Police raiding a Berlin restaurant have discovered playing cards which had been laced with a radioactive substance.

Detectives believe players could wear a hidden detector on their bodies allowing them to recognise certain cards, giving them an advantage.

Bad enough to get cheated let alone get dosed with radiation.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42157129

I wouldn't like to sit in that game for too long, you'd be killing your customers assuming the cheaters are wearing something to block the radiation.

Curie-ous

and I thought bomb pots in my local game were big...

I don’t know why people would be upset by this. Being bitten by a radioactive card is the only chance most people of getting good at poker

Source of Fedor Holz' poker superpowers EXPOSED!

Maybe it was this guy?

1) Identifying radioactivity - and figuring out which other individual player it is coming from - seems awfully ambitious.

2) Obviously (I assume) you're not going to be able to mark individual cards with different patterns (since whatever geiger counter you're using isn't going to be able to read patterns on the cards, compared to the sensitivity of eyes/visible light radiation)

3) If you're marking 13 cards as described in the story, presumably you're marking all of one suit. But in what situations - of any game - is it useful to know whether a player has a given suit, and to be playing for high enough stakes that you're actually using a ****ing geiger counter to identify them? Because you've only marked 13 cards, and those 13 cards are going to remain static from game-to-game, the frequency of that information being helpful is going to be rather rare (and thus, reduce the value of investing in this setup to begin with).

4) How do you stop the iodine spreading to other cards? If it spreads to the truck, which presumably only had incidental contact with whatever else was in the rubbish, how do a deck of cards hold any radioactivity without it spreading throughout the hole deck?

5) How do you track back from a rubbish truck to an individual restaurant? That seems rather unlikely to me - How many destinations does a normal rubbish truck actually stop at?

It seems more likely to me that the cards ended up with the iodine incidentally, I can't imagine that there's someone who has the technical sophistication to use radioactivity to mark cards, but who doesn't have the technical sophistication to use simpler and more useful techniques.

Screen name tag checks out

that has been used for years and it works well. as many other tech methods.

You can shear a sheep many times, but only once can you make it's wool fall out due to radiation sickness.

No wonder all the regs were going bald.

NVGers on their A-game yesterday.

Amazing. NVG

I immediately thought of "Farts on cards" when I saw the title xD

True, inspiring too.

Not to be that guy but wouldn’t slowly giving someone radiation sickness over hundreds of sessions, while cheating him out of his money, be basically the ultimate version of shearing?

Sir, are you referring to American health care cancer treatment?

Well, if you're in the game, you're also giving yourself radiation sickness. This makes no sense to me.

This would make a great movie that's a bit like Smokin Aces. Underground criminals lose huge in this poker game, later it turns out the deck is rigged. All winners are suspects.

On your fifth point Josem I believe radioactive tracing is now very accurate- the investigators in the Litvenenko death were able to trace the radioactive material to a particular flight and the restaurant where he was killed.

Note to self: avoid games where players are wearing lead radiological aprons.

Apparently so! I don't understand it, and having spent 5 minutes reading about iodine-125 and gamma ray radiation, I'm even more disbelieving or not-understanding.

That sort of radiation seems to only be detectable at very short distances, and I tend to not trust things I can't conceptually understand.

Seems like the cops didn't care too much since it was an illegal game and were more concerned with making the area safe. Don't think we'll ever find out much more about it - 13 cards being marked was a bit weird as well.
Maybe we'll hear a bit more of someone like wired picks up the story.

Fun fact on geiger counters btw : Any steel used in their construction needs to be from before the nuclear age (1945) as steel produced at a later date will skew the result.

Geiger counter isn't exactly subtle at the table. Maybe there are digital ones now?

They’ve got an app for that