Saturday, April 03, 2010

Cheating Roulette Dealers Working Indian Tribal Reservation Casinos With Their Agents!

I have just returned from a tour of Tribal (or Native American) casinos across the United States and found a little surprise in four different tribal casinos. Besides the usual rinky-dink casino scams that abound not only in these but in all American casinos, I stumbled upon four separate cases of cheating roulette dealers, and each one of them was pretty good. Since they were all working similar inside scams, I got to wondering whether this was a highly organized multi-tribal casino scam in the works, perhaps the first evidence of a Tran Organization-type scam transferring from baccarat tables to roulette wheels.

In each scenario I witnessed, the dealer was laying down the cheat moves for his agent, to whom he paid the winning chips. After the ball dropped into the slot for the winning number, the dealer would sweep the losing chips off the layout as usual. Then he paid the winning bets on the outside, such as the dozen-bets, column-bets, odd-even bets and red-black bets. The cheat moves were then performed as the dealer shifted his (and hers--I spotted one female dealer in the act) attention on the winning chips on the inside of the layout surrounding the winning number. When the dealer picked up the dolly atop the winning number to verify and re-stack the chips underneath, he very deftly dropped two or three chips that he'd already had palmed in his hand onto the stack. This was done only when there were already at least two winning chips on the number, as the dealers wisely knew that the cameras above could see whether or not there were winning chips on the number but could not tell how many there were. Only in cases when the cameras are zoomed in on the winning number from different angles would they be able to see how many chips are lying there. This would occur only when casino surveillance was looking for this type of move, which in reality is never. It didn't matter to the cheating dealers whether the chips legitimately bet on the winning number were their cohorts' or not. As long as chips were already there, the dealers continued putting the "icing on the cake."

I cannot name these casinos at this time for a variety of reasons, but it doesn't really matter because the dealers are cheating only the house and not the players, so if you happen to be on one of these reservation roulette wheels while this goes down, it will not affect your win or loss at all.

My take: Pretty good scam that will go on quite awhile as long as the dealers and their agents don't get to greedy. While I watched them in action, they took about $150 to $250 per hour off the tables.