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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

> Dice sliding is against the rules already. This isn't a "legal loophole" sort of situation, it's cheating, and thus theft by fraud.

This is the part I don't get. The game apparently mechanically allows that, so how is it cheating, any more than, say, allowing a soccer defender to kick a goal? Seems to me like a loophole like card counting in blackjack.

Is placing a bet after the roulette wheel has begun to spin a crime or merely a violation of the rules (which could get you ejected)?

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Intent matters here, and accidents don't usually even get you ejected from a casino at all. Intentional cheating like that will get you arrested. The rules of the game are often controlled by a gaming commission or legislation that set the rules. Soccer doesn't have the same sort of thing.

Very much so, if you're playing blackjack and you accidentally touch cards or chips or something inadvertent, you'll just get told "Hey, you cannot do that", in varying degrees of firmness.

Ah, so if I run a casino and come up with some new kind of game I can’t just offer it? Rather I have to get approval and perhaps some regulation is formulated just for that game?

That would certainly answer my root question.

Sorry if this is naïve — I don’t really know how gambling laws work at all.

Games are very heavily regulated. You have to get approval, and there is a process for submitting the rules for a new game and getting it approved. Often it's the game makers who do this (and they sell the tables to the casinos for a license fee). It's easiest when it's a game that's very similar to an existing one.

Every casino jurisdiction is different, (and in the US, many native American casinos are regulated by a gaming authority that is part of the same tribal nation, so it is a bit circular) but almost all require a thorough review of any new game's rules and equipment, and usually also require third-party certification of the game's theoretical odds.

I think your main point is fine but your anti analogy is flawed.

FIFA and organisations like UEFA etc very much set out rules of the game. This is a lot like legislation: teams will be fined if they or the fans break the rules.

That is a good point, but also, those fines are civil, not criminal. Gambling is like the FIFA situation except the government controls the rules, making the penalties criminal.

Ironically, FIFA has famously been involved with criminal activity.

I really don’t understand this line of thinking. Plenty of things are mechanically possible but illegal. It’s mechanically possible to use sleight-of-hand to change your cards in a blackjack game, too. “Violating the rules” in a gambling game with the intent to make money is cheating which is a crime.

> Is placing a bet after the roulette wheel has begun to spin a crime or merely a violation of the rules

It’s neither, of course. But let’s assume you meant “after the croupier has signaled no more bets”. If you do it accidentally, that’s fine. If you do it surreptitiously with the intent to cheat, yes, that’s a crime and in fact one of the most classic/famous traditional ways of casino cheating.

I'm not understanding how it works with electronic craps. But normally if the dice don't bounce off the back wall you have to rethrow. So sliding the dice requires a distraction to make sure the stickmam doesn't notice.

It's just an electronic table; the dice are real. The goal is to reduce the crew working the table from 4 down to 1. Presumably much easier to get away with shenanigans with six fewer eyes on the action, which, I assume, is why they targeted this game.

It seems the degree of criminality, if any, would hinge on the precise specifications regarding the rules of the electronic craps game and how they are communicated to the players. Your point is valid, a big incentive for the casino is the labor reduction. But this doesn't relieve the casino of the responsibility to properly run and protect the game. Someone needs to observe the dice rolls and ensure they are valid, if the players are repeatedly making improper throws but nobody warns them or voids them, it's hard to claim the players were knowingly cheating. I have to imagine the game itself has some protection built-in -- what prevents players from replacing the dice with ones they brought themselves -- and therefore if the game, and its human operators, didn't object to what the players were doing (which they were doing in public, in view of surveillance cameras and other players), the burden of proving "cheating" is difficult. Perhaps the casino will fall back on "rules," which then raises the questions were those rules, for this specific model of electronic craps (and not just a normal live craps game) posted in a conspicuous location, is the definition of a legal dice roll clear and precise, etc.

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