This video was being circulated by the self proclaimed professional blackjack player, Michael Morgenstern. In this video he claimed to have captured a dealer at the live casino second dealing. Second dealing is also known as dealing seconds and this is a method of manipulating a deck of cards during the card game by dealing the second and not the top card of the deck and this is done in pursuit of cheating. Second dealing and bottom dealing are frequently used in magic performance.
Second dealing is a trick that comes in handy when you know the value of the second or top card in the deck. In this viral video, it is clear that the dealer is dealing the second card from the shoe as Morgenstern plays blackjack at BetOnline’s live dealer casino. The question here is whether this was intended and who is to be blamed for this action.
What happened?
The player was on an eleven and after hitting, the dealer dealt the second card which was a six. The dealer then dealt the top card he would have dealt to the player and added to his ten which gave him a total of 18 while the player had a 17; this made the dealer win the hand for the house. If the cards were dealt as the were supposed to, the player would have received the 8 and he would have has a 19 while the dealer would have had a 16 and the dealer would have been required to take another card and the probability would be that he would have busted, thus losing to the player.
It is clear that the dealer swapped the cards through second dealing and this is clear in the slow motion replay. The question is whether the dealer knew the cards that were coming up and whether he tried to screw the player or was the dealer unprofessional and under trained and was trying to feel the cards and accidentally pushed a card up the deck.
Many people might not be aware of this but live dealer casinos are not run by online gambling portals sending the games to them. The live dealer pits are most of the time third party companies that are contracted to offer the cameras, cards and the labour. In this case, BetOnline contracted Global Gaming Labs to offer the services.
After the incident, BetOnline ended their contract with the company and replaced them with another vendor. The new software provider for the live casino gaming is Visionary iGaming. This was done with immediate effect and we hope that this will not happen again.