Can we believe any of these "Advantage Play Experts" out there?

The short answer is yes...but that answer is very short, because as far as I'm concerned, there is only one real Advantage Play expert out there, and his name is Eliot Jacobson.

The real AP expert!

This self-professed ex-mediocre advantage player is quite more than mediocre when it comes to analyzing advantage play methods and techniques, both for prospective players and casinos looking for advice on how to make their gaming tables less vulnerable to advantage play. Jacobson has for many years thoroughly examined everything advantage play from simple card-counting to Phil Ivey's monster edge-sorting baccarat scam.

He has written it all in a superb book called "Advanced Advantage Play."

Although I have some differences of opinion with him, one of such being Jacobson's assertion that Phil Ivey's edge-sorting tactics amount to advantage play and not cheating (for me edge-sorting is as much cheating as any other cheat move if the dealers' procedural methods are altered in any way by the player to gain an edge), I have the utmost respect for Eliot Jacobson for his truly in-depth and accurate analysis of anything advantage-play related that comes across his desk--even if his videos are interrupted by an occasional invited guest--mainly his dog!

Woman Casino Cheat gets a year in jail for colluding with Blackjack Dealer in Chip-dumping scheme

More Casino Cheating

It happened at the Mohegan Sun in Connecticut, a hotbed of all forms of casino cheating, some with the help of crooked dealers, others by casino cheats acting by themselves. This one included a crooked dealer, who simply dumped excess chips on his female cohort's winning hands.

They worked the blackjack scam on several occasions--and made a hefty $78,000 profit from the casino. It is not surprising that such a low-level and amateurish scam could make so much money at the Mohegan Sun. Scams like this have been successfully pulled off there time and again.

Thirty-eight year-old Marlene Rivera, who suffered from substance abuse, allegedly convinced her dealer friend Roy Mariano to perpetrate the blackjack cheating episodes. Mariano told investigators that he agreed to participate because he was upset that his working hours at the casino had been reduced. However, he has pleaded not guilty to the crime and is awaiting trial.

Rivera, on the other hand, pleaded guilty to first degree larceny and could have been sentenced to three years in prison. She told the court that she has been undergoing counseling to help with her substance abuse problems.

My take: It amazes me that it doesn't amaze me how these ridiculous scams net so much money before being caught.

Trio of Dice-Sliders Cheat Louisiana Casino for $56,000. One arrested, Two on the lam.

One die doesn't tumble or hit the back wall

Dice-Sliding Casino Cheat Scams are getting more and more popular these days, and I have trouble understanding why casinos are having so much trouble stopping them.

A trio of Filipinos, Allan Arana, Lim R. Tan and Jaime Iglesias, hit the Baton Rouge casino on August 9th. Thirty-five year old Arana was the dice-slider while his two partners were the big betters. After hitting the Louisiana casino, Arana was arrested in a Natchez, Mississippi casino after being caught dice-sliding again. He was shortly released by Mississippi gaming authorities and then headed directly to the New Orleans airport, probably to get the first plane back to the Philippines.

It is not clear if Tan and Iglesias were with Arana at the Mississippi casino. Arrest warrants have been
issued for both.

Dice-Sliding is simply sliding the dice instead of rolling them. In that fashion they don't tumble so the shooter sets up one or both dice in order to attain the winning numbers on various bets. Usually one or more craps players create lively conversation with the dealers and other diversions to get their attention away from the dice-slider, who then slides at least one of the dice instead of rolling it.  A good slider can imitate a legitimate tumble of the dice but the one thing he cannot do is "imitate" both dice from hitting the back wall and tumbling, which all but nullifies the set-up position of one or two dice.

And that's all casinos have to do to stamp out dice-sliding. Just make sure the dice tumble and hit the back wall!

Genting Casino Scotland investigating $250,000 Baccarat Cheat Scam

Another Genting Baccarat Cheat Scam

Funny thing, Genting Group which operates several casinos in the UK and Asia, has again been victimized by what its senior executives say is another baccarat cheat scam. The funny thing is that Genting Group is the owner of Crockford's casino in London, the gaming establishment that brought the whole Phil Ivey baccarat edge-sorting cheat scam to light back in 2012. Ivey was accused of cheating Crockfords out of $12 million.

In this latest case, Genting Group says that a cheating gang hit its Glasgow casino's baccarat tables several times over a four month period and beat them for a cool quarter million. Now details of how the alleged scam was carried out, but it appears to involve distracting tactics and maybe even inside dealer-collusion enabling the cheats to identify the value of the cards before they were dealt.

No mention of edge-sorting has been made. When I get more info on this I will pass it along.

Does demanding to see called poker hands at showdown give unfair advantage to some poker players?

Secrets in the muck?

All poker players have been annoyed at one time or another when other players demand to see their hands after a call when they are thrown into the muck. The accepted explanation for this is that it helps to identify collusion at the table.

But does it? And does it somehow favor certain players over others?

Here's a pretty good article on the subject.

My North Korean Poker-Hacking Claims Backed up by other News Articles

Online Poker Hacking for Nukes?

Back in mid-May I wrote an article about my suspicions that Kim Jong Un, the nuclear-bluffing North Korean dictator, may not at all be a bluffer when it comes to hacking online poker sites. My reasoning, of course, was that hacking online poker games was another profitable source of income to finance the North Korean nuclear weapons program.

Now serveral other news articles about Kim's poker-hacking program, as I shall call it, are surfacing online. And I highly doubt that any of these articles contain fake news. They're coming from official South Korean security agencies.

Here's one article about Kim Jong Un hacking online poker. Have a read and let me know what you think.

Guy REALLY gets cheated out of $100,000 casino slot machine jackpot!

Sugar Daddy got screwed...

Imagine this situation: You're with your girlfriend/boyfriend having a great time at a casino playing a slot machine with a progressive jackpot. You're the one gambling because the money being pumped into the machine at fifty bucks a pop is coming off your casino slot player's card. So while the machine is registering the monies off your card, you're smooching with your companion and you say to him/her, "You go ahead and press the button to bring me good luck." He/she presses the button and...WHAM! Bells start ringing and the slot machine screen goes berserk!

by this Russian hottie

YOU WON! A HUNDRED GRAND!

You got back all the money you lost at slot machines your entire life and then some!

Then suddenly your companion goes running off to alert casino personnel to the your win, crying hysterically out loud,"I won! I won!"

At first you don't think much of the fact that he/she said "I won!" and not "We won!" You think that he/she was simply overwhelmed by the moment, and of course you, not he/she/, would be receiving the big hundred-grand check from the casino.

WRONG!

He/she gets the check because he/she is the person who actually pressed the button on the machine. Casino law states that the person who presses the button or pulls the arm of a slot machine is the rightful winner of the jackpot, regardless of who puts the money in the machine before the button is pressed or the arm is pulled.

So if you have a bitch/asshole companion who is a greedy son of a bitch/asshole who doesn't want to give you the jackpot or at least split it with you, you're shit out of luck.

Imagine that!

Well, you might have guessed that since I'm writing this, the event depicted here actually did happen.

Yes, it did.

In April of this year at the Seminole Hard Rock casino in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 66-year-old Jan Flato was sitting at the slot machine with his hot young Russian girlfriend, Marina Medvedeva (who is married to a guy whose last name is Navarro), when he inserted his player's card into the machine and told her to press the button for good luck.

She did, and the reels came up $100,000!

She claimed the jackpot, gave him jack shit, after which he appeared to threaten her in text messages and she played the nice innocent little girl, as if she wasn't out hustling the guy in the first place.

Well, what would you do if this happened to you?

I know what I would do!

Two more Blackjack Cheats come clean in New Year's Eve $10,000 Casino Scam at Dakota Sioux Casino in south Dakota

Dakota Sioux Casino

It was New Year's Eve 2015, a prime night of activity for casino cheats, but this time the cheats hooked up with dealers and floorpeople and scammed this tribal casino out of ten grand. The latest pair to fall in the casino caper were a pit boss and a dealer.

Lito Banbilla Bolocon, the pit boss, has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit theft in a gaming establishment on tribal lands. Now he faces five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Although he probably will receive lots less prison time and a much smaller fine, he has blown his entire career for what was probably a few thousand bucks.

Same for blackjack dealer Fern Fraya Gill, who helped Bolocon devise a plan to bring in three player/agents to whom they could dump off the money at the blackjack table. She pleaded guilty to the same charge and faces the same punishment and the same ending to her casino career.

Jeremy Kris Brown, another blackjack dealer in on the scam, pleaded guilty last May, and Jordon Anthony Rondell, the "big player,"...you guessed it....also pleaded guilty to the same charge.

I don't have the details of exactly how the dealers passed the money off to their cohort players, but I imagine it was something simple such as not taking losers, paying pushes and overpaying winners.

Bolocon's job was surely to try to protect the scam, making sure no other casino employees caught on to it.

Well, somebody did, and the bottom line is a lot of people went down big-time for such a little amount of money.

Wynn Macau drops $10 Million on its Baccarat tables in one month. Suspicions of Cheating or Casino Impropriety?

Kosher or not Kosher $10 million loss?

Back in April, Steve Wynn's multi-billion dollar prized possession casino Wynn Macau claimed it lost $10 million on its baccarat tables. Wynn himself claimed it was the "most unique statistical anomaly in my fifty years doing this."

Even so, when it comes to the equation containing Asians plus Macau plus baccarat, eyebrows have to get raised--especially mine--and those of several emailers asking me what I think of the situation.

Well, Wynn claims that gambling junkets run by Suncity Group, one of the Pacific Rim's biggest junket operators, are what lowered the boom on Wynn's casino during the entire month of April. He said that swings in baccarat, both the good and ugly--and even insane--can be just that. And they can be.

But for an entire month and such a huge loss, that's something else.

Wynn told the press that "the bottom fell out and all the players won millions of dollars."

But what he didn't mention is that there are hundreds of super-high-rolling Asian baccarat players who can win or lose hundreds of thousands if not millions on any given night inside his casino playing baccarat EVERY night.

Which is what makes this $10 million loss so hard to swallow if it's real and unbelievable if it's not.

Robert Hannum, a professor of risk and gaming at the University of Denver, said, "The odds (of such a loss) are astronomically high," and added, "Of course black swans do occur and some might say anything can happen in the casino business."

One reason for skepticism is that this loss contributed to a significant decrease in the stock value of Wynn Resorts. In fact, shares lost 8% over a two-day period.

That is big!

My take: Well, this kind of stuff is outside my bailiwick, but I will go back to a modified version of that equation I spoke of earlier: Asians plus Macau plus baccarat=something not Kosher somewhere.

Cheating Casino Dealer on the run in Louisiana

Scene of Casino-Cheat Crime

LaCharle LeWayne Scott, a dealer at the Eldorado casino in Shreveport, Louisiana, was peeking at the top card of her deck (I am not sure which game it was but due to the amount I assume it was blackjack), and either giving or not giving that card to her two casino-cheating cohorts, identified as brothers Hilton and Deaudra Hart. I am not sure of the sex of the dealer, but he or she has been charged of repeating this offense at least 25 times for a total cheating profit to the Hart Brothers of $23,000.

So this was quite a sizeable casino scam for a Shreveport, Louisiana casino.

Peeking at the top card by a dealers reeks of a poker scam or blackjack scam, where the dealer evaluates whether or not that top card will help or hurt her partners.

Warrants were issued for all three participants, and the Hart Brothers duly turned themselves in, with bail being set for $5,000 each.

The dealer, however, is on the run...and I'm betting she'll be caught soon...most likely in another casino gambling with her illicit casino gains.

This is another example of the huge increase in dealer-participation casino-cheat scams that have gripped US casinos the past few years.