Play Casino Honest Game

Honest Casinos

The millions of people who gamble today are much less likely to be cheated than they were 25 years ago, and I think I can claim that this is due in great part to my efforts. I began writing early during World War II about the cheats who were clipping the GIs, and from then until the end of the war I served as gambling adviser to the United States Armed Forces and gave hundreds of lectures and demonstrations to military personnel here and abroad. I wrote a series of articles exposing cheating methods and explaining how to detect and guard against them for Yank, the Army Weekly-articles which were highly praised by such military leaders as Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of naval operations, and General Hap Arnold, commanding general of the Army Air Force.

Cheating

Articles about my crusade against cheating in the Armed Forces giving the general public my anti-cheating information appeared in most of our national magazines: Life, Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, American Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Parade, Science Digest and others. Syndicated feature services carried my articles to newspapers throughout this country and they were published in Canadian, Australian, Indian and South American magazines and newspapers.
Then, in two big, definitive books, Scarne on casino Dice (1945), Scarne on Cards (1949), which are still selling today, and in Scarne's Encyclopedia of Games (1973), I included thorough exposes of the cheating methods in use. Gambling cheats, knowing that so much of this previously secret information was available to the public, became more and more hesitant about using the exposed methods.

Casino Operators

Curiously enough, these exposures of cheating have been a blessing to some crooked casino operators. As the players wise up, the operators find that they have to run their games honestly, and when they do that they discover something that should be obvious: an honest percentage game makes more money for its operators than a crooked game. For one thing, honest casinos get more customers with less trouble. A steer joint (crooked casino) has to hire dice and card mechanics and sometimes install rigged gaming tables. It isn't long before the free casino game help are telling their friends not to patronize the joint, and they in turn tell their friends, and in a very short time hundreds of people know all about it.
At this point, the only way to get action is to hire a flock of steeper or agents to locate and bring the suckers in to be fleeced. A steeper may be anyone: a show girl, an entertainer, a cab driver, a bartender, a business associate, a friend. And steeper are expensive; they sometimes have to be cut in for as much as 50% of the amount lost by the victim or victims brought in. The crooked casino is pretty empty most of the time until a sucker is steered in, and then all the shills and steeper have to put on an act and make it look as if there was a lot of action going on.

Steer Joints

Steer joints are mostly located in resort areas, usually have a short season, and are seldom in the same spot the next season. The operators have to depend on taking big sums from a few victims to make a profit; after giving the steeper 50% and paying the mechanic, the shills and all the other people involved, the touch or score (money won dishonestly) must be real big to make the remaining sum amount to much.
An honestly run casino gets action from everyone: the owners themselves, dealers, croupiers' friends, local townspeople, even rival casino owners. Everyone takes a shot at an honest game even when he knows he can't beat the percentage in the long run. The honest casino has continuous action, and the crooked casino, when the steeper don't have a mark in the place, looks like a morgue.