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Comment by Scirra_Tom | Hacker News Reader

If you had a rigged deck and sleight of hand, you could probably slowly replace the casino cards with the rigged cards. In Blackjack I imagine you'd only need 10 cards in the deck to make it +EV. You could even have one player plant, the other take advantage in teams.

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If the rigged cards ever make it into a deck (of the multiple decks used) it won't match what the shuffler has set in software it will be rejected.

There is a list of manufacturers and all are different almost like money from different countries we have a PDF of card types we program into the shufflers. We're lucky if we get it working well with genuine cards lol

edit: cards not cars

You could coat your fingers with infrared ink. Each card would naturally have a different pattern imprinted on the back depending on how you touched it.

How would the mapping from random pattern to card be established?

Well there's the rub. It's certainly technically possible if the device described in the article is. Tagging the cards with "smart dust"[0] might be easier, and harder for the casino to detect.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartdust

Except that smart dust does not exist. That Wikipedia page needs to be rewritten. It's vague and misleading.

s/smart dust/very small RFID chips/g

There is a reason RFID chips are the size they are. The smaller they are the closer the scanner has to be to energize their antenna. Either that or you increase the power but the power needed goes up exponentially with distance. I don't see this working. At least not with today's tech.

Through play. Camera would need to recognize card type from capture of card face up. This plus the back of same card would link the unique signature and the card value.

Been done :)

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/28/4780914/cheaters-used-infr...

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