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| Teaching the right way |
I travel to different areas of the world
doing game protection seminars and hands-on training to casino floor staffs and
surveillance staffs. I often visit the same casinos more than once, and the
second time around is when I notice how much the casino’s staff benefited from
my first visit.
Sometimes it’s not as much as I
would’ve liked.
Is it my fault?
Well, I like to believe that with all my
experience as a casino-cheat and advantage-player, and then as a speaker and
trainer of casino game protection, that what I deliver to casinos that hire me
is the best out there.
So then if I’m not to blame for this lack
of game-protection progress on the part of the casinos, who is?
I hate to say it but the answer is: the
casinos. I mean their staffs.
And the reason is twofold:
One is that not enough key employees are
in attendance.
The other is that some of the key
employees who are in attendance are not there with the right attitude. I have
encountered many with an already-know-it-all attitude that is very detrimental
to both themselves and the casinos they work for.
A good example of this occurred recently
at a major South American casino. The head of its surveillance department was
from the United Kingdom, which happens to be the sharpest casino area in the
world as far as cheating is concerned as far as I’m concerned.
This particular Brit, who no doubt had seen
his share of high-end casino cheat scams, immediately took on an attitude of “How
can I learn anything from you if I’ve already seen it before.”
I had asked the casino’s director of
table games beforehand to supply me with an employee who could help me during
the seminar by actually doing cheat moves I would teach him. I often do this to
draw attention away from myself so that the attendees can witness (after the
fact) that it was their own colleague doing the cheating and mot me, whom
everyone expected to see do it.
This type of attendee-participation
approach serves well to get attendees interested in the seminar.
But in this case at the South American
casino, the surveillance director who was assigned to help me decided to
challenge my knowledge at every turn. I was trying to get him to a blackjack pastpost
to which he responded, “That’ll never work in a casino where I’m surveillance
director.”
I wanted to respond, “How much would you
like to bet?” but instead asked the table games director to lend me another
employee, which she did.
Then during the seminar, while the self-exiled
surveillance director stood behind the blackjack table with his arms crossed
and a bored look on his face, his replacement did the blackjack pastpost and
fooled the dealer and everyone else in the room.
The surveillance director saw nothing,
but still insisted in rebuttal that the move would not work in a real blackjack
setting. What he ignored is that it worked over five thousand times over the
course of twenty-five years on real blackjack tables.
He and I got into it verbally throughout
the seminar and the result was that the more than one hundred employees in
attendance got very little out of the seminar.
So my point is: casino employees—especially
key employees--need to keep an open mind and leave their egos at home when attending
and participating in casino game protection seminars.
Link to Richard Marcus Game Protection Seminars
Link to Richard Marcus Game Protection Seminars
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