Knock knock! Who's There? [Cheating & Skullduggery In Gaming]

The Ender

This is a casino. Casinos are places where people play traditional card games, coin-operated electronic games and strictly luck-based social games like Craps or Roulette. wagering money & having fun with the possibility to take home some winnings.

To maintain the legitimacy of casinos - protecting both the house and the players - a lot of time, money & expertise is sunk into anti-cheating / anti-theft measures. Casinos typically have robust surveillance suites, on-staff professional magicians that can recognize misdirection / sleight of hand & advise management on how to make life difficult for would-be sheisters and strict regulations to adhere to regarding maintenance of video game cabinets, dice shape, table construction, etc. These systems aren't perfect, but they are pretty damn good, and the average player can count on them to ensure they are given a fair playing field (even if it's biased by default in favor of the house).

This is the Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour. It's the premiere tournament hosted by Wizards of the Coast. Hundreds of player come congregate here, pay an entrance fee (and construct or draft a typically expensive deck to play with), essentially wagering money & having fun with the possibility to take home some winnings.

To maintain the legitimacy of the Pro Tour - protecting mostly just the players, since 'the house' is basically just hosting the event and has no involved risk - about a dozen or so high school students, with maybe a college grad or two thrown in, volunteer to watch out for cheating & other misconduct.

(:


Cheating, and the extraordinary lack of effort to either prevent or punish cheating in some of my favorite hobbies, has always sort of fascinated me. Now, obviously showing the contrast between a big city Casino and a M:tG tournament is pretty extreme (one place houses millions of dollars in it's vaults and does tens of thousands of dollars in transactions on a given day, with patrons wagering huge sums of money. The other mostly deals with some product stock & people who have paid 30-40 dollar entry fees), but it still boggles the mind how lax the security is at even the most prestigious tabletop CCG event. I think there's something to be said about a social space that wants to be treated like a grown-up, mainstream entity, but doesn't seem to acknowledge grown-up realities like theft & fraud.

The methods of cheating in and of themselves are also something that's always been interesting to me.


Loaded dice

Watching a loaded dice get rolled over and over is a surreal experience; this thing you always trusted as an objective, chaotic arbiter of outcomes that appears to suddenly abandon it's duties & defy the laws of probability. The best loaded dice are called 'knockers' - they have a weight inside that can be activated or deactivated by knocking them against a hard surface (like the underside of a table). Cheaper loaded dice roll really erratically, and are considered 'obvious' by people that know what to look for, but frankly, most gamers don't know what to look for, wouldn't call out their opponent on it anyway, and use personal dice without standardized construction that tend to roll erratically whether they're loaded or not.

I used to see a lot of loaded dice at tabletop mini tournaments, and even a loaded 20-sided die used by a CCG player to ensure he always played first. Without exception, all of these dice were discovered by the players, not any volunteer event judges or event hosts.


Deck stacking

'Ha! This doesn't work in M:tG tournaments! There are random deck checks! Opponent shuffling is mandatory!'

Seen it done twice, and no doubt it happens far more often. Both times, the cheater built two decks - one he handed-over for the deck check, one he would use for play. One guy kept the second deck in his coat, the other kept it in a lunch bag. They handed the deck over to the opponent to shuffle, misdirected the other player after being given back their deck, and made the switch.

Again, they were only caught by their opponents, not by officials.


Card Palming

This is what eventually got Mike Long banned from sanctioned M:tG tournaments - after being caught multiple times doing the same trick. It's deceptively easy - you don't have to be a professional magician or do anything fancy like transfer a card from your sleeve to your palm while your opponent is looking right at you (though I have no doubt this has happened, and continues to happen). Take a card you want to have, put it under your butt, misdirect your opponent and grab it when you want it in your hand. Mike Long got away with this technique his entire career, only being finally caught when called-on by opponents on multiple occasions when he got sloppy.


Point Total Manipulation

Oh, hm, I thought you had a few less life points / victory points last turn. Well, the dial says 20, so I guess I must be mistaken!

In fairness, with high profile games, this sort of bullshit has improved recently (with officials tracking totals via score boards) - but I still see it in runner-up games, if one player has been foolish enough to trust their opponent to track their own point totals.


This thread was inspired in part when I read an old post by @altmann about being cheated against in a 40k tournament, and I remembered all of the crap I used to see & deal with at an FLGS when they ran for-money tournaments as well as the gong shows that were local M:tG PTQ events. I'm of the opinion that, for the most part, cheating is something that's the responsibility of hosts / organizers to deal with, not players, and it should be taken seriously. Do you think so? If so, why is it that it seems we don't take it seriously?

altmann

One thing I'd recommend is if you ever get a chance to go to PAX go to the chessex booth and look over every weird, odd, (and yes.. loaded) die they have to get an idea of what is out there.

Dropping Loads

Interesting topic! I find cheating interesting in that the "best kinds" (or most successful kinds) involve trying to improve your odds by a small percentage and then to grind that advantage out over time. For example, the guy that switches out cards gets caught, but the guy who "accidentally" looks at the bottom card of the deck every single time doesn't get caught. Moreover, it's easier for the cheater to argue that it was an accident because "If I was really trying to cheat, wouldn't I do something that would make a bigger difference?" The big casinos solve those problems mechanically, rather than socially (players can't touch the cards, etc.), but other groups don't have that option.

The social dynamics of cheating change a lot from game to game, not just commensurate with the stakes. M:tG is popular nationwide, but local groups may have trouble getting an event together and are reluctant to remove their "friends". It's a lot to think about. There is a fun article written by a UCLA ecology professor on why he ALLOWED his students to cheat on their final exam here: http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2013/04/15/why-i-let-my-students-cheat-on-the-final/ideas/nexus/