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Live Dealer Cheating at BetOnline. The gambling forums and Youtube are buzzing since Michael Morgenstern posted a youtube video of a live Blackjack dealer at Betonline casino alleging cheating. Is The Live Dealer Cheating?

Miss one of the Nightly Turbo's this week? Well, we're bringing you the top stories from the week so you don't have to feel left out. Poker players are banding together to get the Commerce Casino to change its stance on Internet gambling legislation, Sorel Mizzi responds to cheating allegation, and more.

Players Before Profits

The Commerce Casino is not exactly making friends in the poker community. Island view casino employment gulfport ms. The casino's opposition to H.R. 2267 has gotten the attention of the Poker Player's Alliance, as well as poker pros and amateurs. The PPA has written an open letter to the Commerce Casino and launched the Players Before Profits campaign in hopes that it will change its stance on the Internet gambling legislation.

“Members of the PPA, and poker players nationwide, are outraged that the Commerce Casino, the largest poker room in the nation, opposes Federal legislation that would protect players’ rights and access to online poker,” Executive Director of the PPA John Pappas said. “They are angry and want to make their voices heard. The PPA’s ‘Players Before Profits’ campaign gives poker players a vehicle to express their disappointment with Commerce Casino.”

Over 4,000 poker players have signed the petition. Are you one of them? Read the PPA's press release on the matter and sign the petition.

The Miz's Side

On August 20, 'waxonchris' posted a long chat transcript between Sorel Mizzi and Steve 'Thorladen' Weinstein in the MTT Community forum on TwoPlusTwo. Plenty of speculation has been taking place, and Mizzi has finally posted his side of the story in the thread.

Mizzi says the transcript is a mix of conversations that he had between Weinstein and others over the course of about a year. He says that late last year he received a threat from an extortionist saying if he didn't send him money, he would release the transcript, but Mizzi ignored the threats.

Mizzi's response on the thread: 'One, to clear the names of the people mentioned in the conversation, and two, because there are actually people I know and respect who are curious about whether or not this conversation did in fact take place.'

The response is quite long and the thread is, as of now, 43 pages. We like to keep things short here, so here's the link to the thread on TwoPlusTwo and Mizzi's response comes in at number 285.

Nomination Time

If you haven't gotten your nominations in for the Poker Hall of Fame, you don't have too much more time to do it. Only eight more days remain in the nomination process. So far, 181 different people have been nominated. The top ten percent will move on to the next step after nominations close on August 31.

“We’re very pleased with the public’s input into the Poker Hall of Fame this year and look forward to unveiling the 2011 Poker Hall of Fame class as part of this year’s November Nine festivities,' World Series of Poker Communications Director Seth Palansky told PokerNews.

Head on over to WSOP.com to get in your nominations.

Putting Up Her Dukes

OK, so last week, an interview with Daniel Negreanu was published where he expressed his views on Annie Duke. According to an interview he did with Kimberly Lansing at the World Poker Tour Legends of Poker, those comments were not on the record. But what's done is done and Annie Duke has responded with an open letter to PokerStars.

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To give you the long and short of it, a PokerStars player wrote an email to the company expressing her aversion to what Negreanu said and PokerStars responded by saying that Negreanu was, 'an entity to himself and as such will always be encouraged to express his views and speak his mind as he would otherwise do so, PokerStars Pro or not.'

Duke is more upset that, as she puts it, PokerStars is not distancing itself from Negreanu's comments.

'I am not offended by Daniel’s opinion. He has a right to disagree with me and dislike me. And I, just like PokerStars, would encourage him to express his views and opinions. This is not about his views. It is about a particular word he chose to express those views. The word “c**t” is not an opinion, it is an abusive epithet, and PokerStars is completely ignoring the use of that term in their response,' she wrote.

Head on over to Annie's Blog to read her letter and then form your own opinions of the situation.

Cake for the Victory

Last week we told you about a rumor that Victory Poker would be moving from the Everleaf Network to the Cake Poker Network. Victory CEO Dan Fleyshman has confirmed that the move will be officially announced on September 1.

'I really was happy with the passion of the team at Everleaf but I felt like CAKE could handle all things that I wanted deep down inside,' Fleyshman said.

To celebrate the launch, a party will be held in London in September and a cake-fight-themed photo shoot will see Sara Underwood take on three other ladies.

'Three days after the Cake launch party/my birthday we're doing a photo shoot that the Cake Network and the rest of the world is going to love. Sara Underwood, Emma Glover, Rosie Jones, and Victoria Moore are going to be shooting a full fledged Cake fight.. So yeah, I'm excited, there's gonna be lots of fun things to do with Cake and I'm excited for the players to be able to have all these tournaments and games to choose from,' he said.

Read more about the move on CoinFlip.com.

100 Club

Kathy Liebert has accomplished something over the weekend that only one other poker player has. She became the second player to have played in 100 World Poker Tour events. Last month at the WPT Bellagio Cup, Erik Seidel became the first player to have played 100.

Her 100th event came at the WPT Legends of Poker, which is under way currently at The Bicycle Casino in California. The Bike was the site of Liebert's first WPT final table and her first ever WPT tournament. Liebert also became the first female player to make a WPT final table, which also happened to be the very first Legends of Poker. She currently holds the record of winningest female in WPT history with $1,745,312 in WPT career earnings.

Congratulations Kathy!

Read more about Liebert's accomplishments and how Day 3 of the WPT Legends of Poker is going on the World Poker Tour live update blog.

Not in South Africa

The Johannesburg High Court has deemed online gambling, including online poker, in South Africa illegal. South African ISPs will be responsible for blocking online gambling and targeting financial institutions that process payments to online gambling sites. Also, mass media will not be able to advertise Internet gambling and South African citizens could face fines (as high as ZAR 10 million or approximately $1.36 million) and jail time if they are caught playing online.

“We approached the media to alert them of the judgment which makes online casino operations illegal, and if they continue we will have them arrested and fight for conviction,' head of the Gauteng Gambling Board legal sevices Lucky Lukhwareni said.

GamingZion.com has more.

Follow us on Twitter for up-to-the-minute news and be sure to add us on Facebook.

For as long as casinos have been around there have been people trying to cheat them. Casinos dedicate a lot of resources to catching cheaters, and they are usually pretty good at doing so.

Online Casino Cheating

However, throughout history there have been a few cases of people who have won fortunes by cheating.

Many of these have been caught eventually, but some of them have gotten away with it completely. Of course, the most successful cheaters are those that we have never heard of and never will.

On this page we will look at some of the famous cheaters and the methods they used to cheat, scam, or hustle casinos out of substantial sums of money.

Carmichael is one of the most successful slot machine cheats, although he has spent time in prison for his crimes. He began cheating slot machines in 1980 when he used a metal device that was inserted into the coin slot and then triggered a payout.

When the big casinos started updating their slots with newer machines, Carmichael found his device no longer worked with them.

As a result he moved to the smaller gambling establishments in Las Vegas that still used older machines. He was eventually caught and sentenced to five years in prison.

This sentence failed to act as a deterrent though, and Carmichael resumed his cheating upon his release in 1987. Slot machine technology had advanced during his spell in prison and therefore he had to change his methods.

Carmichael bought one of the new machines and set about designing a new device that he could use to cheat. He came up with something that has since been called the monkey paw, or slider.

The principle was the same as his original device; it was inserted into the coin slot and caused the release of coins from the machines. He used it successfully until technology advanced again and he once more had to refine his methods.

He bought one of the new electronic slot games and again developed a way to beat them.

It worked so well that Carmichael made money from selling it to other cheaters, as well as using it himself.

Perhaps inevitably, Carmichael was eventually arrested for using the wand in 1996. Charges were dropped on that occasion, but he was arrested again in 1998 and once more in 1999. He pled guilty to running an illegal gambling enterprise and was sentenced to more prison time.

He is now banned from playing in casinos, but he does work with them producing anti-cheating devices.

Richard Marcus has been labeled as one of the greatest cheaters in the history of gambling. That isn’t unreasonable, given that he made a lot of money and never got caught. The only reason anyone knows about his cheating exploits is because he chose to write a book about his life after he had made enough money and stopped cheating.

Marcus named his method of cheating the “Savannah,” and it was in theory quite simple. It took an awful lot of courage and a fair amount of skill.

It was very similar to the past-posting cheating techniques that had been used, but with one key difference. Traditional past-posters would add chips to a winning bet using sleight of hand, but Marcus did it the other way round. He would remove chips from a losing bet.

He would go up to the roulette table and place a couple of chips down as his bet. The top chip would be a $5 chip, or some other small denomination, but underneath would be a higher value chip.

He placed the top chip in a way that the bottom chip could not be seen. If his bet lost, he would grab his chips (which you are not actually allowed to do, hence the drunken act) and fling them at the dealer. During this move he would swap the higher value chip for another $5 chip.

If, however, his bet won then he would make a big deal of celebrating. Invariably the dealer would be a little confused, assuming he had just staked two $5 chips. At this point Marcus would point out the fact that the chip underneath was more valuable.

Because he had legitimately placed the bet, even if surveillance was checked by casino security they would find nothing wrong. He was effectively cheating on his losing bets rather than his winning ones, and it’s winning bets that tend to be scrutinized.

Using this method he was able to win thousands on his winning bets and lose only a few dollars on his losing bets. Because of the way it worked, he managed to avoid being caught. He now works against the cheaters, consulting for casinos, and teaching them how to avoid being cheated.

In 1995, Reid McNeal hit a Keno jackpot at Bally’s Park Place Casino Resort in Atlantic City, for $100,000. Suspicions were immediately raised when McNeal showed very little emotion following the win and asked to be paid in cash.

As jackpot wins of a certain size have to be verified by state gaming officials under New Jersey law, an investigation occurred as a result.

The investigation led back to Ron Harris, a computer programmer working for the Nevada Gaming Control Board. Harris was responsible for finding bugs and flaws in the software of electronic gaming machines.

It transpired that Harris had been using his position to access and modify software in slot machines to pay out substantial wins if a precise sequence of coins were inserted. With his accomplice he had successfully cheated thousands of dollars and gone undetected.

Using his predictions his accomplice, McNeal, could be guaranteed a jackpot win.

McNeal duly won the jackpot at Atlantic City but, as we have described above, that was the beginning of the end for the two cheats. Harris was sentenced to seven years in prison, and released after serving two.

Throughout the history of gambling scams, women have typically been used to cause diversions while their male accomplices carry out the actual scandal.

Ida Summers was different; she certainly used her beauty and charm to distract pit bosses and dealers, but she also did the cheating herself.

Back in the 1960s she became known as the Vegas Vixen for her ability to cheat Las Vegas casinos.

This involved using sleight of hand to remove and add cards to the table when required. She then progressed to adding whole decks of cards that were prearranged to ensure the house lost. These decks were known as cold decks, or coolers.

Although successful for a while, Summers was eventually caught and arrested. Gaming officials in Vegas had become suspicious here, and together with the FBI, launched an investigation.

Seeing as she only received probation rather than a custodial sentence, it seems her looks and charm may have had an effect in court too.

French woman Monique Laurent, along with her crew consisting of family and friends, managed to win over $1 million from the roulette tables at Deauville Casino. Their winning had nothing to do with luck.

But rather thanks to some sophisticated equipment and the help of a rogue roulette dealer. Considering the scam took place in 1973, it was somewhat advanced for the time.

Laurent had her crew use a roulette ball that had been tampered with to insert a radio receiver.

With 90% accuracy she could make the ball land in a group of six numbers. Other members of the crew would place the necessary bets and collect the winnings.

The casino sensed something was wrong, but they couldn’t work out what the problem was. They had the roulette wheel checked and monitored the table and the dealer, but they found nothing wrong. Laurent and her crew therefore continued to rack up the winnings.

They were only caught eventually as a direct result of Laurent’s beauty.

The owner of the casino took something of a shine to Laurent and made romantic overtures. She rebuffed him and he didn’t take it well. He began to suspect her of wrongdoing when he noticed that she was always at the roulette table costing the casino money.

She was always seemingly alone and only appeared to be placing occasional bets. Working out that the cigarette packet might be involved he asked Laurent for a cigarette and the game was up.

Louis Colavecchio is a counterfeiter who used his skills to manufacture incredibly accurate reproductions of slot machine coins. He then used these coins in many American casinos with initially great success.

His operation was on a grand scale and he was producing thousands upon thousands of coins.

Casino Cheating News

When he was eventually arrested in 1998, following an investigation after casinos had started to notice sizable surpluses of the coins in their inventories.

Law enforcement seized his stash of coins and the tools used to make them. Such was the volume of this equipment they had to rent storage facilities just to house it all.

When Colavecchio was released in 2006 he resumed his activities, but was arrested again after just a few months. He brokered a deal to reveal the secrets of his operation so that casinos could avoid being stung in this way again.

Nikrasch, also known as Dennis McAndrew, is another slot machine cheater. In fact, he is arguably the biggest known slot machine cheater in history. It has been said that he posed a serious risk to the integrity of the whole slot machine industry.

Together with his crew, it’s believed that Nikrasch made over $15 million using his sophisticated methods.

There has been a lot written about Nikrasch, particularly about his downfall, and much of it’s speculation. It’s widely believed that he was set up by someone who knew about his operation, but he himself has admitted that he does not know who or why.

He was arrested in 1998 while trying to cheat his way to a huge jackpot in a Las Vegas casino. Subsequently, he agreed to exchange some of his secrets in return for a reduced sentence.

Nickrasch had served time in prison before, having been convicted in the 1980s for his role in cheating the mechanical slot machines of the time. As a master locksmith with mechanical expertise, he had developed a method for forcing payouts from these machines.

Following his time in prison he returned to Las Vegas and soon began planning a return to his cheating ways.

By this time, though, slot machines were very different. The technology was now computerized rather than mechanical and the machines were vastly more difficult to manipulate.

This didn’t stop Nikrasch however, and he began to work on developing new methods for beating them. He did indeed come up with an advanced system for doing so.

His new system required a crew of people, which Nikrasch recruited using his contacts. He would visit a casino and, with members of his crew covering him from video surveillance and security personnel, he would break into a machine using an untraceable method.

After he left, another member of his crew would then come and win the jackpot: seeming legitimate. It’s not known for sure how many times Nikrasch pulled this off before he was caught. Equally, no-one knows how long he might have been able to get away with it if had he not been set up.

Although Brennan is a thief rather than a cheater, he deserves to be mentioned here for the simplicity and apparent success of his heist. Brennan was a cashier at Stardust Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

In 1992 as he was leaving work, Brennan decided to fill a bag with half a million dollars in cash and chips. He calmly walked out of the casino and has never been seen since.

There have been rumors that he was killed by an accomplice who didn’t want to split the proceeds, but there has never been any evidence to back this up.

The common belief is that he is still alive, somewhere in the world, enjoying his ill-gotten gains.