Young Scot develops system to identify card counting

Card counting at Blackjack tables could soon become a thing of the past thanks to a 22 year old student at Dundee University. Kris Zutis who is originally from Latvia is studying for an Applied Computing degree and for his final year project has worked with The Gala Casino in Dundee to design a system to analyse information from casino cameras to detect card counting and dealer errors. Card counting is of course not illegal as such but casinos nearly always take action against somebody they suspect of the activity as it can be costly to the casino in question. Having featured in The New Scientist magazine the system is attracting a lot of attention and Zutis was invited to present his paper at the International Conference on Computer Vision Systems in Belgium. By the developers own admission the system still needs some work to be commercially viable and hopefully the interest shown so far will enable him to develop it further. Zutis himself claims not to be a great gambler and prefers Poker but Blackjack is more suited to the system. Card counting is not new and many players do it to some degree; in fact there has even been a film made about it called “21” but the casino would certainly be very glad of a system to detect it sooner than they can by simple observation.