Inside Asian Gaming

Oct 2007 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING Casino Scams 39 B efore embarking on a 25-year career as a casino cheat, I spent a year deal- ing in a Las Vegas casino.I dealt all four conventional table games, and ironically, the first time I ever cheated a casino was as a dealer in the commission of a baccarat scam identical to the major one recently busted in casinos across the US and Canada. Just as the Tran Organization spotted glaring weak- nesses in casino table-game protection and surveillance in 2007, I was able to do the same back in 1977 while dealing mini-bac- carat in Las Vegas. Why do so many scams go undetected for so long by floor staff and surveillance departments? How can groups of cheaters come into your casino and navigate their way around your dealers, floormen, pit boss- es and surveillance personnel? You might find my answers somewhat hard-hitting, but they are true. Laziness and ignorance Throughout my career as a casino cheat up until my retirement on New Year’s Eve 1999, I was always acutely security con- scious, and always believed this was the rea- son I was never caught. Since my retirement, I have written books and done TV shows about casino cheating, all the while telling everyone I was one of the few cheaters who never had serious problems because of my own internal security inside casinos. I was only partially right. And I did not find this out until 2007. I recently spoke at the World Game Protection Conference in Las Vegas, where I met several people in- volved in different capacities of casino sur- veillance operations. Naturally,most of these people were interested in talking with me, as I am perhaps the first major “longtime professional casino cheater” who has made himself available to the very industry that had sought to trap him for more than two decades. In particular, people asked me questions pertaining not only to my person- al experiences and cheating methods but also about the various scams they had heard about or imagined could happen. Not to sound disrespectful to anyone serving in casino surveillance or security, but I was truly amazed at the level of inexperi- ence and ignorance shown by many people holding important surveillance positions. A conservation I had with a surveillance shift di- rector from a major Nevada casino stands out in particular. This person’s comments about detecting and setting up casino cheaters ac- tually made me think of a parallel statement made by the famous baseball player Mickey Mantle,who once said,“Had I known I was go- ing to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.” The words streaking across my mind that moment were “Had I known surveillance departments were this unknowl- edgeable, I would have been even more ag- gressive during my cheating career.” But we should not be surprised by this. Another thing I learned at the WGPC was how poorly casinos pay surveillance staff, and how many people pass up on careers in the field because of the lack of opportunities for advancement. That reality flabbergasted me. How can a pit boss earn significantly more than a surveillance operator? Or a ca- sino shift boss twice as much as a director of surveillance? I mean, which employee is in a better position to save the casino money— onewho detects amajor scambefore it walks out the doors with thousands of the casino’s bankroll, or one who rates customers’ play and“generally”supervises the games? Again, I am in no way demeaning the value or job functions of casino floor staff, but I feel key surveillance people are more important to casinos’ bottom lines. A good case in point is the mini-baccarat scam I wrote about in the July issue of Inside Asian Gaming . Although I believe I would have detected this scam much earlier, I am not faulting the surveillance operators.Why? Because we cannot expect them to catch so- phisticated cheating scams when they have not had the proper training to enable them to. In the old days, casino surveillance de- partments were staffed with people like me, ex-cheaters who really knew the scams from firsthand experience. In today’s surveillance system, people in the eye-in-the-sky are taught about scams by other people who were taught about the same scams in the same fashion they’re now teaching them: mainly, through videos and demonstrations. I am not criticizing these methods, as they are the product of our technological revolu- tion, but more needs to be done. Remember, when you put a person who is not scam-savvy in charge of a surveillance department, it’s like putting a pilot with a recreational license at the helm of a com- mercial jetliner; he’s going to be unfamiliar with a lot of the inner workings. So what do we do to improve floor and surveillance efficiency? In today’s modernized casino world, we must teach floor staff and dealers how to recognize basic and advanced scams, be- cause in spite of improvements in video sur- veillance,the cheaters are not backing down, and some are capable of using technological advances to their own advantage, capitaliz- ing on casino floors’ real-time ignorance. A major problem with on-floor surveillance in today’s casinos is that the entire floor staff, from dealers up to casino managers, has become far too dependent on surveil- lance upstairs to do this job for them. They believe that because every square inch of casino space is videotaped 24/7, no cheater can make off successfully with a significant scam. The common belief is that all scams will be caught by the camera sooner rather than later. Maybe so, but what a fair amount of ca- sino personnel don’t realize is that the cam- era catches many scams that are ignored by the floor staff. Floormen and pit bosses often fail to grasp that the order of process re- Why Cheaters Prosper Richard Marcus is considered one of the world’s greatest casino cheats, and now consults for casinos around the world to help prevent them becoming the victims of scams. He discusses the need for casinos to educate floor and surveillance staff against both internal and external cheating