The FBI released the below
information:
After just a few hours of playing
baccarat at a Maryland casino in September 2017, Chenguang Ni headed home to
New York with more than $850,000 in winnings.
The odds of winning any given hand
of baccarat stand at just under 50 percent. But Ni and his tablemates won an
astounding 18 of 21 hands—including one run of 14 straight wins.
The next day, the casino called the
FBI’s Baltimore Field Office. Ni had cheated, they believed, and one of their
dealers had likely helped him. But the dealer they suspected, Ming Zhang,
denied any involvement when questioned by the casino.
“The casino knew there had been
cheating,” said FBI Special Agent Jason Bender of his investigation of the
case. “What wasn’t known was exactly how the player did it.”
Baccarat games are played with eight
decks of cards. The dealer—called the banker—typically spreads the cards on the
table to show the players that they are standard decks, shuffles them, and then
places them into a holding container for play.
The banker then deals two cards to
the player position and two cards to the bank position. A player bets on whose
hand will come closest to nine—the player or the banker—or if they will tie.
There is only a single player hand no matter how many players are at the table,
and extra cards are dealt out only under certain prescribed circumstances.
A player who knew the order of the
cards in the deck could predict the outcome of each game with absolute
accuracy. The casino concluded that Ni must have known the order of the cards.
By reviewing the casino’s
surveillance footage and conducting interviews, FBI agents confirmed that Ni
had convinced the other gamblers at the table to follow his lead that night.
These unwitting accomplices were given money by Ni and told to bet along with
him and then hand over their winnings at the end of the game.
Soon after, the casino dealer
confessed to his role in the scheme. Zhang, who worked at two Maryland casinos,
admitted he met with Ni over the summer of 2017. The two men agreed that Zhang
would alert Ni of his upcoming shifts as a dealer at the casinos. He further
agreed to not shuffle a section of cards in the baccarat deck after they had
been fanned in front of players.
Ni found a way to use his phone to
take images of the cards as they were fanned out. “Then he and the other
gamblers he recruited would sit there for a while, playing smaller bets just to
move the cards along and keep their seats,” Bender explained. During this time,
Ni excused himself from the table on several occasion to go to the bathroom to
review the images of the deck.
Bender said that Ni didn’t have to
memorize each card in the unshuffled section of the deck but only needed to
recognize the sequence of cards that would signal the unshuffled cards had come
up. “Then he just needed to remember the either/or sequence of the bets—as in
player, banker, player, player,” Bender said.
Investigators learned the pair had
also carried out a similar plan at another casino where Zhang previously
worked, and the take from that casino was nearly $200,000.
By the time agents came to Ni, their
evidence was strong. Ni pleaded guilty to conspiracy to transport stolen funds
and was sentenced to 13 months in prison. Because Ni is not a legal resident of
the United States, his case will be referred to Immigration and Customs
Enforcement after he has served his sentence.
The dealer, Zhang, was fired from
the casino and sentenced to 18 months in federal prison in December 2019. He
was also given three years of supervised release and ordered to pay restitution
equal to the full amount of the illicit winnings.
In total, investigators found the
pair cheated the casinos of $1,046,560.
Bender explained that although these
casinos are big business, a portion of the casino’s profits go into the
Maryland education trust fund. “Part of that revenue belongs to the state of
Maryland, and part of the theft affects state education funding,” he said.
He also warned would-be cheaters:
“You should assume you will be caught.” Bender said that the casinos usually
detect cheating while the player is still at the table. “But even if you walk
out, the evidence of the crime is going to be captured.”
In other words, the odds are
overwhelmingly against you.
No comments:
Post a Comment