Please, only answer with serious replies, preferably based on some real-world experience.

I am living in Europe. The casinos here seem to be rigged against the players. This is not some sour grapes observation; I have been very analytical in my observations. I’ve even taken friends with me to verify the statistics I was storing up.

First, let’s talk about blackjack: one casino uses an automatic card dealing machine. There are times when it seems impossible the dealer is getting so lucky: often 80% of the time he starts with an ace, ten, or face card. One day I visited two casinos, and in both places the dealer had an ace as his first card three times in a row.

On those rare occasions when the dealer doesn’t start with a strong hand, he magically gets 21. Not 19 or 20, but 21. One night, we started mocking the dealer because it became ridiculous. About 90% of the time, he’d have five, six, ten (face card). It was never five, seven, ten or anything. But always those three cards to equal 21. This happened at least 20 times within 90 minutes.

Roulette: some of my friends are convinced that the casino somehow uses magnets to influence the ball. One oddity: on about five occasions recently, I switched my chip from one number to a split between two numbers. So, while I started with a chip on Five, at the last moment I switched it to Four/Five.

Guess what? EACH TIME I won.

It seems statistically that this is not just some aberration. I moved a chip to one of the only numbers that wasn’t being played… and it won…. five out of five times.

Suspicious?

Please, do not answer with the typical:

1) You’ve got a selective memory
2) It all evens out in the end

These occurences seem to deny statistics. In fact, I just returned from the casino. I was getting such abominable cards that I had them switch the table from Blackjack to Pontoon. I quintupled my money in about an hour. In other words, the cards were so abominable, that getting a 5-card pontoon was actually a winning strategy.
To the first respondant who commented, “you are seeing statistics that aren’t really there, just trying to justify your losses”, that is not true. As I said, I even took friends there to help me keep statistical count.

Here in Europe I think that inspection is lax and not frequent. Also, if it’s like everything else here, there is corruption.

Also, it’s not just me. I have seen pros playing (yes, I am taking their word for it, that they gamble so frequently it’s like a profession) who lost about $5,000 in a day. The cards they would get were ridiculously bad. For example, they’d split aces against a six, get a three and a four, and the dealer magically draws an ace (here, the dealer only gets one card at the beginning; he draws last).

While this is not proof of cheating, a few times the ball has literally bounced out of the number it landed in, almost like it was getting some invisible whack.

As I said, some friends here are convinced that the casinos are cheating.