X-ray tables, marked cards and the Mafia: How the FBI says poker games were rigged play

A Basketball Hall of Famer. X-ray poker tables. The Mafia. They were all purportedly crucial to an alleged yearslong illegal poker rigging scheme that resulted in 31 federal indictments this week. The case focused on rigged poker games is one of two announced that allegedly involve prominent NBA figures.

Investigators state that the scheme to defraud players at a poker table began in April 2019 when defendant Robert "Black Rob" Stroud and other co-conspirators began devising a ruse to use technology to rig illegal poker games, usually Texas Hold 'em, against unwitting, wealthy players whom they called "fish" or "whales," and who were aware that they were playing in illegal, high-stakes games, but believed these were "straight" games against other wealthy players. In reality, in many cases, every other person at the table besides them was in on the scheme.

The fish were also enticed to play by the presence of high-profile former professional athletes, known as "face cards," with the biggest names revealed thus far to be Basketball Hall of Famer Chauncey Billups and former NBA player and coach Damon Jones.

The scheme started with the technology, which was primarily inside the card-shuffling machines, which read the order in which the cards were dealt and relayed the information to an off-site operator. Sometimes the games employed X-ray tables and/or hidden cameras in the poker chip tray to assist in reading the cards. Players would also occasionally wear special contact lenses or glasses that would allow them to see marked cards.

No, when you submit a game for approval by the gaming labs you send them the ROM images (flash images these days), the source code, and the build tools. The build process has to produce the exact images that you provide. And with complete access to the source code, they can AND DO crawl through it looking for anything that looks out of place.

Once the game is approved, they save a hash of the code ROMs, and at any time they can show up at your place and ask for hash your ROMs to verify. AND, every slot is connected to an in-house management system. Every button press, every screen touch, every coin dropped in, or dispensed out of the hopper, every bill inserted, every ticket printed, the results of every spin, etc. is logged to this accounting system. (Not to mention door openings, and anything else). Also, one of the features that this system includes is “Here’s a key to seed your hash function with, using this key, hash your ROMs”. And the game is expected to hash it’s ROMs, and return the result. (Which the master control system verifies.) If you take too long, or if the answer isn’t correct, the master control system shuts the game down, and produces alerts that something is wrong with that game.

The lab grabs hashes from EVERYTHING in the slot that has code on it. They’ll have the hash of the ROM on the ticket printer, the hash of the ROM in the bill acceptor, etc. (Just in case you think you’re tricky and have your code only cheat when the ROM in one of THOSE things changes).

And lastly, if there’s ever a dispute, the lab comes in and grabs those hashes, and they’d BETTER match. (Or they’ll shut down your casino. They have pretty much 0 tolerance for shenanigans. With the mob history, you can understand why.)

The payoff % varies! When we produced a game, we’d produce several version with different payout percentages and it was up to the customer to decide which one to use.

Payout percentage is calculated on credits played. Lets say 1 million credits were wagered over 1 million games, then the game should return the payout percentage to the player, and keep the rest for the house.

USUALLY, the lower the denomination, the lower the payout percentage. So they penny slots could be something way down near 89-88%. Whereas the $100 a credit machines could be as high as 99%.

And this is tested over MILLIONS of games during development. And is computed using what’s called a “par sheet”. (Usually made in Excel). In this sheet they lay out every possible winning combination, and how much it pays. (Cherry-Cherry-Cherry pays 2, etc.) And if you iterate through every combination on the reels, you can figure out how much all winning combinations would pay vs. the total number of possible combinations. Subtract them, BOOM. Payout percentage!

Say you have 3 reels, and each has the numbers 1-7 on it. They would work out the results of 1-1-1, 1-1-2, all the way to 7-7-7. And finally, that having been said, most modern slots have 5 reels, and most reels have 35 or so stops on them, so it’s “35 to the 5th power” combinations. And since the random number generator is verified by the gaming labs as sound, they know that there’s perfect (enough) probability that everything will work out fine.

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