For Me, Regulated or Not, It Is A TRUST Problem

[Westland Bowl]

For me, online gambling died in November 2009. Ever since then I only had ONE small cashout. More and more the online blackjack games got blatantly obvious they were manipulated based on bet size relative to bankroll and my betting patterns. I've haven't deposited real money in over a year and now I am glad I didn't.

Online casinos, up to this point, have not addressed the trust problem of manipulation of the games, especially for card games. It's a conflict of interest to have the casino be the drawer of the cards that are "hidden" unlike where you can see the shuffled and un-manipulated cards in a shoe in a land casino. I believe this issue is going to be the biggest problem that mainstream public will have with online gambling when it is regulated.

[Rhyzz]

It's all very well saying that these games are 'manipulated' in some way, but without offering up any evidence or opinions on how it is even possible to manipulate a game that has a built in house edge, i'm struggling to see your arguement.

I have guys betting between £1k - £4k a hand on Blackjack, some weeks they destroy the Casino, some weeks they lose six figures...it balances in the end. Accusing the game of being manipulated and 'fixed' is quite short sighted since you cannot see the long term RTP of the game at the operators end.

[lots0]

For me, online gambling died in November 2009. Ever since then I only had ONE small cashout. More and more the online blackjack games got blatantly obvious they were manipulated based on bet size relative to bankroll and my betting patterns. I've haven't deposited real money in over a year and now I am glad I didn't.

Online casinos, up to this point, have not addressed the trust problem of manipulation of the games, especially for card games. It's a conflict of interest to have the casino be the drawer of the cards that are "hidden" unlike where you can see the shuffled and un-manipulated cards in a shoe in a land casino. I believe this issue is going to be the biggest problem that mainstream public will have with online gambling when it is regulated.

How do you think they could address this trust issue?
After the Wall Street/Banking crash, we all know that government regulators can't be trusted, they can be bought off.

Do you trust the Native Casinos? You shouldn't.
The Native casinos games are not regulated any more than the current questionable online casinos are.
As a matter of fact, when the casinos that were regulated in the UK were allowed in the US, they were in FACT much more regulated than any of the Native owned land based casinos inside the US. That is one of main reasons the Native Casinos in the US are so against the British regulated online casinos. They didn't want to have to compete head to head with "Regulated" Casinos.

Your right is all about TRUST...
But it is also about educating yourself on who to trust and who not to trust.

Because the casino playing field is not even... there are honest trustworthy casinos and there are the crooked casinos that will steal you blind (no matter if they are land based or online).

[Westland Bowl]

Just because they bet big and win some, lose some doesn't mean anything. If they have a betting strategy that does pretty good most of the time, then they would see the manipulation.

[Westland Bowl]

For me, online gambling died in November 2009. Ever since then I only had ONE small cashout. More and more the online blackjack games got blatantly obvious they were manipulated based on bet size relative to bankroll and my betting patterns. I've haven't deposited real money in over a year and now I am glad I didn't.

Online casinos, up to this point, have not addressed the trust problem of manipulation of the games, especially for card games. It's a conflict of interest to have the casino be the drawer of the cards that are "hidden" unlike where you can see the shuffled and un-manipulated cards in a shoe in a land casino. I believe this issue is going to be the biggest problem that mainstream public will have with online gambling when it is regulated.

How do you think they could address this trust issue?
After the Wall Street/Banking crash, we all know that government regulators can't be trusted, they can be bought off.

Do you trust the Native Casinos? You shouldn't.
The Native casinos games are not regulated any more than the current questionable online casinos are.
As a matter of fact, when the casinos that were regulated in the UK were allowed in the US, they were in FACT much more regulated than any of the Native owned land based casinos inside the US. That is one of main reasons the Native Casinos in the US are so against the British regulated online casinos. They didn't want to have to compete head to head with "Regulated" Casinos.

Your right is all about TRUST...
But it is also about educating yourself on who to trust and who not to trust.

Because the casino playing field is not even... there are honest trustworthy casinos and there are the crooked casinos that will steal you blind (no matter if they are land based or online).

The scope of my original post was really in regards to online hidden cards as oppose to cards you can see in a land casino shoe. The trust-worthiness of Native casinos is a separate issue. I just plain don't trust hidden cards. How to address that? I don’t know....let the online casinos figure that one out.

[jstrike]

The blackjack trust problem's actually really easy to fix, and that's what we're gonna do when we open up (already doing it in demo mode). 1: There's no such thing as a single-player blackjack table. You're always playing with other people. 2: Every card shoe is fully published to everyone, at the end of every day, and you and everyone else can compare what happened against it.

That way you can see exactly how all the cards were dealt for every hand, and exactly why you got what you got. I don't know why other casinos don't do this. But we use a real, six-deck shoe that covers hands through about four decks before being shuffled.

[Nifty29]

The blackjack trust problem's actually really easy to fix, and that's what we're gonna do when we open up (already doing it in demo mode). 1: There's no such thing as a single-player blackjack table. You're always playing with other people. 2: Every card shoe is fully published to everyone, at the end of every day, and you and everyone else can compare what happened against it.

That way you can see exactly how all the cards were dealt for every hand, and exactly why you got what you got. I don't know why other casinos don't do this. But we use a real, six-deck shoe that covers hands through about four decks before being shuffled.

A really good idea that would go a long way to solving the trust problem.

Of course, there will always be those who insist that what you show at the end of the day is 'manipulated' but these are usually just unskilled players who don't have a firm grasp of the mathematics behind the game.

[jstrike]

Of course, there will always be those who insist that what you show at the end of the day is 'manipulated' ...

Well...yeah. Technically, it'd be easy to have multiplayer blackjack and still double-deal the cards, and then publish the re-shuffled deck at the end of the day. But, when all those hands are published in a row, together, thousands of them every day, and anybody can run them through an program and analyze them for randomness, there's no way a casino can get away with lying about it -- even 1% fakeness would show up, like if you only did it with a trigger over a certain amount won. I'm kinda a security/fairness paranoiac myself. I get weird with certain dealers even in real casinos, and I'll walk away from the table. And online, it's definitely a huge trust issue. So I've tried to think how I can write software that'll provide proof-positive of fairness, where the player never has to take my word for anything. So far, this is the best I've come up with, but if anyone's got a better one, I'll do it.

[DiamondGeezer]

jstrike what would you think about the idea of someone writing a program for BJ that would work along the same lines as Pokertracker does for poker?

By that I mean a program that could record player and dealer cards and cross reference everything in the way computers are so good at. Once you have your database you could interrogate it for say how many times you had Ac 9d and won. For one software and accross all softwares. Also it could keep track of all your important win/loss stats accross all softwares. Plus different stake amounts. And compare actual play with perfect play.

Not saying it would solve all the worries but I feel it would burst a lot of the myths players often have.

[jstrike]

jstrike what would you think about the idea of someone writing a program for BJ that would work along the same lines as Pokertracker does for poker?

By that I mean a program that could record player and dealer cards and cross reference everything in the way computers are so good at. Once you have your database you could interrogate it for say how many times you had Ac 9d and won. For one software and accross all softwares. Also it could keep track of all your important win/loss stats accross all softwares. Plus different stake amounts. And compare actual play with perfect play.

Not saying it would solve all the worries but I feel it would burst a lot of the myths players often have.

I think it's a great idea. I mean -- you have to have a relatively large sample size to know if anything's fair. With 10,000 hands, you should be +/- 5% of the EV if you're consistently playing perfect Blackjack. That means you could still be winning or losing. The software would at least be able to show what % of the time you went off the reservation and didn't play perfect strategy, and then it could compare that with the actual results. If you put that together with a few hundred other people running the software, so you had a million or so hands, you'd be able to tell for sure if a casino was cheating.

Even barring that, though, there would be tell-tale signs. Like an abnormally high distribution of picture cards in the 5th, 7th and 9th dealt cards off the deck. And you could probably pick that out within a couple thousand hands and say with pretty high confidence whether the casino was level or not.