You should write a letter, explaining your actions and why you did them, and promising not to do these actions again if you are reinstated.

This is exactly what someone laundering money would say.

so who would I address this letter to?

Try another casino. Maybe you already have , IDK. You could find out if you are on a multi venue "black list"! If you are not banned elsewhere , change your behavior to avoid it.

Don't tone it down. Stop completely. Your hobby is incompatible with the casino environment.

I don't think you do,

And selling chips to players at the table.
And making multiple trips to the cashier.
Every time they look up you're there making a transaction of some type.

Not sure if you're a short change artist or are laundering money but something seems shady.

Easiest to just ban you.

I still wish they would have given me a warning at least. If I knew it was a serious issue I would have not done it in the first place. Now I'm out of a local place to play poker.

"Multiaccountng"? What does that mean?

nypoker, I am not trying to insult you here. Are you on the spectrum? You are doing seriously odd things with money for odd reasons. Of course the Casino is going to take interest and likely decide they have no idea exactly what you are trying to do but it looks suspicious so don't take any chances.

The fact that you did not realize your behavior is highly unusual and would draw unwanted attention is why I ask if you are on the spectrum.

You have been banned from multiple banks for the same behavior and didn't think the casino would care?

I would not repeat any of the behavior anywhere you would like to frequent going forward, but you probably realize that now. Sorry you got banned.

Considering you’re in NY which doesn’t have that many poker rooms may I ask which casino? Or if you’re update or downstate?

Cause if you’re from Long Island then youre really limited to AC, Mohegan, Foxwoods, or the new Resorts in the Catskills. But upstate I know there’s turning stone and I’m not that familiar up there

Maybe if you didn't give the cage a problem for following federal and local rules and laws by asking for your social security number after your daily transactions reached a certain amount (you must have given them quite a problem since they had to get security involved) then maybe they would have reinstated you.

I've seen people get reinstated for worse so you're likely conveniently leaving things out. A lot of the daily "pro's" I saw up there are actually bad degenerate players anyway so maybe this is a blessing in disguise.

I already said the name of the establishment. Rivers casino NY. Never heard back from today so I think it's safe to lock it up as a perma-ban.

Am I on the spectrum? Well, I've never been diagnosed. People at the homegame I used to play in for year(s) always joked that I was autistic. I didn't think it would be an issue to hunt for star notes in a casino and it just seemed like a good place to do it since there's cash everywhere.

Buddy of mine used to joke with me that one day no banks or casinos will accept my business. I suppose we are getting closer and closer to that day.

Will I stop hunting for star notes? No. There's nothing wrong with it as far as I'm concerned. Will I change the way in which I hunt for them? Yeah sure.

They literally never asked me for SS# at this place within the past year. I was once asked for it last year or so when they claimed my daily transactions were going to exceed 10k, but otherwise no issues lately.

Oh well, I suppose it's time to voice my opinion publicly now that Rivers is a sham casino. In due time I'll have my own casino

Yeah. What a terrible place for not letting you cycle through all their bills.


And that's if we believe your telling of the story.

The minute you refused to provide a TIN you got flagged with a SAR, no matter how long ago or what your reasoning. Your truly bizarre cashiering behavior since then definitely put you into a risk bin the casino doesn't need. I'm surprised you lasted as long as you did. Do not keep up with the same behavior or you will eventually be PNGed at every casino you visit.

what does TIN mean or PNG?

TIN is tax identification number
PNG is persona non grata

I find it funny that this casino bans somebody who regularly brings in $5k cash each trip and could potentially go on tilt at any moment and piss it all away on blackjack or table games in the blink of an eye but will let a broke hooker sit down at 1-2NL and hog up a seat every night at midnight and bother the entire table asking for free $ and won't remove her when a player complains to clear the rail.

Great priorities. The place was a crack den anyways full of fiends. If I could find something good to say about the place I would say it, but being within 25 min drive from home was the only good thing about it.

Maybe if you managed a poker room with a brain and let dealers sell chips from the rack when fish bust out so they can play the next hand, players like myself wouldn't feel the need to buy in for $1000s extra as backup reloads for the fish. And every session I'd find the dealer make a mistake. They condone ratholing. You can literally build up a 500BB stack, table change, then table change back and buy in for 30BBs.

Bunch of idiots running that casino.

That is a false equivalence. The broke hookers should probably not be permitted to bother players, I agree. I also agree that it would be ideal if you could sell chips to other players (though I do not agree that selling from the rack is preferable, but this is a different topic with not a lot of consensus).

But your cashier behavior is almost indistinguishable from (very poorly executed) money laundering. You refused to give your TIN when asked, which is one of the biggest red flags there is to a financial institution. At least you weren't caught structuring, I guess.

Casinos have significant exposure to this sort of behavior, and they are subject to significant penalties (regulatory and financial) if they are found to have violated their procedures for complying with the federal FinCEN requirements. You are fooling yourself if you think that risk is remotely comparable to the risk of letting unsavory persons patronize the casino and bother the other patrons, or that your $5k tilt jar is in any way meaningful to the people responsible for FinCEN compliance. They are not even in the same ballpark.

Anyway, given your recent statements you seem to hate the casino and everything about it, so I don't understand why you are so hellbent on getting your ban overturned anyway. Just move on and play somewhere that doesn't have all the problems you have identified. And do yourself a favor and follow the advice everyone else in this thread has given you: stop with the money shenanigans if you want to continue to play wherever you end up.

I also don't like driving >1hr and spending extra $ on gas.

and why does everybody keep saying money laundering? how is this money laundering? exchanging chips for cash and vice versa = money laundering? how?

I'm no expert on the subject but from what I gather it goes something more like this:

Person A has mad $ from illegal gains. Person A Opens up a business and employs person B. Person A pays person B in cash instead of with check so therefore B doesn't claim $X for taxes and then the business can keep whatever employee wages expenses would have been paid in their asset column instead of liabilities when it comes to accounting...?

Or something like that?

How does buying extra chips to sell to fish at the table and cashing in and out for small bills occasionally qualify as money laundering? Cash is cash. None of it gets traced (to IRS) when it's under 10k in a single day as far as I know.

So why exactly is everybody accusing me of something I'm not doing??

Thanks.

Well, I feel for you about not getting a warning, but given what you've said I don't blame the casino either. Like I said, if I were in their shoes I would have booted you months earlier, your behavior is highly suspicious.

You also are probably not aware that FinCEN reporting is secretive by design, and casinos are either forbidden from, or highly encouraged not to, tell potential violators that they are being reported. So getting a warning would be highly non-standard.

Money laundering is taking dirty money and cleaning it. It is almost the exact opposite of tax avoidance.

You taken cash with mysterious provenance, "gamble with it" for a while, cash out, and now you have records from a financial institution showing where the money came from, and you can say the money came from gambling winnings and it is now entirely legit. Whether or not you pay taxes on it is completely secondary to whether it has been laundered.

Casinos and banks are required to report whenever a person is given a large (>$10k, but in practice >$3k) sum of cash money, so that financial authorities can track it and make sure you are not laundering large quantities for illicit purposes. They are required to watch for many smaller transactions that might add up to larger amounts that would otherwise need to be reported too ("structuring").

No one is saying you actually were money laundering. We are saying your behavior (exchanging chips for cash and back again, repeatedly) looks like money laundering. As an added bonus, all your questions about old money makes it look like you might also be counterfeiting.

and FinCEN is what?

You are smart enough to post on 2+2, you can figure out how to use google too.