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Comment by socialist_coder | Hacker News Reader

Wow, putting RFID chips in every card... gee what could go wrong?

How does that idea even get past the whiteboarding stage? Seems so stupid for any poker house to do that. I mean come on, there is real money at stake and you are putting RFID TAGS IN EVERY CARD???

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It's a necessary evil to make the game more marketable. Watching poker without knowing the hole cards is pretty damn dull. They used to use cameras but RFID is cheaper and lower friction for players. FWIW major tournaments and other casinos with streaming shows have been using them for years without prior incident. It should be a fairly securable system in principle, just ban devices at the table, and don't let players have access to the equipment, but Stones was clearly way too lax.

> without prior incident

without being overly exploited such as to be recognized as an incident

True. It's certainly possible the industry will turn away from RFID because of this.

You're right, it's possible that this goofball has alerted the average poker player in streamed tournaments to a scheme that's been operating under the radar all over the place.

Unlike e.g. blackjack, the house usually has no stake in who wins. For this reason it's always been easier to cheat at a poker table than at other gambling places.

So why would anyone play with this guy at this point even if the casino won't ban him for lack of definitive evidence?

Oh they won't. This guy is never playing poker again in his life, except maybe in a jail cell. That's already guaranteed.

Edit: Just pointing out the obvious that no self respecting (or just self protecting) poker player would willingly sit at a table with this guy.

Couldn't each RFID tag have a UUID that maps to some in-house database to decode them to their actual card value? Each card/deck would essentially be "unique" and if you read the tags all you'd know is that your opponent is holding cards B8BB148A-1BA4-493D-A9C4-884A2AAA4491 and 1534DE97-B227-4292-817E-01112B9BC1E5.

What am I missing?

Unless you never reuse a single card, then whoever is scanning the cards can know what a card is if it's played again.

Could be worked around by rolling the IDs every time cards go through the shuffler. That's beyond the capability of most commercially available RFID tags, though.

Usually only two decks are used at a table, one for the current hand, and one in the shuffle machine. That's only 104 unique tags. Decks tend to be changed out only every few hours at most, because it delays the game (new decks are visually verified by spreading them on the table to see that they contain every card).

The vulnerability probably wasn't in the cards. That is, the cheater could not read the card RFIDs directly. It is more likely that he has been able to access, in real-time, the system reading the cards and storing the card values.

I'm curious how pervasive RFID tags in cards are in casinos, anyone know? I'm sure they're aware of how big of a vulnerability that could potentially be.

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