If you’ve ever been to a casino and decided to buy a pack of cards to take home with you, you may have noticed that the cards you buy have been altered in some kind of way.
Casinos punch holes in decks of cards that you buy there so that people do not attempt to sneak them into the games at the casino itself.
The most common thing that casinos do to packs of cards that people buy is punch one or more holes in it.
Very often, these holes are punched right into the middle of the cards.
This may seem weird; no other decks of cards that you buy from any other store, or the ones that you would play with at the casino, have been altered in this manner.
So why, then, would a casino make such an alteration to a pack of cards that you buy there to take home with you later?
The answer, of course, is precisely that: they want you to take them home. They do not want you to keep them in the casino.
Think about it: one of the biggest issues in casinos is gamblers trying to find clever/lucky/ingenious ways to cheat the system and win lots of money.
Heck, they’ve even made movies about this topic.
So, one could imagine that if you were to sneak a deck of cards into a particular game in a casino where the cards look like any other deck, but you as the gambler have altered the cards in some minor way (bent corners, colored in edges, something similar), then it is certainly within the realm of possibility that you as the gambler could see those cards being dealt and use that to your advantage.
Let’s say that you marked the face cards in a deck of cards in a way that you can recognize them facedown; if you were to then play blackjack and see those marked cards in the dealer’s hand, you’d know how to bet accordingly (and as such, increase your chances of winning).
The casinos, of course, don’t care for that kind of cheating – not that they don’t have their own tricks they use to scam customers, but that’s another matter entirely – so any deck of cards that you buy from a casino will be marked via having holes punched in them that the dealers will recognize them if they see you try to sneak a deck of cards into a game and be able to remove the cards from the deck (and potentially kick you out as well).
This makes it easier for casinos to track the easy (or possibly even lazy) cheaters at their game, saving their energy to catch the more devious and clever cheaters instead.
