By Bill Zender.
Dear Friends and Business Associates,
I will be speaking again at the World Game Protection Conference in Las Vegas Nevada to be held at the Rio Las Vegas on March 11th through 13th. If you are there in attendance and you see me, please come up and say “hi”. I will be attending all three days.
World Game Protection Conference 2025 March 11th– 13th Las Vegas – Rio Resort
CORE – Investigating Gaming Losses
As I have the past two years, I will be participating in Willy Allison’s CORE Training Program. The topic I will be presenting is “Investigating Gaming Losses”. My session will be held on March 11th, 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM. This session is for all surveillance and table games personnel as well as gaming regulators. I plan to do a drill-down into the use of “Charting” of suspected play in the main card games of Blackjack and Baccarat as well as a select Alternative game.
I “showcase” a different Alternative card game each year. Three years ago, it was Three Card Poker. Two years ago, it was Ultimate Texas Hold’em and last year it was Mississippi Stud Poker. As many of you will remember, we drilled down into the games and examined the rules, the basic strategy of the game, and strategies for gaining the dealer’s hole-card and/or community cards. The purpose is to examine the different elements of the game and determine if a “suspected customer” could possibly be gaining an unwanted advantage over the house. This year I am examining the game of High Card Flush (HCF). I will be breaking down HCF based on procedures, game rules, and basic strategy for betting or folding.
High Card Flush is subject to a different vulnerability, Player hand information sharing also known as Player Collusion. I will dive down into the reason a game like HCF is vulnerable to information sharing while a game like Three Card Poker is NOT. It has to do with the shared information’s ability to eliminate the different combinations that the remaining cards have on the dealer’s hand. I will also provide everyone with the strategy used to determine if the remaining suited cards can be exploited by raising and folding accordingly. We will also investigate the different indicators that a collusion team is in the process of attacking the game. And, I also have a suggestion as to a great deterrent your casino can use to prevent advantage players from considering your game as a target (without altering your present game or procedures).
Following High Card Flush, we will take a short break and come back to analyze the casino’s main game ofBlackjack. I will focus this hour on an analysis flow chart developed from years of conducting high winning player evaluations. The participants in the session will be taken through each step used to evaluate the play of a suspected Blackjack customer. The first issue we will investigate is whether the customer is gaining an edge through card counting. Once our analysis either confirms or denies card counting, we will move on to other areas of possible concern. By the time we go over every element in the Blackjack flow chart, the participants will be armed with enough information to declare the play honest and fair or look to barring or more drastic measures.
I like to introduce new concepts to the session, and this year I will be presenting a short feature on “The Mechanics of Card Counting”. Many casino executives wrongly believe that any card counter can walk into their club and extract thousands of dollars in a matter of minutes using a simple count-system. This is not true, and this belief has cost the casino industry millions of dollars from loss of hand decisions. We will be examining the different elements that must be used so that the Professional Level Card Counter can gain an advantage over the Blackjack game, and help everyone understand that even an attack from a Professional level counter can be a manageable situation
In the third hour we will examine the game of Baccarat. Again, we will use a game flow chart that takes the participants step by step until the investigator can confirm or deny the fairness of the customers’ play. In the last portion of the Baccarat session, I will provide Baccarat Game Protection Tips that the participants can utilize to eliminate a large portion of the possible avenues of attack in their casino’s games.
BOLO ’25 – Top Casino Scams from 2024
Starting off the Morning of Thursday March 13th, Willy Allison will be presenting BOLO ’25, a review of different scams and thefts from the entire year of 2024. The first segment, starting at 8:00AM will be the highly anticipated “The Sal Report”. Sal Piacente will discuss and demonstrate things he’s seen recently that are interesting and maybe a little concerning from a game protection standpoint from around the world.
At 9:00AM, Willy and I will discuss the “Top Scams” that made the news around the world. We will break down and analyze how the scams work and with the help of the audience rank them in terms of impact and ingenuity. We will also examine what types of scams are trending, what the 2024 scams have in common and what casinos should do to sharpen their defenses against scammers in 2025.
At 10:00AM BOLO ’25 finishes off with “The Briefing Room”. The Briefing Room is a round table session featuring representatives from gaming enforcement divisions across various jurisdictions. Each participant will be asked to give a short 15-minute presentation on gaming crime prosecutions, trends in their jurisdictions and general BOLO information. This segment will be moderated by Thomas Maier, an Advanced Compliance Auditor for the Wisconsin Division of Gaming.
There are seats still available for this year’s conference. For registration to 2025’s World Game Protection Conference please go to the following link https://www.
Questions???
I am always available to answer your questions. If you have any questions on gaming, do not hesitate to contact me through my email. I answer emails about gaming every day! wzender@aol.com. I am here to help. Do you want to meet me by Zoom or any other video platform? Just let me know.
Happy Chinese New Year, good luck, and stay safe!
Bill Zender and Associates
www.billzender.com
IMAGE CREDIT: BillZender.com