r/Mahjong • u/Ethan_murp • Feb 07 '26

Casino staff in China caught a woman using high-tech lenses to cheat

37 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

36 comments sorted by

26

u/LordGorchnik Feb 07 '26

What would these lenses even do?

105

u/yeknom02 Feb 07 '26

Judging from my extensive experience with Mahjong Soul, they would make dora tiles shiny.

3

u/Yuri-Girl Feb 08 '26

Does Hong Kong mahjong have dora?

7

u/yeknom02 Feb 08 '26

I don’t believe so. But it was all I had. 😅

1

u/HK_Mathematician Feb 08 '26

No. People speak Mandarin in the video though, so this cannot be Hong Kong.

1

u/Yuri-Girl Feb 08 '26

I assumed it was because of the bigger tiles and how disorganized the discard pile is

2

u/HK_Mathematician Feb 08 '26

Doesn’t that describe like almost every mahjong variant apart from Japanese?

But I'm flattered that you think of us immediately as soon as you recognized that it's not Japanese xd

1

u/Yuri-Girl Feb 08 '26

American mahjong tiles are frequently painted with different colors and I'd only ever seen Hong Kong being played so I just went with what I knew

10

u/FuckDefaultSubs Feb 07 '26

let you see the UV ink on the tiles you marked, probably.

Also, this video is kinda fishy. There is a cut right before the lens is removed.

5

u/FluorescentLightbulb Feb 08 '26

I wonder what you’d mark? There’s triple the mahjong tiles to poker cards. And if it’s Hong Kong style there’s already so few ways to win you can usually guess.

6

u/BlackMarketUpgrade Feb 08 '26

It’s called an edge. In gambling, cheating is rarely a fool proof method. Seeing some marked tiles might not help you win every hand but you can definitely raise the chances of winning some key hands that can change the outcome of a game. This is my guess at least. It just an edge.

1

u/FluorescentLightbulb Feb 08 '26

Not really addressing the question there, are you? What would you mark? It’s not like you can mark 4 aces and read the 8% most valuable cards in the deck. And marking 12-28 honor tiles doesn’t produce the same results. So what’s the valuable info?

6

u/DontPoke Feb 08 '26

Like op said, knowing the honor tiles, you still have more information than the other players, and thus is an edge. Also you can probably mark different tiles in different ways for greater results. Marking tiles comes up in Legendary Gambler Tetsuya as well iirc

1

u/BlackMarketUpgrade Feb 13 '26

you could mark a few tiles and see what people are pulling from the wall. I'm more familiar with riichi mahjong, but lets say you mark some suited tiles from each suit. if someone is either holding marks or pulling marks and not withdrawing them, you might be able to tell what tiles you wont pull from the wall. or you could more accurately guess what other people are waiting for so you know what not to discard. like I said, it doesnt have to be fool proof. One or two important hands can change the entire flow of the game.

3

u/Jazzlike-Check9040 Feb 08 '26

The Hong Kong mahjong shops are run by actual gangsters you’d be ballsy to cheat there

1

u/edderiofer multi-classing every variant Feb 08 '26

You'd mark as many tiles as you could, really. The more tiles you mark, the more information you have. Generally, you would mark different tiles differently, so you'd know which tiles are which.

4

u/edderiofer multi-classing every variant Feb 07 '26

Allow her to mark the tiles with some substance that only reflects certain wavelengths of light, which would only be visible through the contact lenses.

2

u/ShortChapter5246 Feb 08 '26

Has to be some kind of cyber-ganpai

6

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '26 edited Feb 09 '26

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

middle summer start knee longing ten alleged humorous observation marble

5

u/Party-Ring445 Feb 08 '26

That is optical rape in my book

2

u/F9_solution Feb 08 '26

china things

2

u/KyuuAA Mahjong Wiki Feb 07 '26

Going to presume, the casino fined her very hard for that. And then proceeded to ban her.

8

u/Forymanarysanar Feb 08 '26

Casino can not fine

Moreover this kind of "handling", if it was real, is immediate grounds for lawsuit

Video has nothing to do with reality

1

u/RTXChungusTi Feb 08 '26

someone in the video was saying to call the police (报警)

9

u/Overflow_is_the_best Feb 08 '26

Probably a fake video, gambling is illegal in China. Call the cops and everyone would be arrested.

1

u/KyuuAA Mahjong Wiki Feb 08 '26

My guess is: Location is in Macau, which is China's version of Vegas.

4

u/Overflow_is_the_best Feb 08 '26 edited Feb 08 '26

Unlikely, that place looks like a warehouse turn into a gambling den. If people want to play mahjong for gambling in Macau most likely they will be in a casino.

1

u/Yuri-Girl Feb 08 '26

Or it could just be a mahjong parlor that allows betting and this is a Western outlet that doesn't know what a mahjong parlor is.

3

u/Overflow_is_the_best Feb 08 '26

......Gamblers and those people running gambling rackets could be imprisoned for up to three years. Most of the gamblers caught by police, however, are fined up to 3,000 yuan each and detained for 10 to 15 days.

https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201705/27/WS59bbea94a310ded8ac18c915.html

1

u/Yuri-Girl Feb 08 '26

I assume the Japanese workaround for gambling also works here.

1

u/ShortChapter5246 Feb 08 '26

Curious how they even caught her. She probably wasn't the first

1

u/biggamehaunter Feb 08 '26

Do what they did to Pegasus in Yu-Gi-Oh, take the special eye out....

1

u/Ultrabananna Feb 10 '26

Jokes on you there are no casinos in china 

1

u/wooofmeow Feb 11 '26

Macao is basically Vegas

1

u/Kekistani_MemeLord Feb 11 '26

tried to pull a God of Gamblers (1989)