Why didn't I think of that?

[Camy]

A high-rolling gambler has allegedly won $32 million at a casino in Melbourne, Australia, thanks to a little network hackery carried out by accomplices.

Games like poker are much easier to win if you know some or all of your opponents' cards. After all, it's hard to sustain a bluff if the person you're bluffing has actually seen your hand.

In this case, the un-named "whale" - casino argot for a player who wagers large amounts of money, often on giant-sized individual bets - is said to have relied on his accomplices to feed him information about what other players at his table were holding.

His accomplices were able to snoop on the other players because they had remote access to the casino's own surveillance system, giving them a bird's eye view from CCTV cameras right inside the high-rollers' room.

The $32 million was apparently scooped in the course of eight big-stakes hands.

Read the article, do.

[Chris James]

Perhaps the ultimate gamble is stealing. But casinos know the odds in such games of chance are in their favor, and isn't that just another form of theft?

[Cole Parker]

It's only theft if the odds are rigged. Everyone knows the odds are in the house's favor for all the games it hosts. If it rigs them higher than the norm, I suppose that could be called theft, but generally they don't do that because in the long run, they'll get fewer customers if the casion down the street has a better payout. This, I understand, was a poker game. The way those work at most casinos is the house takes a small percentage out of every pot, or, simply charges a large entry fee and then supplies a dealer but has no stake at all in the hands themselves.

C