Do people with a "sixth sense" have an edge when they play casino games? Many researchers believe that such psychic powers are a real phenomenon, which means that some people have an innate ability that directs them as they decide where on the roulette table to place their bet, when to take another blackjack hit and how to choose their slot machine.

The discussion is an old one – are some people psychic? If so, how does it help them as they play Slotocash real money casino games?

Psychic Powers

For thousands of years, specific individuals in almost every society were regarded as having psychic powers. In some regions they were feared and hunted, while in other areas they were respected and revered.

Psychic powers, often referred to as Extrasensory Perception (ESP), describe the purported abilities of some individuals that allow them to process information or influence the physical world through means that fall outside the known laws of physics and biological senses. The existence of ESP remains a subject of intense debate between parapsychologists and the mainstream scientific community.

There are three main categories of psychic ability

  1. Telepathy - transfer of thoughts, feelings, or mental imagery between individuals without using speech, body language, or technology.
  2. Clairvoyance - gain information about an object, person, location, or physical event through means other than the five senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste).
  3. Precognition - knowing about a future event before it happens.

Psychics report that they "sense" through hearing sounds or voices, feeling a sensation or "knowing" that something will happen with no real rhyme or reason to back up that knowledge.

Research

To date, psychic powers have not been proven under rigorous, double-blind laboratory conditions. Most scientists attribute "psychic" experiences to high-probability guesses and picks on body language,  a tendency for people to believe that vague, general descriptions apply to their precognition or a general confirmation bias where the one time that a premonition came true is remembered while the hundreds of times that premonitions didn't come true are forgotten.

Preliminary research, however, indicates that there is enough evidence to warrant further investigation. Daryl Bem of Carnell published a paper in 2011 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in which he reported on nine experiments that involved over 1000 participants. He wanted to test to see if students could pre-learn words for a test that hadn't happened yet. Eight out of nine of the experiments showed statistically significant results in favor of precognition.

Ganzfeld meta-analyses that covered over 40 years aimed to evaluate anomalous cognition by watching to see if one person could describe an image being sent by a person in another room. This evaluation showed a small but persistent effect that, even skeptics agree, cannot be ignored.

In a study by Dr. Morris Friedman, researchers explored a neurobiological model where the brain's frontal lobes block innate psychic abilities. The study determined that participants showed significantly higher mind-matter interaction scores than those with a fully functioning filter.

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Psychics in the Casino

Casinos monitor carefully for card-counters, card manipulators, bet manipulators, optical and digital cheaters, advantage players, slot machine exploiters and other types of scammers. However, there are some casino winners who have attributed their success at the casino tables to psychic abilities – and no one has been able to disprove them. Some of their stories include:

  • Richard Chen - Richard Chen is known as the "Man with the X-Ray Eyes," but Chen attributed his success at blackjack to his ability to "feel" the density of the cards. He said that he could predict when a "shoe" (the box holding the decks) was about to produce a massive streak, either for the Player or for the Banker. 

    In September 1997, Richard Chen entered the Monte Carlo Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. Because he was already known to many casinos as a "card-counter",  Chen used a fictitious Burma passport to check in and obtain $44,000 in chips. Over the course of several hours, Chen turned his buy-in into $84,400—a profit of $40,400. When the casino realized Chen was a known card counter, they refused to pay out his winnings. 

    The Nevada Gaming Control Board sided with the casino but Chen took his case to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in Chen's favor. They ruled that, regardless of whether Chen's win was due to his purported psychic abilities or his reputation as a card-counter, skill is not a crime.

  • Mary Hanlon - Mary Hanlon, an Ohio grandmother, claimed that she had had a vivid dream of a specific slot machine that was located at a local casino. In the dream, the machine displayed the numbers 7-7-7-2-5. The next morning, Hanlon drove to the casino and found a machine that "felt" like the one in her dream. Within 10 minutes, she hit a jackpot worth over $100,000. The final digits on her player's receipt were – you guessed it – 7-7-7-2-5!

  • The Woman in Blue - For decades, the legend of "The Woman in Blue" has persisted in Monte Carlo casinos. She first appeared at the roulette tables in the 1920s and would sit for hours, never betting.  Suddenly, she would stand up, place a massive bet on a single number, win, and leave immediately. 

    Witnesses claimed that, during one month, she won 14 times in a row,  always on a single-number bet. When asked how she did it, she simply whispered, "The wheel speaks to those who listen." The Woman in Blue has never been identified.

  • Joseph McMoneagle - Joseph McMoneagle was a high-profile Remote Viewer for the U.S. Army’s Stargate Project. In an experiment, McMoneagle and other Remote Viewers were tested to see if they could predict the outcome of sporting events or casino games before they happened. While not always 100% accurate, McMoneagle and others showed a statistically significant ability to describe future targets.

Expert Tip

There's no real reason to dismiss the idea of psychic powers since, as a curiosity, it can do no harm. If, however, someone suggests that you base your casino strategy on the predictions of a psychic, keep your distance!

There remains much research to be done on the possibility that ESP can promote a casino gamer's success rate but it's fun to try!

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