Media-Peeker Poker Cheat is Convicted and Nets Three and half Years in Prison

This poker cheat will have lots of time to reflect

His name is Ali Tekintamgac. He was born in Turkey but now has German citizenship.

And he's just set a record for the longest prison term ever given to a poker cheat--3.5 years.

Tekintamgac is a champion. In 2010 he won more than $300,000 at the Spanish World Poker Tour Championship. But later that year he was refused entry at the Partouche Poker Tour main event after allegations of cheating began to surface.

The alleged cheating-tactic employed by Tekintamgac was using phony media members (or sometimes real ones) of supplying him with information about opponents hands during big poker tournaments. These media guys used their cameras to zoom-in on poker hands of players across the table from Tekintamgac, then signalled the poker cheat the value of their hole cards.

This was pretty well caught on video.

Apparently, there were a handful of accomplices involved in the poker-cheat plot and one of them flipped on Tekintamgac to testify against him.

My take: I have for more than a decade been talking, writing and blogging about the wide scale cheating in major poker tournaments across the world. As entry fields in these events keep on growing, the old favorable poker-tournament method of cheating, collusion and chip-dumping, is not as profitable as it once was, therefore, poker tournament cheats need to invent new creative methods like Tekintamgac has.

All in all, I am quite surprised by the severity of the sentence, even more so that it came out of Germany.

Please Marina Bay Sands Singapore..Say it ain't so!--AGAIN!

Marina Bay Sands Cheating Labyrinth

It has happened again! Just unbelievable but yet ANOTHER insider dealer casino-cheat scam has rocked the Singapore Marina Bay Sands.

I really cannot believe this. Just after I posted an article about a team stealing a loaded baccarat shoe right out of a card rack on the casino floor right in the baccarat room, another Marina Bay Sands dealer has pleaded guilty to stealing chips right off his table by stuffing them into his Bermuda shorts and then giving them to his accomplice to cash out.

And if that wasn't enough, he was also dumping more chips off to this same accomplice in the form of paying ties and losing bets on the baccarat table.

So, I have finally come up with a formula that could be copyrighted for the annals of baccarat cheating in Singapore.

It is: BACCARAT + SINGAPORE+ MARINA BAY SANDS + CROOKED DEALERS = CHEATING.

This time the cheating dealer, Jiang Kaiwen, told the judge he had felt slighted and unappreciated by his fellow casino workers and bosses, and that none of them backed him up when the casino's customers made fun of him. In fact, he claimed his peers took the side of the patrons abusing him.

Mr. Kaiwen and his casino-cheat cohort, Li Zhifan, decided to make the Marina Bay Sands casino pay--and pay they did! As much as $140,000 in a single month.

I have read that Marina Bay Sands surveillance department ran back the baccarat tapes when they were told by accountants doing an audit that the numbers were off.

Well. I'm not sure I believe that--but what I am sure of is that the Marina Bay Sands Casino is the biggest casino-cheats candy store in the entire world!