Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | Oct 2007 40 garding suspicious play or possible outright cheating-moves is supposed to work from the bottom up.Many, even if subconsciously, have taken the approach,“Why should I wor- ry about watching the games so closely? If anything goes down, the camera will tape it and my surveillance colleague upstairs will run back the tape and catch it.”But this must work the other way. The person on the floor must initiate the process. He must call sur- veillance and report his suspicions. Naturally, this happens whenever surveillance is called, but my point is that surveillance is not called nearly enough, because floor personnel rely on their confidence in video surveillance.My advice: When on the floor, don’t rely on the camera because the camera cannot tap you on the shoulder and say, “Excuse me, Mr. or Madame Pit Boss, but the player on mini-bac table number 3 just pulled a move.”Let’s not forget that cameras are no different than computers; they need the input to give you the output. If you don’t tell them, they don’t tell you, thus the cheaters can get away with their scams. The dealer’s checklist Let’s take my inexperienced pilot anal- ogy a step further. You all know that before any aircraft takes off, there is a checklist that must be adhered to. Pilots must confirm that instruments are in good working order and that all preparations for takeoff have been made.Why not initiate this process for casino dealers? What if they had a certain checklist before dealing cards, spinning roulette balls and passing dice to craps shooters? Would this effectively reduce the casino’s risk of be- ing cheated? You bet. By way of example, let’s consider my infamous “Savannah” move. For those unfa- miliar with it, the move consisted of hiding a $5,000 casino chip under a $5 chip on even- money and 2 to 1 bets on the bottom of rou- lette layouts, so that the dealer believed only $5 chips were placed there. This was done by jutting the $5 chip slightly off the $5,000 one. When the bet lost, I raked it off the lay- out before the dealer could sweep it. When caught I replaced it with two $5 chips I’d had palmed in my other hand, going into a drunk routine to deaden suspicion and avoid sur- veillance. When the bet won, I was paid ei- ther $5,005 or $10,010, depending on which bet had been placed. Naturally, there were surveillance verifications each time the bet won, but since it was actually a legitimate bet, the casinos had to pay. Never once did a dealer, floorperson or pit boss detect the $5,000 chip underneath before I was claiming the winning bet.Which made this the “perfect move.” But was it really so perfect, or could a simple procedural dealing tactic have ren- dered this move impossible? Well, after casi- nos saw it hundreds of times, and suspected something was wrong even though their cameras backed it up, you would think they could have stopped it. Yes, they could have. If roulette dealers had been instructed to follow a checklist, which instructed them— among other things—to visually verify the bottom chips of all the outside bets, making sure that no high-value chips were set there, I never would have gotten paid on the move. Not once. But this countermeasure was never con- ceived of by suspicious surveillance depart- ments, nor was any other procedural change made to give the casino a chance of de- fending itself against what was really a very simple cheating move. Mental checklists can be used by dealers to combat cheating on all the table games. Checklists will not wipe out cheating entirely, but will greatly reduce the number of times scams are both attempted and succeed. I would estimate that with ef- fective dealer’s checklists, which supervi- sors must ensure are adhered to by dealers, overall cheating on table games would be reduced by as much as two-thirds. Lack of communication I feel there is a fundamental lack of com- munication between personnel on the floor and observers in the surveillance room. Aside from basic regulations dictating when floorpersons should call surveillance, there has to be a more hands-on approach from both levels of the casino. The simple perfor- mances of verifying questionable bets and settling disputes between players and the casino are not enough. Both the person on the floor and the person in the eye must be able to properly communicate a situation to the other, and on top of that, use some lat- eral thinking. Looking back over my cheating career, I remember a prime example of this lack of communication and “thinking on your feet” relating to game protection.I had been past- posting“chocolate”$5,000 chips underneath black $100 chips on blackjack tables up and down the Las Vegas Strip. After dozens of successful payoffs, word of these audacious moves finally reached surveillance depart- ments. Eventually, a move was caught on tape, but it was long after I had left the ca- sino with the money. However, surveillance departments teaming up with Griffin Inves- tigations put out bulletins that were distrib- uted in gaming pits throughout Las Vegas. The warning was: “Beware of pastposters switching in chocolate chips underneath black chips on blackjack tables.” Even my name and photo were attached to the warn- ings.You would think that I was soon put out of business, right? Wrong. Knowing that floor staff, surveillance departments, Griffin and gaming agents were all on the lookout for chocolate chips being pastposted under blacks, I decided to try something else that was really the same thing, though I suspected casino staff would not recognize it.I went back into the same ca- sinos, well aware of the bulletins, and did the exact same blackjack moves slipping yellow $1,000 chips underneath green $25 chips. I got paid time and again, as if there were no flyers on the podiums warning the floor staff that I was loose in the casinos.What’s more, I even saw the flyers in the pits. My point? This is a classic example of streamlined communication that doesn’t really communicate. Pit bosses received the warning from surveillance, then relayed that information to floorpeople, who then relayed the same information to dealers on the blackjack tables. So while everyone on the floor was waiting for me to pastpost chocolates under blacks, I went from casino to casino pastposting yellows under greens. Amazingly, or maybe not so amazingly, even when I took heat on the yellow-under- green moves, no connection was made to the chocolate-under-black moves depicted on the flyers.Surveillance was not notified by floor personnel that“unseen”winning yellow $1,000 chips were showing up on blackjack tables. This is what I mean by a lack of lat- eral thought. People on the floor need to be trained so that they are versatile enough to recognize that the yellow-green move was the same as the chocolate-black move. This type of oversight is prevalent in today’s ca- sinos because people, relying way too much on technology, are not trained well enough to use their own common sense. I always conclude my training seminars to casino staff with the reminder:“At the end of the day, cheaters are busted by humans, not technology.” Richard Marcus, a former baccarat dealer and recognized authority on numerous as- pects of Asian gambling and cheating, now offers detailed training and seminars to ca- sino staff, including dealers, floor personnel and surveillance. His engaging and authorita- tive insights have been featured at The World Game Protection Conference, the Asian Casino Executives Summit, the Peru Gaming Show as well as many international TV segments about casino surveillance and the armies of cheaters who battle against it. http://www.richardmarcusbooks.com/ protection.htm Casino Scams