Engineers Compete to Cheat a Casino With Custom-Built Devices

Mark Rober invited engineers and makers to CrunchLabs Casino to build and test devices for cheating at casino games. Cheating itself was allowed, but getting caught was not.

The creations included a remote-controlled robotic poker chip that could move a roulette bet after the wheel stopped, dice whose internal weighting could be changed with heat, and a concealed wearable card-counting assistant. Another contestant hid a pinhole camera in a sleeve and used computer vision to reconstruct the order of a deck.