This is not “cheating”, and even the article you link to on Nautilus has corrected themselves. (It now reads “the Las Vegas shark” instead of “the Las Vegas cheat”, and the word “cheat” now appears nowhere in the article.) Please correct your article as well.
In response to the rising popularity of blackjack computers in the late 70’s and early 80’s, Nevada passed NRS 465.075 in 1985, prohibiting “use or possession of device, software or hardware to obtain advantage at playing” casino games. Many other jurisdictions enacted identical laws in subsequent years. It is still not cheating, but now it is illegal. When Shannon and Thorp were working on roulette, these laws were still 20+ years in the future, and their activities were completely legal.
Some of the comments seem confused about the difference between what is cheating, what is illegal, and what a casino can kick you out for.
- Cheating is a specific term defined in law (NRS 465.015, in Nevada) regarding altering the results or payout of a game.
- Any number of actions related to gambling can be illegal without being cheating. Being an unlicensed bookie, using a roulette computer, putting down a $20 sports bet for your buddy while he drinks at the bar…
- A casino can kick you out for any reason at all. I’ve never been given a reason, actually. Just “we don’t want your business.”
The main risk Thorp and Shannon took wasn’t being arrested, it was being beaten up. Vegas casinos were pretty openly run by the mob in the 60’s and 70’s. They didn’t care too much about the legality of what players were doing, just that they were bad for the bottom line; and they didn’t care too much about the legality of their countermeasures, just that they were good for the bottom line.
(The corporate takeovers of the 80’s, and various lawsuits against casino thugs starting in the 90’s, helped change those calculations, so things are now a lot safer.)
