The Chinese may believe in good fortune, but it seems a number of enterprising business people in the Mainland city of Guangzhou are not prepared to allow the serious business of gambling be left entirely to Lady Luck.
According to an investigation by the South China Morning Post, a whole street of traders is selling paraphernalia aimed at skewing the odds firmly in favour of the house.
Before litigation lawyers from Macau’s concessionaires start text messaging their clients via BlackBerry, however, it’s worth pointing out the cheating kits are being sold to people running illegal casinos. From past media reports, those illegal casinos tend to operate in hotel rooms in Guangdong province (China’s richest by GDP), or occasionally in Macau hotels unconnected with the legal gaming industry. Unsurprisingly, in the parallel world of illegal casinos, the ‘operators’ need to keep on the move and don’t like to tie themselves down with permanent premises.
Dodgy casino equipment reportedly on offer in Guangzhou includes marked cards, closed-circuit television and computers to control what cards are dealt by otherwise random card shufflers. The card picking gear costs RMB20,000 (USD2,900)—a small fortune even by the standards of relatively wealthy Guangdong province. But then the potential rewards for the cheats are likely to be very large.
Oh, and the SCMP reports the shops are only yards from a police station that doubles as a district headquarters for plain-clothes detectives. Ouch.
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