Bringing Down the House...No More

These days card-counters have more to worry about than just the the odds.

No one realizes it at this casino, but Aponte is a veteran of the card-counting
team of math whizzes from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The team reportedly took more than $10 million from casinos in its heyday from 1994 to 2000. Aponte has been barred from more than 100 casinos in the United States and a few overseas. In St. Kitts, he said, he was recognized by a Biometrica database, and now he avoids the biggest, most modern casinos. The team's No. 1 downfall, he said, was information sharing. Once the members' faces began showing up in databases, their days were numbered. (via The Washington Post)

Card-counting isn't a real criminal problem, as being exceptionally good at math isn’t exactly stealing. Still, it’s interesting to see how effective this technology can be when combined with industry-wide information sharing.