About Table Max Expertise I am an expert blackjack player and have been told that I am disallowed from playing 21 at roughly 50 casinos. I can answer just about any question involving blackjack and many questions involving casino gambling generally, even those involving legal issues, casino measures taken against good players, the `comp` system, casino credit, and of course how to play 21 so you, not the house, are the one with the advantage.
Experience A great deal of study and play experience culminating in winning a great deal of money at the game. For obvious reasons I prefer to keep my name private.
Education/Credentials College and master's degree in unrelated fields.
Question How do casinos protect themselves from players bringing in counterfeit chips? Is that tried very often and have many been caught? Thanks.
Answer Casinos use many methods to deal with the danger of counterfeit chips and are for the most part successful. Here are two of their measures.
1. Note that you rarely hear of counterfeit $1 bills; to be cost-effective, currency counterfeiters have to counterfeit bills of large denomination. In much the same way, chip counterfeiters have to counterfeit large denomination chips (probably $100 and up) in order to be cost-effective, since there is a certain fixed cost even to manufacture fake chips.
Casinos, believe it or not, keep extremely careful track of each $100 and up chip. Each player has a computer account which often contains a record of the kind of chips he's holding. Furthermore, if you try to cash large-denomination chips at the cashier, someone in the cashier's office will often ask you which table you got these at and call the pit to verify this. (Buy in for several thousand dollars and then cash out if you don't believe me.) So it is more difficult than you'd think to swap fake chips for cash.
There are exceptions to this rule for some casinos, such as Foxwoods in Connecticut, which sees so much big money action so routinely that they don't bother to keep track of the chips in this way. I would strongly suspect, however, that such places routinely record all large transactions on video so as to have some ability to recognize and chase down the counterfeit chip passer later.
2. I have also seen at Harrah's casino in Shreveport some sort of a fluoroscope device which they passed $500 chips through at the cashier, and some sort of glowing triangle within each chip was apparent. Presumably this is an anti counterfeiting device and fake chips would reveal no triangle.
So to sum up I can tell you that passing fake chips is hard to accomplish. I'm pretty sure you'd do hard time if you were caught, too: it's open and shut fraud.
ADDENDUM:
I meant to mention that if you play at a table for an hour or so, you will see a casino employee come by and actually count how many chips of each denomination are in the table rack. Most casinos keep hourly lists of what chips are at which table, and who walks off with chips. So, to sum up, they audit their chips carefully. The sum of their methods is not enough to deter all counterfeiting perfectly, but I am sure it deters most of them.
