Casino Surveillance Pro

Las Vegas Casino Security Needs To Watch For More Than Cheaters To Qualify For Federal Liability Protection, Expert Says If Las Vegas casinos and hotels want to receive the type of liability protection that MGM Resorts is seeking nearly one year after the Oct. 1 shooting, they’re going to have to prove that their security systems can do more than just catch clever card counters at the blackjack table, according to one lawyer. Hotels are currently not among the facilities that have been approved for Department of Homeland Security certification that protects and limits liability in the event of a terrorist or violent attack on their premises under the SAFETY Act of 2002. And at least according to one expert, Las Vegas casinos might need to dramatically diversify and amplify  their surveillance procedures in order to meet those standards. Lack of Guilt by Association “What they would have to show is that those cameras are equally useful for terrorist threats, such as...

A few posts back, I talked about the best low-tech way to keep a cashier honest. This time we're going to talk about some higher-tech methods. First of all you have to understand that all surveillance systems these days record video digitally using computers, servers and network-attached storage arrays. (VCR's and videotapes haven't been manufactured in over 10 years, and I don't know any casino surveillance operation that is still using them, of course there may be a few I don't know of.) Most larger casino operations also use a networked point-of-sale system, instead of just a regular cash register, to ring up guest tickets and collect all payments. Depending on the type of software involved, the POS and CCTV systems can be integrated together through an application that runs on a web browser. This application allows a surveillance observer to watch what a cashier is ringing up and collecting for payment, both in real time and when doing a review. It will also...

A longtime reader of my blog suggested that I start posting news articles concerning casino surveillance. I thought that was a great idea, so here's my first one. I came across the story a few days ago on the internet. The Yavapai Casino, a tribal casino located in Prescott, Arizona, was closed from 11 a.m. until after 6 p.m. on July 30, due to a security concern. “We had an issue with our surveillance cameras,” said Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe’s Tribal General Manager Steve Rosene. “That’s a big deal for us, so we had to ask everyone to leave. It (the evacuation) was done safely with no problems,” Rosene said. The issues were resolved by about 6 p.m. and casino staff said they believed they'd be open later in the night. Commentary: As an expert in Casino surveillance systems, including their installation, maintenance and operation, I can say that everything about this story screams out that they had a major system malfunction or failure. Weather they were using an in-hous...

Low-tech ways to keep a cashier honest: The most effective low-tech way to see if a cashier is embezzling is to do a middle of the shift audit. That's where you walk up to the cashier tell him to stop working, and stand right next to you as you audit his till. You will run what's called an X report, if it's an old Tech cash register. This will show exactly how much cash he should have taken in. Add that total to whatever his starting Bank was and you have an exact amount that should be in the cash drawer. If it's over that amount, and especially if it's over by a fairly significant amount of money, then the cashier is not ringing up some cash sales even though he still collecting the money for it. I saw a cashier audited once only an hour into his shift and he already had over $100 more in his till than the X report said he should have. If the cash total is only over by a dollar to $10, then that can be contributed to errors, or poor cash handling skills. When ...

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I played craps this week for the first time in probably 20 years. I left Reno in late 1997 to work for a tribal casino, then another casino , in the Pacific Northwest. Once I was working for the tribes, I felt like it was improper for me to gamble at those facilities, even the ones I wasn't working at. Not all of them offered craps anyways, so I just didn't play. So earlier this week, I found myself in the Cal Neva Casino in downtown Reno, with an extra hundred bucks in my pocket and an empty craps table staring me in the face. It worked out pretty good too, with me playing for about half an hour and walking away dead even. Having been bitten by the bug, I returned to the Cal Neva a couple days later and this time left about a hundred fifty ahead. So, let me tell you how I play craps. Rule number one: stay away from the goddamn proposition bets, including the field bet. Rule number two: reread rule number one. Hard ways, horn bets, C & E, they all have terrible payoffs ...

Okay so you may have heard recently that the Supreme Court decided to let individual states determine whether or not they wanted to allow legalized, regulated sports betting, weather in a casino or some other retail establishment. I've been asked recently a how I think this will affect the Nevada bookmakers. Here is my analysis. I don't think it's going to have much of an effect Nevada books. The only people that it will have a real effect on, in my opinion, are illegal Sports books and bookies, which are most prevalent on the East Coast. I think it will affect them a great deal, but most of their customers we're not flying to Nevada to make Sports bets already, so instead they'll just stop using me legal bookies and go to the new legalized Sports books. Another thing to consider is that most casinos in Nevada, both big and small ones, have stopped operating Sports books already and if just leased the space out to a company called William Hill. William Hill is a ...

Okay, here's where we get down to the nitty-gritty and what I assume you all really want to know about employee theft. Which is, what does the eye in the sky have to do with all this?What are the techniques that's surveillance uses to detect and deter employee theft in the casino? Well obviously they have cameras. Duh. In the last 10 to 15 years however, new software has emerged that allows those cameras to be synced up with the point-of-sale terminals at all of the cashier stations in the casino. The software has gotten less expensive over time, as software tends to do. The result is a pretty sophisticated way of looking at what each cashier does on their shift. For example, most of these software solutions allow you to go and pull up each individual transaction, along with the video on it. And they can be sorted by difference payment methods. You can view all of the transactions that only involve cash, or you can do every time the cashier it no sale to open their drawer. Th...

I remember the first time I was ever exposed to employee theft. I was a teenager in high school, and working during the summer at an amusement park. My first day there I was partnered up with another kid, about my age, and we worked an ice cream cart together selling ice cream sandwiches, popsicles and that kind of stuff. The problem was inventory control and I realized it right away. When we left the walk-in freezer to go out and sell, nobody verified how much product we had in the ice cream cart. And no one verified what we came back with, either. The kid I was working with had some kind of a cash bank, but that wasn't counted in or out either . And it was a general rule that by the time you got done with an hour or two of selling ice cream in the hot sun some of it would be melted at the bottom of the container. Nobody kept track of that either. So basically this kid was going out there, making all cash sales with zero inventory controls or monetary controls. If he came back ...

Check out our new sponsor, Zoom benefits. Click here to learn more. In case you didn't know, my main job is as a uber and Lyft driver in the City of Reno Nevada. It's kind of out of necessity, not choice, that I do this thing. I would still be working in Casino surveillance if I hadn't got leukemia last year, but we can talk about that later. Anyway, I was driving two people in my car this evening and they were discussing their jobs and what they were going to do and where they were going to go on their upcoming vacation. From the things that he said, I could tell one of the two persons was a bartender at a casino. I even figured out which casino it was, but I'm not going to mention it here. I don't want to get anyone in trouble. At one point this bartender stated To His companion that he never made less than $100 a shift "extra".  And I could tell by the way he said it and the context in which it was said that he wasn't referring to his tips. Th...

Hieverybody, I've been making some changes to my living conditions, and no longer live in the city of Reno. I've moved down to Yerington Nevada, which is about 90 miles to the south of Reno. It's a fun little town about 3,000 people, kind of in the middle of nowhere. Anyway I'll be posting new content very soon. In the meantime I am happy to announce that we have our first sponsorship deal. It is a benefits and frequent buyer program called Zoombenefits. They offer discounts on cell phone service and other stuff too. And you stuff is being added all the time. To check out the sponsorship deal text my code, CAR6673, to 385-213-3225. At least give it a look, you will be helping to support the content that is provided on this channel. Thanks everybody, more posting about casino gambling real soon.

Hi everybody. I have been away since late last year. If you have read the older posts you will see that I was having a lot of medical problems. I think I have most of them fixed, finally, and feel like blogging for the first time in a long while. So, on to the topic of today. I have been trolling through Youtube recently, and seen a lot of videos on craps betting systems. They all say something about  "How to win at craps" or words to that effect. They are all bullshit and "Click bait", designed to get video views and subscribers (and eventually money) to the channel owners. They will all claim to have some kind of "never lose" system and then show a series of throws, bets and payoffs that some how "prove" that their system works. Don't believe it for a second. Here is one that is typical of the whole bunch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn5z8Me_phE It's called the "Iron Cross" betting method because the bets line up in...

This post is a reprint about a video on Youtube.  It's all about todays electronic slot machines, their random number generators and how cheats are hacking them!  Click here to watch it And click here to visit my Patreon page. If you enjoy my content, and would like to see more of it more often, please consider becoming a patron. I am also looking at expanding into audio and video podcasts if I can get enough donations. 

I got another good question last week, from a reader wanting to know what a surveillance room is like, how it is laid out and how it is staffed and run.  So here goes. I have worked in surveillance departments at six different casinos in the last 25 years. Some very small (300 slots, 6 blackjack tables) and some very big (3000 slots, 60-70 table games of all kinds). When I started in the early 90's it was all VCRs and not all cameras were recorded all the time. We used a lot of "multi-plexers" and "quad screens". A multi-plexer used one VCR to display and record up to 16 screens on one monitor. Since the VCR still records at 30 frames per second, that meant that if you did a review on any one of those 16 screens you would be looking at a "freeze frame" effect, where you only got 1.8 frames per second of the shot you were looking at. A quad would record all four screens at 30 fps, but the size of the picture on the screen was 1/4 (obviously) of the to...

This post is sponsored by Amazon Prime .  You can get a free 30 day trial of  by clicking  here . Speaking of Amazon, they have some great books about how to win at blackjack, craps, and other casino games. Click on this link:  Good books about Casino gambling And don't forget about my article, called " Sports Betting: Advanced middle techniques for college and pro football wagering ." It's all about a way to bet on sports with very little risk but high potential rewards. Click  here  to go to the eBay listing. It's only $4.99 plus fifty cents shipping.  Now on to this weeks topic.  This is a repost from a year or so ago, but it's still good info, if I do say so myself. Whenever I meet people and tell them what my profession has been for the last 25 years, I always come away with the feeling that they equate card counting and advantage play as cheating. It is not, of course, as most of the readers of this blog undoubtedly know. It is just...

Greetings all, I have gotten some more recent (good) feedback from a reader who brought up some excellent questions that I would like to address here. The first observation is that most of my examples concern single deck games.  To that, I plead guilty. And I will do a better job of covering the double deck and shoe game. The reader also correctly pointed out that many of the rules that casinos use make card counting at double deck and shoe games not very effective. Rules such as double down only on 9, 10 or 11, and no double after split obviously increase the house advantage more than most counters care to accept.  Also, deck penetration can discourage counters as well. The last casino I worked for had the dealers on double deck games burn 24 cards at the top of deck. This keeps most serious counters from ever even sitting down at double deck games. For these reasons, I usually use single deck games as my examples, but will endeavor to use more multi deck examples in th...

I was going to post more about count checks this week, but I got a question from a reader that i decided to answer instead. We'll get back to count checks next week. This readers question, request actually, is for me to outline what I do when I go out to play blackjack. And I will be happy to talk about that, with a couple of warnings. Even though I play baclkjack very seriously, I am not a professional player. There are very few people in the world that can legitimately lay claim to that title. But you can be a good player, maybe what the casino would call an advantage player, without being a professional. What separates a professional from everyone else, is usually the bankroll (which will be a small part of their total net worth) and the proper attitude. You have to have both, otherwise your betting decisions, along with your hit/stand decisions will be tempered by a fear of losing.  Your ability has to be top notch also, of course. You need incredible focus and observation...

This blog post is a reprint of one that I did about a year-and-a-half ago about count checks, and how they are usually done in a surveillance room. those of you who are new to my blog may not have read it yet, so enjoy And now a few words about count checks. Previously, I showed you some of the initial ways that surveillance will use to canalize your play at blackjack table.  Sometimes a lazy observer will just go with that, especially if you are being obvious. Like going from one hand at $25 to three at $500. They'll just call the pit boss or casino manager and let them know what "Captain Obvious" is up to on BJ 6.  You will then be asked to stop playing blackjack and try your luck at Keno or slots. Or Let it Ride. However, if a player is not being that obvious, an observer will initiate a count check. This involves using a PTZ to get a bet shot so they can tell exactly how much you are betting each hand. Then they use a worksheet or scratch paper to monitor the count,...

Lets review. I've already stated that I think the first things you should do, if you want to be a successful gambler in general and blackjack player in particular, is develop a money management strategy and an exit strategy. (This, of course, assumes that you have taken to time to learn basic strategy and understand the basics of card counting. But you probably wouldn't be reading an online blog about casino surveillance if you weren't serious enough to do that.)  Now you have to decide what kind of player you want to be. If you live in Nevada, or near a legal casino that offers table games, and most US citizens do, these days, what with the popularity of tribal casinos, I am talking to you.  You have a choice of being a casual player, just in it for fun and entertainment, or a serious player who, while not being an addict or an adrenaline junkie, wants to have at least a better than average expectation of making a little money in the long run. Or a lot, depending on your...

Ok, so here is what I would expect some gambling sessions look like, if you are using your powers of observation and the correct mind set to influence your money management and exit strategy. Losing session. Lets start with the bad. Lets say you start with 100 units and you decide to set a stop loss for your self of 60 units. So you buy in for $100 at a Five dollar minimum, single deck table.  Its you and two other people at the table, you sit at third base. At the top of deck you bet 5 units, a lot of small cards come out during the hand, and you win. At a plus 4 with no aces out, you decide to double up, so you bet 10 units. You draw two face cards, but the dealer has a BJ and you lose.  Now the count is minus 1 with 2 aces out, so you drop back down to 5 units and lose again. Shuffle.  You've lost two in a row, so, even though its top of deck, you bet 10. Again, you draw two face cards, but the dealer gets a four card draw to a twenty one. Lose. At minus 4 with 1 ac...