It hasn’t been more than a few weeks ago where we discussed that live online blackjack might be the best way to gamble online. We know that no matter the blackjack game, that house edge is with the casino. It’s more comforting for some gamblers to have an actual person dealing the cards when playing blackjack online. Over the years many people have learned how to play blackjack in casinos. Not everyone trusts computer dealers even if the casino is regulated.
Recently, a self-proclaimed professional blackjack player ran into a problem with a live dealer game at BetOnline.ag. Michael Morgenstern has a video of him playing blackjack online that appears to show a dealer cheating.
You can see a short version of the incident in the video below. He posted a longer version of the video on his YouTube account.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3-OssVlvgc
The video shows a BetOnline blackjack dealer dealing the second card in a shoe instead of the first card. The dealer then gave himself the card that would have been the player’s card. As a result of this deal, the dealer won and the player to lost the hand.
This was a strange hand as Morgenstern split a pair of 2’s against a dealer showing a King. He may have been counting cards but, for what it’s worth, our strategy page says that “twos, threes, and sevens should be split against a two through seven” only. It appears as though the dealer double flicked the cards in the shoe and skipped the card that should have been dealt.
Since the original post of this video, there have been a lot of articles and forum posts about the potential cheating hand. It doesn’t seem as though there’s a major cheating scandal at BetOnline. Other incidents of live blackjack cheating haven’t been reported at BetOnline since the incident. However, the online casino operator decided to change their live casino dealer software provider. Here’s a segment of their press release.
“18 February 2017, BetOnline.ag announces that they have cut third-party vendor Global Gaming Labs (GGL), in favor of Live Dealer Casino third-party vendor Visionary iGaming (ViG) – effective immediately!”
This may appear to be an incident and not a full blown scandal. However, this complaint from Morgenstern wasn’t the only problem BetOnline has had with their live dealers.
“After client-side complaints regarding the number of available tables, games offered, lackadaisical dealers, and poor hand reporting became common-place (regarding GGL), BetOnline took on the task of finding a superior Live Casino Vendor.”
Any cheating should be cause for some kind of alarm. The good news, in this case, is that there doesn’t appear to be a major live online blackjack cheating scandal. The bad news is that there has been more than just one incident. It’s important to follow blackjack news on this and other websites in case there are other cases like this with different live dealer games.
You can the full video of this blackjack session here and see more videos from Morgenstern on his YouTube channel.
