It doesn't matter whether it's at the just-opened Hollywood Casino in Toledo, Ohio, or The Meadows Racetrack and Casino in Washington County. There's one class of gambler who won't be welcomed -- those who have proved they can beat the house.
They are simply called "card counters" by those in the gambling industry. What they do is not illegal, but if they are spotted on the casino floor, they'll be asked to leave or to stop playing blackjack.
"There's a whole lot of people doing it," said Beverly Griffin, president of Griffin Investigations, a Las Vegas company that runs a database of 7,000 names of cheaters and card counters to which casinos can subscribe. "Some make little amounts and come and go. It's the people who make the large amounts of money, it ends up causing attention."
Those with the rare talent of card counting can win big. A group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who outwitted casinos for millions of dollars in the 1990s was featured in a 2003 book, "Bringing Down the House," and later a Hollywood movie, "21."
One of those students, David Irvine, who now shows others tricks of the game at the Blackjack Institute, reported making $55,000 in a single hour during one of his first Las Vegas visits. Other veteran blackjack players offer online courses and videos to teach novices the art of card counting.
At the blackjack table, card counters know when the odds shift from the house's favor to theirs when they calculate a disproportionate number of high cards (10s through aces) left to be played. Then, the card players significantly increase their bets. Some card counters work in groups, with a player signaling to another to join a blackjack table when the odds are right.
Card counting isn't considered illegal or cheating in either Pennsylvania or Ohio.
"There's nothing in the law to say people can't count cards," said Richard McGarvey, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board. "That said, casinos can refuse service to a patron."
While card counters aren't breaking any laws -- unless they are using electronic or other types of devices to assist them, which is illegal in Pennsylvania -- casinos believe that those who are very proficient at it gain an unfair advantage over the house.
"It's in the best interest of the industry and the commonwealth to protect our games of chance from being manipulated or taken advantage of," said Sean Sullivan, general manager and vice president of The Meadows.
To try to keep that from happening, casinos turn to their own devices -- from an online database to high-level surveillance cameras and staff training -- to weed out those trying to beat the system at blackjack.
Hundreds of casinos throughout the world subscribe to Griffin Investigations' database, which is composed of blacklisted gamblers' names, their photographs from surveillance cameras and mug shots, information on the crowd they gamble with, and which casinos threw them out.
"It's always been, in my opinion, no such thing as too much information," Ms. Griffin said, adding that casinos have the right to know who their customers are.
With the Griffin database, casinos can search for people by, say, estimated height, weight, age and what games they play, and then draw up a list of matches on the database to see if someone has a history of getting kicked out of casinos, Ms. Griffin said.
Surveillance teams also send photographs of suspected card counters in real time to Griffin investigators to verify identities, she said.
Some casinos use surveillance cameras with face-detection technology to look for cheaters or card counters. But too often with that technology, the photos aren't clear, the angle isn't right or casinos lack a strong enough database of their own to match a person's face with a name, she said.
Despite the Hollywood-hyped glamour of card counting and numerous Internet sites devoted to it, Mr. Sullivan said it has not been a big problem at The Meadows. In the two years that the casino has offered blackjack, it has banned 10 customers from playing the game because of card counting, he said. They have not been barred from the casino itself.
"We encounter card counters every two to three months. It's not a very frequent thing. We don't see a lot of it," he said.
Mr. Sullivan added that The Meadows sees players who will attempt "to enhance their chances by trying to track cards." In most cases, he said, the casino pays them no mind.
"We don't concern ourselves with them in the same conversation or in the same spirit as the [professional] card counter," he said. "They think they have a better advantage than they do."
At Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh, no one has been permanently banned from the gambling floor because of card counting.
"If our team suspects a player of card counting, we typically ask them to move to another type of game; or on a case-by-case basis, might ask them to leave the casino," the casino said in a statement.
Besides the Griffin database, casinos use other tactics to watch for card counting on the floor.
Pit managers and dealers -- with staff watching on surveillance cameras -- look at high-stakes players' behavior, for example, noticing if they double their bets when the cards are in their favor or cut back when they aren't, said Frank Fantini, publisher of Fantini Research, an online industry magazine.
The Meadows also employs a program that allows it to analyze the card playing of its customers to help in sniffing out card counters.
George Joseph, a consultant who once served as a surveillance director for major Las Vegas gambling palaces, said that casinos also employ simple methods to deter card counting. They include using continuous shuffling machines and multiple decks to make it harder to track cards.
A lot of the gamblers don't like continuous shuffling machines, however, and employing them could end up working to a casino's disadvantage. "If you do too much of that, the customer says, 'I hate this place' " and might not return, he said.
Mr. Joseph said even expert card counters will lose 48 percent of the time and tie another 9 percent of the time. "That's the same for the average player assuming he plays fairly good blackjack," he said.
Where the professional card counter has an edge is knowing when to wager larger amounts on certain hands. While card counting can give a player an advantage, Mr. Joseph doesn't consider it to be cheating.
"He doesn't create the advantage, he just recognizes the advantage," he said.
Casinos, of course, view it differently.
"We're in the business of providing entertainment. We make a profit. If something manipulates that in an ill-begotten way, that's not fair," Mr. Sullivan said.
First Published: June 10, 2012, 4:00 a.m.
Updated: June 10, 2012, 4:08 a.m.
