It isn’t cheating…yet?

Here’s an interesting story about roulette cheating from the UPI:

London casinos are bracing for a possible onslaught of gamblers equipped with a device that claims to provide a big edge to roulette players.

The gadget uses software to calculate where the little white ball is most likely to land. However, it has not yet been declared illegal by British gambling regulators.

Gambling analysts told The Guardian that the Gaming Commission appears unwilling to ban the devices because it would be an admission that roulette can be biased.

The Commission has urged casinos not to pay players caught using the gadget, which consists of a concealed clicker that records the ball, and a computer that calculates its speed and motion and then delivers a prediction of where it will land via an earpiece.

The devices cost about 1,000 pounds $1,268. It came to the commissions attention a couple of years ago when a suspected gang of professional gamblers used them to win more than 1 million pounds $1.64 million at the Ritz casino in London.

United Press International - NewsTrack - London casinos brace for roulette cheats

A few years ago I wrote this up somewhere online, saying that I thought it was impossible. I then got an email from a guy who says that it really, really works, and he has the money to prove it.

So even though I tend to be skeptical of these kind of high-tech “schemes” (it’s not cheating if it isn’t against the law, is it?), I’m willing to concede that this may work.

But it seems that the Commission is putting the casinos into a tough spot–how can they refuse to pay out if the device isn’t illegal?

I have the feeling that there is more to this story than was published here.