Dublin Casino Owner Goes on Vacation While Two Trusted Employees Rip Off His Casino

Well, the owner/boss thought his casino was in good hands during his absence on a pleasure trip. According to this article, he was not quite in the good hands he'd thought he was!

According to the Irish Sun, two casino managers, Tayab Kourtische and Jagjeet Singh, got busy cheating the Dublin Casino's electronic roulette and "fruit" machines out of 18,000 euros. They were seen on CCTV setting up the machines for the kill. They did, however, avoid jail time.

This included tricking the roulette table by removing the glass cover and placing a ball on a number before playing the machine.

This fooled it into thinking the ball already inserted was a win and treated it as a win.

Garda Brian McCormack told prosecutor Antonia Boyle the method the men used to steal from the fruit machine involved a third person who is not yet before the court.

This person loaded a large number of €50 notes into the machine before pressing a “pay out” button.

This then generated a ticket allowing the person to cash it in to redeem the money they had just put into the machines.

CCTV FOOTAGE

Kourtishe is then captured on CCTV footage, unlocking the machine, using a key he had stolen from the office and withdrawing all the cash the third person had just put into the machine.

Singh then came along and cleared all the transactions on the machine, which effectively wiped the statistics and removed all records of the input of the €50 notes into it.

Kourtishe and Singh, both of Tallaght, Dublin, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to sample charges of theft from Expo Casino in The Square, Tallaght, in September 2017.

Neither man has previous convictions and both had money in court to make full recompense.

Gda McCormack said that Kourtishe had stolen €8,895 from the fruit machines and by manipulating the roulette table, while Singh stole a total of €8,988 from the fruit machines.

Judge Pauline Codd noted that Singh was manager of the casino and stole the cash while the owner of the casino was on a month’s leave.

'BREACH OF TRUST'

She accepted that he has made full restitution and had a gambling addiction at the time but noted that his behaviour represented a “breach of trust”.

Judge Codd accepted from various testimonials before the court that the offences were “out of character” for Singh and that he has since “sought to address his gambling addiction”.

Judge Codd said that Kourtishe had taken keys from the office which enabled him to steal from the fruit machine.

She said he was “culpable in terms of his breach of trust” but again acknowledged that he has made full recompense for the theft.

Both men were sentenced to two and half years in prison which were suspended in full on strict conditions.

Gda McComack said the owner of the casino immediately identified both Kourtishe and Singh as suspects through CCTV footage, once the thefts were discovered.

IMMEDIATE ADMISSIONS

Both men made immediate admissions when their boss questioned them about it and signed a note to say they had stolen the cash.

They also returned some of the cash they had stolen.

Gda McCormack acknowledged that both men had provided him with bank drafts to cover the full amount of money they had stolen but he has had difficulty in contacting the owner of the casino as he has since moved to Spain.

There was also no victim impact statement prepared for the case.

Kieran Kelly BL, defending Kourtishe, asked the court to take into account his client’s pleas of guilty and co-operation with the garda investigation.

He said his client, who is originally from Algeria, felt a compulsion to look after his mother who was elderly and ill, which was what motivated him to steal the cash.

“He knows now that he cannot give to others what he does not legitimately have himself,” Mr Kelly said.

“He was well-motivated, if misguided, in his intentions and hopes to go back to the person he always was,” counsel submitted.

Another Dealer/Agent Baccarat Scam in Australia

 Again at the Star Casino in Australia, this one for what seems to be at least $200,000, although the amount is not clear in the reports I have read. Baccarat scam involving casino employees have been on the rise in Australia, but at least this time Star surveillance inspectors seem to have caught this one quickly as it was happening, but I don't how many cheating sessions went on before the last one. Judging by hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and chips seized by police during subsequent raids on the two suspects' homes, one a baccarat dealer, the other a player, the cheat scam survived a few sessions before the bust.

This article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Two men, including a former employee, have been charged over their alleged involvement in a betting scam at Sydney's Star casino that reaped thousands of dollars, including casino chips valued at nearly $170,000.

Earlier this month, the organised crime squad’s casino and racing investigation unit commenced an investigation under Strike Force Antree following reports two men were involved in corrupt betting during a game of baccarat.

Police will allege that, in a private member's gaming suite at the casino, former employee Hieu Duc Lam was involved in dealing cards during three games of baccarat that Ziyi Liu played. It is alleged the two men communicated with each other in order to win.

Following inquiries, police arrested Mr Liu, 27, at a casino car park in Sydney and a Mr Lam, 35, at a home at Canley Heights in Sydney's west, about 6.20pm on September 9.

A search warrant was executed at the Canley Heights home, where officers allegedly seized more than $270,000 in cash, $2000 in US currency and electronic storage devices.

A second search warrant was executed at a unit at Ryde, where investigators allegedly seized more than $300,000 cash and casino chips valued at $169,000.

Mr Liu was taken to Day Street police station and charged with three counts of dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception and participating in a criminal group contributing to criminal activity.

He appeared at the Downing Centre Local Court on Wednesday, where strict conditional bail is to continue. The matter will be before the same court on November 11.

Mr Lam was taken to Fairfield police station and also charged with three counts of dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception and participating in a criminal group contributing to criminal activity.

He appeared at Liverpool Local Court on Wednesday, where the matter was adjourned to Downing Centre Local Court for November 11.

Further charges are expected to be laid against the men.

"These types of things were picked up fairly quickly with the systems and processes at the casino and the police investigated that, and gathered the evidence to put these men before the court," organised crime squad’s casino and racing investigation unit Detective acting Inspector John Cosgrove said.

"In general terms, there is a lot of cameras, you are under constant video surveillance down there and your actions and your movements are being continually monitored."

A Star spokesperson said: "The Star’s internal processes identified an issue and law enforcement was subsequently engaged. The casino regulator was also informed. We have no further comment."

Investigations are continuing.

Crown Casino in Melbourne bungles air-tight Cheating-Case against dealer and cohort playing Baccarat

The case was already three years old. Thirty-seven-year-old baccarat dealer Michael Hu had allegedly teamed up with a female baccarat player Yixuan Cui to cheat Hu's employer, Crown Casino, out of a cool four hundred grand. Casino investigators became aware of the allegedly cheating, which had Hu supplying winning hands to Cui, who was making large bets at the baccarat table. A cheating technique known as false-shuffling was performed by Hu, whereby he knew the order of the cards coming out of the card shoe in advance and protected that sequence by making believe to shuffle the cards.

The pair were seized and taken to the casino's security room, where both alleged cheats confessed. The only problem was that their confessions were cajoled from them by overeager and over-aggressive security interrogators who did everything from telling them they would help them with the police if they gave confessions because they were ex-cops themselves who had connections within the police department to downright threatening them if they didn't confess.

Threats of long prison sentences, allegedly on tape, and other types of threats were made against the pair, whose lawyer now says not only must the case be dropped but also the defendants are entitled to $250,000 in damages, which equals the sum of cash and chips that were seized from their apartments, their winnings from the casino. 

One Crown Casino surveillance investigator named Manuel Lyberis reportedly told the pair, "We're just trying to help you, mates. It's like a get-out-of-jail card, and if you don't take it now, you won't get another opportunity. Then the casino's investigations manager, Jason McHutchinson, told them, "I will cop the full extent of the law on you if you don't confess.

Well, both Mr. Lyberis and Mr. McHutchinson really overplayed Crown Casino's hand. They had a real tight case against the alleged cheats, including the two hundred grand in cash and fifty grand in Crown Casino chips they seized from the raided Melbourne apartments where the suspects lived. 

All in all, it looks like Hu and Cui are gonna be able to get back their cash and have no criminal record from the case.

My take: Shame on the Crown Casino security and surveillance departments.

Poker Player Star's Safe Ripped-Off Of a Cool Million by Father's ex-Girlfriend

Star Poker Player Antonio Esfandiari, winner of the $1 million buy-in Big One for One Drop Tournament in 2012 for more than $18 million, was the victim of a million-dollar pot himself, but not a poker pot. A forty-six-year-old woman by the name of Svitlana Silva, whose glittery last name fits quite nicely into her first name, which perhaps gave the cops a clue to the crime, and who was also the on and off girlfriend of Esfandiari's father, Bejan, made off with a million in cash, casino poker chips and tournament gold bracelets (including the Big One bracelet), which she then proceeded to blow and win back in several high-stakes Las Vegas poker games, most of them private. 

She allegedly knew or figured out the code for the safe, which contained the same numbers of Bejan's cellphone password, which she did know. But instead of getting out of dodge with the loot, or should I say "getting out of Sin City," she instead hung around town and used the cash and chips to buy into huge-stakes poker games, losing all the cash quite quickly, then using the stolen chips, most of them worth $25 grand each, to win back the money she lost. The problem was that another player received those chips upon cashing out.

Using those very high denomination chips is what did her in. Knowing that casinos keep track of their large denomination chips, she had to get those chips back from that player so they would not show up again in any casino and lead the cops to her. She contacted the man who had them, telling him that the chips were marked in casinos' computers and could be confiscated when presented again for use or cashout if they're reported stolen. 

Thus she offered to buy them back. But before she could, Las Vegas police caught up with her after learning of her huge cash and chip-buy-ins and coupling that with the fact she had lived in Estandiari's Las Vegas apartment with him and his father and still had access to it.

This bizarre incident brings back memories of the Bellagio "Biker Bandit" (Tony Carleo), who held-up the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas back in 2010 and escaped with a million dollars in similar $25,000 chips. He, too, knew that casinos kept track of these chips, so he figured out a way to get rid of them. Unfortunately for the Biker Bandit, his idea was even worse than Silva's.

He put an ad on the Two Plus Two poker forum offering to sell them at a huge discount.

Need I say more?

New False Shuffle or Back-End Baccarat Shoe Scam at Livermore, California Casino--This one for $4 Million!

That blows my mind! Should blow yours too.

Same ol' same ol'--but a $4 million scam at a Central California Casino? I would think that's a bit much.

According to reports, a dealer/player/ cheat-team who are also wife/husband, in that order, cheated the Parkwest Casino 580 out of four million bucks by what seems to be either/or a false shuffle baccarat scam/peek and memorize the cards at the back of the shoe scam, or both. This is very hard to believe, and even though the cheat-team allegedly operated for two years, I cannot imagine them getting that kind of money out of that casino and getting away with it for so long. From the descriptions, I am not sure of the actual mechanics of the scam but it must involve the tricks I mentioned above.

Khan "Tina" Tran and Eric Nguyen, the happily or desperately married couple, have been arrested on various felony charges.

Haven't we all heard the last name "Nguyen" in many big-time insider-cheat baccarat scams before? 

Convicted Table Games Card-Switcher Gets 3 years Probation

Card-Switcher Sentenced in Canada

Khai Zhou card-switched his way to $6,000 profit on several occasions of play at the Fallsview Casino Resort during May 2019. The article of the story does not many details besides saying he played two spots at the poker tables, so I take that to mean he was most likely playing carnival derivative poker games. There is no mention of accomplices nor is there mention of how Fallsview casino staff caught on to the scam.

In addition to the 3 years' probation, Zhou agreed to place himself on the voluntary Ontario Exclusion List for the same 3 years.

It relatively rare to see active card-switchers cheating in North American casinos, especially in the US where penalties are much more severe.

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Let Dealers Keep Their Own Tokes and You Get Burned!

Happens every time!

I see that in this struggling re-opening phase, some casinos have been experimenting with the ultra-dangerous policy of letting dealers go into business for themselves! That is what letting them keep their own tokes boils down to. So shelve the flasks and forget the experiment...FAST!

This article will piss a lot of people off, but you need to hear this because I know it firsthand.

Where I start this article doesn't matter. There are soooooo many problems with letting dealers keep their own tokes. That said, let's begin with its very clear-cut history.

For those of you as old as me, you may remember the grand hoopla this issue caused in the late '70s and early '80s. Vegas dealers were still in their heyday as far as making money via tokes was concerned, and many Vegas casinos, both Downtown and on the Strip, still allowed dealers to keep their own tokes. What happened was the IRS decided to crack down on it, in the knowledge that hundreds of dealers working at top Strip casinos were making a quarter-million and up a year...and becoming tax evaders along the way. Then panic swept through the industry when dealers fiercely objected and threatened to form unions and even picketed in front of casinos in protest to the IRS taxing their tokes. Dealers have tried to unionize in Vegas many times but never had their attempts been as frenzied as that one forty years ago...over tokes.

Recently, dealers at Caesars Palace tried to unionize, so let's go back and take a look at Caesars' history with dealers' tokes, some of which I was indirectly involved with.

There is a famous Caesars incident that some of us old-timers remember. In the mid-'70s, Las Vegas legend Fletcher Jones, then the country's number-one automobile dealer and a big Vegas gambler whose son married ex-Vegas mayor Jan Jones, had a huge run at the Caesars craps tables. He won several hundred thousand, maybe more, and when he heard that the craps dealers were working for themselves, he gifted each one working his hot table with a brand new Corvette. This sparked an outrage from the rest of Caesars' dealers who may have gone home with just a hundred bucks that night.

The same scene often played out with Asian high rollers in the baccarat pit. Some of them who made multi-million dollar scores occasionally dropped a half-million on the dealers. In fact, most of you probably don't know this, but back in the day Caesars baccarat dealers had to buy their jobs, plus they had to have the "juice" (be in good favor with someone powerful) to be a qualified Caesars-Palace-Baccarat-Job-Buyer. Those baccarat jobs once sold for up to fifty grand and I don't know if there was some kind of longevity guarantee or not.

This went on from the time Caesars opened until the early '80s. And it did not sit well at all with the rest of Caesars' dealer population. To say there was resentment goes without saying. But the proof in the pudding was a huge chip stealing/cashing scam pulled off by a group of Caesars dealers and pit supervisors shortly after the Fletcher Jones incident.

Enter Richard Marcus.

Those of you who read my memoir "American Roulette" know how much I loved Caesars Palace and might even remember that at the end of the book, I wrote, "When it's all said and done, I hope to be buried somewhere on the property of Caesars Palace Las Vegas."

Now, I bet you can imagine why I said that. Not because I loved the restaurants and the Julius Caesar statues and fountains...not on your life!

I loved the dealers! You see, I knew their situation there. The ones working the high-action pits were juiced into their jobs by their payments and connections, thus they had control of their pits. They were the supervisors who supervised the supervisors. They made five times more than their supervisors (at least) so they didn't have to tell them jack shit about what was happening on the tables and didn't care what the supervisors knew or thought anyway.

So how did my cheat-buddies and I take advantage of this and cheat Caesars out of a few million over that heyday decade? You guessed it! By toking the dealers working for themselves.

We would go up to their $100 minimum blackjack tables, bet three $100 black chips, then upon winning the bet and being paid three black chips, we'd switch out the original bet and replace it with two $5,000 chocolate chips with a black on top and claim to the dealers that they paid the bet wrong, of course with four or five chocolate chips sitting on the table as back up.

And as the claim went down, so did a black-chip (or two) toke go down on the table. So each move netted $9,800 minus toke. Did this little-big bet-switch ever fail? Sure...of course...on the 152nd attempt.

You think I'm full of crap...think again!

And now get this...the vast majority of those 151 straight times getting paid over a six month period at Caesars Palace, the dealers didn't even mention his/her "mistake" to a supervisor. Simply because they made lots more money than them.

Would this scam have worked so well had the dealers not been working for their own tokes? I doubt it.

Next, you have the problem of high rollers getting too friendly with dealers whom they've been toking, maybe knowing the dealers are working for themselves. This can lead to collusion scams between those players and dealers. Say a high roller goes bad and he's been chummy with the dealer he's tipping big. This makes it easier for that player to approach the dealer to turn against the casino. Do the big inside baccarat scams ring a bell?

Okay, forget me and the rest of the cheats. The real dangers of this policy are internal. You let dealers keep their tokes, lots of them will be making more than their supervisors. That is a BIG NO-NO. How do you think supervisors, who'd been dealers for many years prior and worked themselves up to better jobs with better pay, would feel when their "underlings" are making more than them? You could end up with supervisors stealing with or without other disgruntled dealers' help.

Steve Wynn is well aware of this problem. Even without dealers working for themselves, he had dealers making more money at the Wynn Las Vegas than his supervisors and pit managers were. His solution was to force dealers to yield a percentage of their tokes to the supervisors, which, in my opinion, is not a great idea either. You just need to have your supervisors making more than the dealers in ANY case. You cannot have job promotions bringing less money to those climbing ranks. If the dealers are making that much, then so is the casino, so you just have to pay the supervisors more or they will lose faith in the company. In virtually all cases, just making sure that dealers pool their tokes will avoid this problem.

What about the internal problems that have nothing to do with cheating and stealing? What about the age-old problem of dealers hustling tokes? How do you assign the tables when dealers are working for themselves? Sure, you say, "Just rotate them from low to high minimum games and from pit to pit. But it just doesn't work. You get a super high-rolling "George" on a $15 game who wins a hundred grand and tokes the dealer ten or twenty grand. Yes, it could happen. And when it does, the other dealers get upset again; you have the resentment again, and you're back with the same problem. And of course, let's not forget the pretty-women dealers making the most money on tokes and the jealousy and resentment that is going to cause among both sexes dealing.

Now, I get it that some of you trying this in the Covid Era might be seeing some favorable results for your casinos, such as dealers encouraging more action and speeding up the games, having more incentive, etc., etc., but it will not last. And the speeding-up of the games is most likely temporary and due to fewer players and bets at the tables.

Some casino areas have reportedly had previous success with it, such as New Hampshire, but New Hampshire is not Las Vegas. Dealer attitudes and other elements are much different.

Best is to dump the dealers-keep-their-tips policy now before you really see what I mean.

Look, I can go on and on about this. But I shouldn't have to. Casino history has already proved it. The policy has never worked and it never will.

So I finish the article the same way I started it:

You adopt the dealers-keep-their-own-tokes policy...you burn!

Should Las Vegas sell Blackjack Short?

Easy Pickings?

This week I was on a Scientific Games Webinar panel for a debate on game protection in the new Covid-19 casino era. SG's Roger Snow, the host, asked the question if the liberalization of Vegas blackjack rules, mainly bringing back en masse the 3 to 2 blackjack payoff, was an invitation of a "feeding-frenzy" to hungry card counters and advantage-play sharks smelling blood in the currently bleeding Las Vegas casinos.

Benny B-Man Mancino, the VP of Hard Rock Cincinnati and host of the B in the Know Internet show, answered unequivocally that casinos in Las Vegas more or less have "no choice but to put the place on sale." What he was referring to is that in this era of reduced casinos where operators have to do everything possible to draw clientele, offering blackjack games with a lower house percentage, in spite of the counters and advantage players, is the only way to go in these trying times.

Let's take a more in-depth look at the B-Man's analysis of the current situation.

One of the literally hundreds of debates going on about what Las Vegas casinos should and shouldn't do during the re-opening period has been how to deal with what is seen as possible spiked advantage-play attacks on the casinos due to certain reopening factors that many game protection people believe will lead to just that. Before we go on, let me mention that this argument is more relevant to Las Vegas casinos than any others in the US since Las Vegas finds itself in a unique position in which it has hundreds of competing casinos, three dozen or so that rely on the travel industry, mainly gamblers arriving by air.

Some facets of the liberalization/game protection debate are centered around three main issues: 1) Surveillance staffs will be preoccupied monitoring Covid-19 protocols and therefore won't have sufficient time for adequate game protection operations and coverage; 2) Table game staffs will be reduced and also preoccupied with protocol and customer service; 3) The players per table rules will increase earning opportunites for counters and advantage-players as they will see lots more hands per shoe than when tables are fully-occupied in normal times.

As I am hearing, casinos are reacting to this at different extremes. Some are not taking any special measures to avoid a possible AP attack while others are downright paranoid. I have heard that some casinos just aren't worried about this as it is not nearly as important as getting the players back at the tables, no matter who they may be, albeit casinos have the ability to identify card counters and APs in spite of the masks to some extent, including requiring people entering the casinos to lift their masks for a surveillance ID check.

I am also seeing reports that some casinos (not sure to what extent this is happening in Vegas) are so paranoid that they have reduced bet spreads to 1 to 3 units on their higher-limit blackjack games. I have even heard that at least one casino actually has a table minimum of $100 and table maximum of $300. Now that is ridiculous! Imagine a high roller flying-in who bets $200 on his first hand of blackjack and then just wants to let it ride one time but is told he can't. I think that would evoke a lot of "adios-amigos." And I would imagine that the dealers would not be specifically pointing out this bet-spread reduction to high rollers as they arrive at the tables, because most would probably just get up and say adios right there.

So which route should Vegas take here? Personally, I think the B-Man has the right idea. If you gotta rent out the joint cheap for a few months or even a year to help keep a steady flow of blackjack action, do so. The risk of not doing so might have ramifications that we don't even anticipate. Who knows, if blackjack sits more idly than it should for a year, could that reality do long-term damage to the game's popularity? I don't know...just something to think about. And another reality to take into consideration: as the threat of card counting and advantage players perceived by casinos has always been greater than necessary, that perception is exaggerated more than necessary now, which is nothing more than the same as it's always been. So again, no need to overreact to the counting/AP threat now...unless we see some dramatic negative results.

The solution to this Vegas game protection issue just might be uniformity. If all casinos can somehow come up with more or less the same adjusted or remain-the-same blackjack rules, the problem would most likely solve itself.

But in this period of casino confusion, that might be too much to ask.

Covid 19 Raising the Stakes in Online Poker Cheating!

Ghosting in Online Poker

We may have another epidemic on the loose. This one in the online poker world. Of course we all knew that the epidemic would give rise to online-poker play for the obvious reasons, but at least some people may be surprised that the increase in online poker cheating is no doubt keeping pace. I am not one of those people.

The recent big case of online cheating is the Daniel "Jungleman" Cates case, in which Cates, a highly-regarded pro, cheated multi-millionaire recreational player Bill Perkins out of what is reported to be hundreds of thousands of dollars by "ghosting" the games. Ghosting is when a player in a big-hand situation is replaced by another player of higher-caliber talent to take over the playing of the hand. The term comes from ghostwriting books. There has also been talk of Cates having information on Perkins' hole cards, which can be obtained via hacking and with the help of designers of the application software.

Also murkily involved in this cheating scam is Dan Bilzerian, the hedonist actor/poker player who has been involved in lots of online and off-line murky and sometimes violent scandals. This scam seems to mirror the Mike Postle live poker scam of a few months ago, where Postle allegedly used streaming at Stones Casino in California to get the value of his opponents' hole cards. In any event, there are thousands of online poker scams rearing their ugly heads since brick and mortar poker got sidetracked by the virus.

How do I know this? Well, first off, I know a thing or two about online poker cheating. Back in 2006, I wrote a book about poker cheating, both online and off, called "Dirty Poker." In the book, and on television with famed Las Vegas investigative journalist George Knapp, I boldly stated that online poker would be infested by cheating scandals, mostly by way of hacking, where the cheats would obtain information on their opponents' hole cards among other things.

Both Knapp and I took a tremendous amount of heat from the poker community at the time, many calling me a full-of-shit asshole and much worse. But, lo and behold, the biggest online poker scandal of all-time engineered by Russ Hamilton (who also cheated his way to the 1994 World Series of Poker Main Event Championship) that came to light in 2008 showed that maybe I wasn't so full of shit after all. Tens of millions of dollars were taken from legitimate players in exactly the same way I'd predicted it would. You can see my interviews with Knapp on my website richardmarcusbooks.com.

But my knowledge of the current rise in online poker cheating has nothing to do with what I wrote and said in the past. I have direct information on it. You see, believe it or not, I have been making a bit of money these days despite my casino game protection training career being on indefinite hold. Since early April, I have received eight (count 'em) requests to monitor private online poker games in which a player or players were suspected of cheating. All of these games were by private invite and played on mobile apps which one of the players, or a close contact of one of the players, designed and created the platforms. Even though I am by no means an online poker cheating expert, I know cheating when I see it!

In each of these eight cases, I was linked to these private online games, some of which were formed by executives of the same companies, industries and even strip clubs. So I pulled up a chair in front of my laptop, popped open a beer and a bag of chips, and watched the action. As the suspected cheating players were identified to me beforehand, it was quite easy to offer an opinion as to whether or not they actually were cheating by watching their play. In six of the eight cases, I was sure the suspects were guilty. In the other two cases, I thought the accusers were overzealous in wanting to blame someone or something for their losing streaks and the seemingly unrealistic winning streaks of their targets.

One funny if not unusual incident arose from a private-app game played by a group of well-to-do executives who frequented the same Chicago strip club. I was contacted by one of the players who copied me all the emails between the players in the game discussing their suspicions of the one player they all suspected of cheating because he was on a two-month winning streak and was also the person who'd introduced them to the app and the platform.

Well, I watched ten two-hour stints of their game, focused on the suspect player for the first five sessions. I just couldn't see anything suggesting the accused was cheating. I was sure he had no information on the other players' hole cards. So I watched and watched and watched. Finally my attention, for no specific reason, was drawn to the other players. I focused in on each of them, one by one.

My findings: The guy who'd hired me was the one cheating! I sent him an email, copied to all the other players in the game, that, yes, there was cheating going on in the game, but it was not being done by the suspected cheat. Then I sent a private email to the guy who'd hired me and told him I thought he was the cheat...No, I didn't refund the money he'd paid me.

Neither he nor any of the others from the game ever responded to my emails.

So, what should you take from this? If you play in private online poker games by invite only...BEWARE!

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The Ups and Downs of being a Casino Game Protection Trainer

He always kept his cool!

Don't get me wrong about the downs! There's nothing I love more than getting a call from a casino asking me to come to their property and train their Tables Games or Surveillance Staff. The pay is excellent and if I didn't get those calls, I wouldn't have much to do with my professional life anymore. After all, spending the first 25 years of adulthood as a casino cheat doesn't exactly put together an eye-catching resume for most of the world's job markets.

The job itself is not easy, especially if you're in the latter stages of middle age or beyond! In my case, there's lots of international travel involved, and that alone takes a lot out of you. The actual training sessions pass quite quickly because they are never boring. However, at the end of the day you feel it because you've been on your feet talking for eight hours straight, even during lunch because attendees are always coming up to you asking questions and making comments, which is all good. And in cases where I train at one property for an entire week, the voice can go AWOL by the end of day 3 or beginning of day 4.

But I am not complaining!

Overall, my training sessions, both to individual casinos at their properties and to open multi-group casino seminars in major gaming areas, are quite rewarding experiences for me, and I would think as well to the grand majority of the attendees who participate. However, there are some frustrations, the biggest one being attendees who don't come to a seminar with an open mind. The first thing game protection training attendees need to have to come away with something valuable from a training session is an open mind and a willingness to believe the possibility of something seemingly impossible, even when it happens to them. I like to say to an audience, "If I were some guy you met in a bar and I told you the moves I pulled off in casinos, you would tell me to take a hike with some expletive at the end. That is understandable, but, unfortunately, some attendees take that same attitude at a training session.

Then I say, "But if what I am going to tell and show you over the next several hours is not reality, then I wouldn't be here standing in front of you, would I?" The point simply being that I would not have received a call from their casino department heads to come and train the casino in the first place. This usually gets most of the people who didn't come to the training with an open mind to open up their minds.

But not all.

However, I can deal with that and it's not frustrating. You cannot expect everyone to believe in new elements of training that contradict what they have already learned or experienced.

What does get my goat is when that disbelief is replaced by ignorance, over-aggressiveness and just plain resentment against me. Some people just don't accept learning game protection from an ex-cheat and have to vent that resentment by challenging me at every step and corner. Challenges are fine and I encourage them, but not when they get out of hand.

For example, at a European international event not long ago, I was doing a segment on daub card-marking, using 3-card poker as an example. So without asking the attendees which 3 cards would the card-markers be most interested in marking, I just got right into it telling them they would mark the Qs, Ks and As since they are the most important cards in the game. But as I started showing it, one attendee, actually a well-respected operations manager from a major European casino with 30 or 35 years experience, challenged me and said they might want to mark the 2s, 3s and 4s instead. At first I thought he was joking but he persisted to the point where he was disrupting the seminar. I kept asking him why would they mark the 2s, 3s and 4s instead of the three most important cards to the game. Then I thought maybe he didn't know the dealer qualifying rules. But he did know them and still persisted that the likelihood of marking the 2s, 3s and 4s was no different from that of marking the Qs, Ks and As, given only 3 ranks of cards would be marked.

Well, I lost my cool and let the ignorance of this person get to me. I argued with him until I was blue in the face and finally had to say lightheartedly, "OK, sir, you're right...."

After the seminar, another attendee who had witnessed my frustration approached me and said, "You know what? You don't have to prove anything to anyone. Everyone here paid a significant amount of money to attend your class. If someone wants to behave like that, just move on. Don't let it interfere with what you're trying to accomplish."

I explained to him how it bothered me so much because I really care about people learning and getting something out of my seminars. He just shook his head and said succinctly, "Sometimes you just can't give insight to those who wanna be blind."

And then he recounted a story about Steve Jobs, whom I think is one of the greatest human beings to ever step foot on earth. He told me that Jobs once said in an interview that when hecklers at his presentations would stand up and shout out something nasty about his products, like this or that iPhone sucks, he would just take pause for 10 seconds, look upward and take a deep breath, and then just go on about what he was saying about the product. He said that calmed him down and avoided confrontations.

I have since adopted the Steve Jobs method of dealing with onsite frustration and it has indeed helped me.

Thank you, Steve.

I would like to close with one incident that happened a few years back that is the epitome of not keeping an open mind. In one session, an elder attendee challenged me on a certain type of roulette cheat move. He said it could never be done on him or anyone else in his casino, and he took it to the wall and seemingly would have bet his life on it. Well, as fate would have it, not only could it be done on him and his casino, it WAS done on him IN his casino! Twice!

You see, while I was in the casino-cheating business for 25 years I kept records on every move I ever did, all thousands of them. I charted who the dealer was, who the floor supervisors were, if there was any heat, if surveillance was called or another pit notified, etc., etc. It just so happened I recognized this particular attendee as a dealer I had beaten with the same cheat move some years prior. He had very distinct physical characteristics. Of course his adamant refusal to accept reality pissed me off, but of course as well, I couldn't say that I had done the exact same move on him twice...for two reasons: 1) It would not be acceptable etiquette on my part; 2) He would have never believed me anyway!

That...is the frustration of game protection training. 

So if luck has it that I ever visit your casino to do some training, please keep an open mind!