee.

I’ve also been following Steven Bridges on YouTube and it’s super interesting!

That's... weird? I feel like as a casino it'd not be unreasonable to think something fishy was going on, like the guy was making a (somewhat clumsy?) attempt to launder money.

But overall... yeah. Certainly a casino has the right to refuse service to whomever they want -- such as someone who's counting cards (not that counting works at blackjack these days, since no casino deals out a single full deck at a time anymore) -- but the idea that they don't feel they have to honor whatever payouts owed up to the point of kicking someone out... messed up.

It is not sometimes. They will strait up not pay if fraud is suspected.

I'm sure it's understandable that that's outside the acceptable way to play a game - counting cards, for example, is done while respecting the rules of the game.

I kind of see this one as stealing from the casino, rather than players getting an edge.

But I'm cool with casinos getting robbed!

The article is scant on details, but it sounds like this happened at an auto table. If the auto table allows dice sliding, and they weren't warned by a dealer that they were not allowed to slide the dice, then they were playing by the rules.

To flip it around, why is the casino allowed to stack the odds in its favor, but not the player? If there's an exploit in the rules that players can use to gain an advantage, then it's on the casino to update its rules

And to your point about warnings from dealers, many people walk up to a craps table for the first time not knowing what they're doing, expecting to learn on the go (and most craps dealers are happy to help, if you ask questions nicely and not while they're in the middle of counting payouts). There's no rule that says you can play a casino game only after first memorizing the rule book for that game.

If you go up to an "auto" table, and there's no one supervising it (or, say, just one person who can't possibly watch everything), then the casino is implicitly saying that the software on the table is good enough to help ensure the rules are followed. If it's not, then that's on them.

I do think that card counting and dice sliding aren't quite in the same league, though. Making a rule against card counting seems itself unfair; the game is about probabilities, and card counting is an integral part of determining those probabilities (given a hypothetical naive casino that'd give you single-deck blackjack these days). But a rule for craps that says "you can't roll the dice in a way that lets you determine the outcome before rolling" seems... pretty reasonable to me? The game would be pretty pointless if the shooter could just call out the numbers they want, and that'd be the roll.

Either way, criminal charges for dice sliding is messed up. If the person supervising the auto table (or the auto table itself) didn't enforce the rules properly... welp, maybe the supervisor needs better training, or the table needs better software.

Nobody wants a pure chance game, and the casinos know this, so they make games that allow for some degree of skill to influence the outcome. The idea here is that if you think you're above average, you can win 55% of the time, and the casino allows that because most people win 40% of the time so they come out positive.

In fact, casinos promote that, and poker and blackjack are great examples where beginners who don't have the skills to beat the odds are more likely to gamble (and lose money) because they think they're better than they actually are.

To me, that's what makes this case and card counting the same thing. The players used their skill to outsmart the casino. The casino can then update their rules to account for that: using multiple decks for blackjack, or adding an obstacle the dice must trip.

What the casino shouldn't be allowed to do, is go cry to the government and throw the players in jail.

That being said, if the players were going against guidance or violating the rules then I agree, that's illegal and they should return the money and be banned from the casino. Still no prison though haha.

If a company doesn't allow you to test their security, just let it go.

I think offering gambling games as a business should be illegal but as long as it's legal the casinos deserve the same protection from people trying to abuse contracts as everyone else.

And consider the usual case at a normal "manual" craps table: if someone tried to slide the dice, or throw them in a way that wasn't allowed, there are three (and sometimes four) casino employees around the table who will quickly call "no roll" and tell the shooter what they did wrong, and have them go again. If they keep doing it, they'll get kicked out. No need to involve law enforcement here.

But once we talk about an "automatic" craps table -- which exists mainly to cut down on labor costs to the casino -- now they're pissed that they failed to enforce the rules properly, and have -- through their clout and government legal capture -- turned that into criminal charges against the people who slid by.

I know I've been arguing the opposite in other comments, but in this case they apparently didn't actually agree to the rules of the game, and yet they chose to play anyway: the rules do state that sliding isn't allowed, and that the dice have to tumble in a certain way for it to be considered a valid roll.

Regardless, though, I think it's the casino's responsibility to ensure rules like that are followed, and if they fail to do so (due to cost-cutting measures like having software run a craps table), that's on them.

While I more or less agree with everything you said, could there really exist a casino where players have an advantage against the casino? I feel like even a casino that tries to be perfectly fair, and make a profit on other things like food and alcohol, would eventually go belly up because they would logically attract more 'cheaters' than any other casino, even if they did their best to stop them.

The whole point of a casino is for the house to eventually win. That is the nature of a business. However we are also talking about gambling - the taking of odds and rules of the game and paybacks etc.

So someone outflanked the house, via dextrous skill. Now here's where it gets a bit murky: where do we draw the line between fiddling the odds potentially into your favour via skill and otherwise? I think that skidding the dice was always an available option and hence should be accounted for say with a trip obstacle that the dice must cross.

I think that skidding in this case is different than earpieces and card marking and other cheats. I also don't think that counting in Black Jack is wrong - fix the bloody game.

Gambling is often painted by the industry as a game of skill. Please don't penalise skill but do have the good grace to realize when you have lost. Pick yourself up and adjust the rules and crack on. You have destroyed so many lives over the centuries, so why not own it and grow up?

There's actually clear rules about dice handling at carb tables. The dice are expected to hit the far wall, the dice are expected to be tossed, and to not slide. Throws that do not meet standards might be deemed 'no roll'.

As long as the casino offers a game true to the promise they should have protection against people looking for loopholes the same way there is protection in contract law.

Gambling games are a form of reverse insurance. With insurance you pay to reduce variance/risk. In gambling games you pay to increase it because apparently a lot of people enjoy it.

As long as the deal is "come play this game, we offer negative ROI in exchange for high variance" and not "come at us, try anything to win at the game we have here" the house deserves protection imo.