Michael Kaplan On: Casino Cheating Stories Of The Week

Despite recent appearances to the contrary, if you want to cheat a casino, you don’t have to do it with a dealer as your partner.

I wrote about a Chinese baccarat cheat who made a fortune beating the game by surreptitiously sliding key cards in and out of his sleeve.

Surveillance spotted him, casino security tackled him, the cheater literally ate his seven of hearts.

Bad finish for him. But I admire the guy’s do-or-die moxy.

Then there was the gang of roulette crooks who had a pack of cigarettes with a tiny computer inside it that tracked the wheel and accurately predicted where the ball would land. We think there are better ways to win at roulette that don’t involve any brushes with the law.

James Grosjean told me about a more hands-on gang of Greeks.

They planted tiny razorblades under their fingernails and marked the cards in single deck blackjack games (where players get to touch their cards, as they are dealt face down) at stunningly high speeds.

However, as implied above, over the last couple of weeks, there’s been a rash of dealers caught with hands inside casino coffers.

It’s for good reason that casinos are most concerned about cheating that happens from the inside. It’s harder to cheat at real money online casinos but it’s not impossible.

One greedy land-based dealer did not do herself any favors by going for the gold –and then some. It was reported last week that the woman flashed her cards to confederates.

That was nervy enough, and there are ways to do it without advertising the move to eyes in the sky that dot casino ceilings.

Then she got carried away. Shady dealer didn’t collect losing bets from her partners, which is tough to hide.

Even worse: She allowed them to clumsily jack-up winning wagers after play concluded.

Now the dealer might face 10 years in jail.

Maybe she should have dealt in a place where the game is gray market legal and there is no casino commission rallying to throw her behind bars.

Such was the loophole in Texas where a dealer in a poker game being held inside a social club there (ie a place where the game is not illegal but not sanctioned either) stands accused of driving aces to the top of the deck and divvying those valuable cards to confederates at the table.

Poker giant and friend of this column Shaun Deeb posted a video of the deception. He called it “disgusting.” The casino apparently called it a problem.

The dealer was fired, but he’ll face no jail time because there really was no law for him to break in Texas.

Nice one, cheater!

At a Chicago casino, the rolling suitcase served as a giveaway – it was loaded with cash and the player wheeling it out never lost.

In Pennsylvania a sneaky dealer did not confine his larceny to one game. At baccarat, he smoothly switched hands so that the players won.

In the game of Pai Gow Tiles, he falsely shuffled the plastic rectangles.

Over a two-month period, the dealer and his squad of players relieved the casino of $170,000. Then three of them were arrested at a gaming table.

One who never got caught is a magician turned cheater with the obviously phony-baloney name of Dustin Marks.

But he exercised caution in general and particularly knew how to keep from getting his ass kicked by avoiding the kinds of places where casino bosses took matters into their own hands, a la backroom thugs in the movie Casino – which is based on a true story if you weren’t aware.

Notorious for such bone-busting retribution was downtown Las Vegas’s Binion’s Horseshoe in the 1980s. Dustin was recruited to participate in a gambit there.

The player would be betting $5,000 a hand, Marks would be slipped into a dealer spot at the casino. He’d engineer the deck to provide winning hands.

Upon hearing of the scheme and the place where it was set to go down, he told me, “I said, ‘Are you crazy?’ I wanted to know nothing more about the play.”

It’s the sort of eyes-wide-open approach that this week’s gallery of rogues might do well to adopt after their legal difficulties get resolved.