In my travels I have spent time with some of the best cheats in the business. But I have also enjoyed meeting and befriending some of the people who engaged in and pioneered advantage play, or “AP” for short.

Advantage players are some of the smartest people in the gambling world. Starting with Ed Thorp and the development of card counting, these cunning players exploit mathematical probabilities as well as procedural vulnerabilities to change the odds in their favor: from “warp plays” to “shuffle tracking”, inadvertent flashing of hole cards and the fortuitous idiosyncrasies of how playing cards are cut, creating factory-made “sorts” that the players can exploit visually without the knowledge of the casino.

None of these methods are “cheating”. They involve mathematics and simply using your brain or they depend on vulnerabilities in casino procedures and equipment that the player can see without physically doing anything. If the casino does something stupid and you see it, you didn’t commit a crime.

In a previous piece I talked about how you can’t be too greedy with a play if your intention is to last, and how that might have been a factor in the FBI indictments connected to the NBA. If you win too fast and make in-game decisions that don’t map against proper strategy, you’re drawing a neon arrow over your head.

It’s different for “short money”, where you have a spot or a sucker that you won’t see again and you just don’t care about burning it up. In those games, as cheats would say, you can rip and tear. The classic example of this is the carnival operators who run “flat stores”, rigged to clip the suckers in small town seasonal fairs across America and Australia. You prey on naive locals, many of whom have had a beer or two and no self control. Then you pack up the County Fair or Showgrounds and move on to the next venue and the next smorgasbord of suckers.

Nothing focusses the mind and pushes you to reassess your priorities more than barely escaping death.

A couple of years ago, the cosmos slapped me in the face when I survived a major automobile accident. The car I was driving was completely written off, crumpled up like a squeezebox. I had to push away airbags, slide through shards of atomized windshield, clamber over the console, and drag my ass out the passenger window — not even realizing at the time that the impact had fractured my sternum…

Like many of you, I continue to take a keen interest in reporting surrounding the recent FBI indictments of over thirty people alleged to have been involved in poker and sports bet cheating conspiracies in the USA.

In this blog I want to discuss the risks associated with advanced technology used to cheat at cards. Specifically, I’ll focus on the professional discipline required to use these methods, and the danger arising from systems that are “too perfect”.