Who needs Tells?

One of my favorite "gambling" books is Thomas Bass', "The Eudaemonic Pie," the true, if hard to believe, story of a group of California hackers who built a shoe-based computer/communications system for predicting where the spinning ball on a roulette wheel would end up. And it worked.

If not quite as good, another fun read in the same vein is Ben Mezrich's "Bringing Down the House" about a team of card-counting M.I.T. students who reputedly took the Vegas casinos for millions until shut down.

Now, researchers from Stanford University and Cornell University have put together a camera system that can read a playing card facing away from the camera by analyzing the way projected patterns of light bounce off the card.

via BoingBoing