Book review: Beat the Players

I just finished reading an unusual book: Beat the Players, by Bob Nersesian. He is a Las Vegas attorney who has carved out a niche representing people who have been (or claim to have been) abused or mistreated by casinos in various way, especially by casino security personnel. His cumulative experiences repesenting these clients have obviously given him a nasty taste for casinos and their security people, and that dislike pervades his book.

Most of his attention is focused on what he calls "advantage players," such as blackjack card counters. Obviously, such people have a much greater chance of having an unpleasant encounter with casino security than the typical tourist or local player who is just looking to get lucky. Casinos don't much like having the odds either reduced or turned against them, and Nersesian documents pretty well that they tend not to distiguish carefully between those who alter the game by perfectly legal application of skill and those who alter the game by cheating (marking or bending cards, using shiners, etc.).

Therein lies the problem. The author provides copious examples from trial depositions, police reports, transcriptions of surveillance video, and so forth, of security personnel, casino executives, police officers, prosecuting attorneys, and even gaming control officers who simply don't understand or don't care about the crucial distinction between cheating--a felony in Nevada--and taking smart advantage of the circumstances of the game provided by the casino--perfectly legal action.

He furthermore provides unequivocal documentation for at least a few cases of evidence being altered, destroyed, and suppressed by casinos in order to retroactively justify or cover up their illegal actions. In at least some cases, such conduct is at least tolerated if not out-and-out endorsed in subsequent review by the gaming commission and/or courts. It is not a pretty picture.

The book is marred, though, by several things. First is the author's inability to restrain his language. His sour feelings for the casinos make at least this reader question his objectivity. Second is the apparent lack of a good editor. Nersesian is not a horrible writer, but many sentences are awkward or unclear and could have benefitted from editorial oversight. Along the same lines, there is a lot of unnecessary repetition and wordiness throughout. Typographical errors abound.

Nersesian also shows some peculiar bits of thought. He seems to be the last person left on the planet who actually believes that the "lead" in pencils is literally lead, rather than graphite. On that basis, he concludes that possession of a pencil anywhere in Nevada may be a violation of the statutes governing lead (which were enacted to proscribe making of slugs to defeat slot machines). It's an utterly absurd conclusion, based on a simple misunderstanding of what an everyday object contains. That kind of dumb mistake necessarily makes me suspicious about the level of critical thought and research that he has applied to other areas.

A similar situation pertains to his repeated assertion that, while a casino has the legal right to detain a player suspected of cheating, it does not have the right to force such person to accompany security to a special holding area (the infamous "back room") while awaiting the arrival of police. But in an appendix he provides long excerpts from Nevada gaming regulations, and I learned that one of them specifically provides for exactly that. It's "Surveillance Standards for Nonrestricted Licensees," Standard 8: "The casino surveillance system...must possess the capability to monitor and record...the area of any security office or other room in which persons may be detained by casino security personnel.... A person is considered to be detained when the person has been detained by casino security personnel and confined in the casino security office in such a manner as to deprive him of the ability to leave voluntarily." In light of this, I can't figure out how Nersesian arrives at his advice to casino patrons that when they are told they are being detained they cannot leave the casino, but they can and should protest and resist being forced to the security office.

He has a whole chapter on the Griffin book. It is chilling to see how this company is frequently shoddy in how it collects, records, and distributes information about casino patrons--information that, absent a lawsuit, its subjects have no ability to know about, review, or correct. Somebody suspects you of being a card counter, you get entered in the book as a suspected cheater, that label gets distributed to all of Griffin's clients (which means basically all casinos), and there's nothing you can do about it, short of a defamation lawsuit.

There is a useful and interesting digest of many of the most important court cases involving disputes between casinos and their customers, as well as criminal charges of cheating, from both Nevada and other jurisdictions. As in most areas of the law, there are gray areas left, and cases that appear to contradict each other, and Nersesian understandably has to just throw up his hands and say, for some things, that it's impossible to predict whether a specific activity would be ruled to be legal or illegal. Fortunately, they are not things that anybody will do accidentally; they would require deliberate planning and attempts to exploit weaknesses in the game as presented by casinos. The casual gambler has little to worry about in this vein.

The only mildly interesting thing related to poker is my discovery that, by Nevada regulations, poker is a "card game," while blackjack is not. No game that is played against the casino is a "card game"--not that that really matters for any practical purpose.

From this book I learned a lot that I did not previously know about the statutes, case law, and regulations that govern gambling generally and casinos' interactions with and responsibilities to their patrons. However, very little of it will have any relevance to my life. Given my personality, my nearly exclusive use of casinos for poker, and my propensity to stay well clear of anything that might even look like cheating, all of my interactions with casino security personnel to date have been pleasant, nonconfrontational, and uneventful, and I expect they will continue to be.

But if you're a habitual card counter or you look for blackjack dealers with poor technique and try to sneak peeks at their hole cards, your mileage may--and probably will--vary. In that case, I suggest you pre-arm yourself with the relevant information and advice that Nersesian provides.