Poker Cheating Again: “Greed is the Root of all Evil”
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”.
When the news first broke, I was particularly interested in the high-tech cheating tools exposed in the indictments. These included crooked shuffle machines that could transmit the future play of the hands, marked cards that could be read with special lenses and what the FBI referred to as “x-ray tables”.
I discussed these tables — known as “light tables” or “the octopus” — in my earlier post. They don’t use x-rays at all but instead use photon beams (yes, really) operating in the electromagnetic frequency (RF) spectrum well above the range of visibility for the human eye. I was especially interested in their exposure because my forthcoming book, Thieving Bastards: True Confessions of the World’s Greatest Cheats includes an interview with one of the developers of this system, “Dr.X”. I conducted that interview around twenty-five years ago and at the time I remember thinking, “Nobody will ever believe this is true.” So, from my perspective, the FBI’s timing in cracking this case has been impeccable!
Photo showing an “x-ray table”. The cards are viewed by a monitor in a concealed location.
Image credit: U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of New York
I have also interviewed several people who worked with the late inventor of the early optical readers for blackjack that are the grandaddy systems of the shuffle machine and poker analyzers used in these scams. These blackjack shoes were referred to by cheats as “talking shoes”, and they will appear in volume two.
The risk in an “OP” play
Now, as I’ve been reading the coverage of this case, the constant thought in my mind has been that the big problem with all three of these systems is that they are too strong. In modern parlance, they are over-powered or “OP”. By that, I mean they are too strong for thieves that lack discipline.
This is a big weakness for amateurs who get their hands on this technology but can also be the downfall even for the best professional thieves with thousands of miles as road hustlers and crossroaders. As Chaucer wrote in a tale about three dice cheats, “Radix malorum est cupiditas” — greed is the root of all evil.
One old timer I interviewed — a guy who had worked in pro crews from the 1940’s for fifty years — told me that getting sophisticated marked cards into a game is one of the strongest plays imaginable:
“But that’s very strong. Very strong. If you can get a floorman and give him some money and get him to put some decks in. That is strong.”
What he knew, however, was that the art to all of this is to not telegraph the action. The real pros knew how to work a scam for “long money”, meaning to manage a play that might last “forever”:
“And if you know how to play and don’t make it obvious. You don’t look at the cards as they come off the deck. You deal round the table and you catch a card on your left and when you’re dealing to your right you might catch one. You don’t catch them all. You know, you can’t get greedy with it.”
But light tables, and optical readers in shuffle machines and sophisticated “paper” (marked cards) can be too strong and the temptation to “rip and tear” can overwhelm a thief with cartoon-style dollar signs in his eyes. This even happened with Erbie, the guy who designed the early shuffle machines and talking shoes. Here’s an incident where he abandoned reason when using an analyzer:
I knew there were gonna be three guys from the crew on the table. In a poker game you’re typically gonna have nine players. But there were only two other players that showed up, so it was a five-handed game. The one sucker and the other guy that I didn’t really know.
The sucker used this bookmaker and apparently, he came with a lot of cash, he had a couple hundred thousand on him. He was there to play.
Well, it felt like the guy was getting bored because nobody’s playing. Nobody was gonna play unless they had the winner, because of the analyzer. So, then he’s getting frustrated and starts betting high because it was a ten-twenty no-limit game. This guy’s betting hundreds and then he makes like a thousand-dollar bet.
So, the hand that woke them up, he was in a pot with Erbie and Erbie had queen-four and won the hand. He called a thousand dollar, maybe two-thousand dollar, bet and the guy freaked out.
He’s like, “You played queen-four against me?”
And Erbie says, “Shit yeah, I play horseshoes and hand grenades! I’ll play anything!”
This is the sort of stupid shit Erbie got away with.
“And lead us not into temptation…”
My suspicion when the news first dropped was that this may have been a key factor in the ultimate failure of these recent poker conspiracies. This assessment was supported by the comments of alleged victims of the scam:
“Those guys cheated with a device, and they cheated me and cheated other people who were good people. And they used a star athlete. They used the star to do it. They had us excited. The only reason they were able to pull this off was because they had a professional athlete in place,” the source said.
“We knew that it was a device because of how they would push. It wasn’t like a thing where they could see the backs of cards. It was like, let’s go all in before any cards even come out.”
In one messaging exchange between people alleged to have participated in the scam we see the following comment which shows an awareness of the risk in spooking the sucker if discipline wasn’t maintained around the over-powered technology:
Image Credit: U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of New York
In an earlier exchange we see that greed may indeed have clouded the judgement of two of the alleged “quarterbacks” (the guy with the Bluetooth earpiece) in the game and that “Sophie In New York” might think this was unwise:
Image Credit: U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of New York
What this looks like is that the same sucker lost two bad beat hands to two of the (alleged) cheats BOTH drawing to an inside straight (a “gutshot”). This is a trash play, where any smart poker player would have thrown in the hand.
But the two alleged thieves would know the gutshot hands would be the ultimate winners and the sucker would end up with the bad beat. It’s like they could see into the future — because, thanks to the octopus or the talking shoe, they could.
Discipline
For a true pro cheat, then, a core skill is discipline. And you have to hope you’ve put together a team that have the same high-level discipline. You have to read the action and know if the play is right. At the same time you have to be monitoring the players to see if anyone is getting suspicious.
If it’s a casino play, you have to be assessing the competence of the staff and their level of attention to the game. You have to do all of this while secretly signaling (verbally and non-verbally) to your partners when to greenlight the play, when to “turn” the players and staff, when it’s time to draw down bets, and when it’s time to get the hell out of Dodge.
I’ll leave the last word on this to one of the greatest casino cheats of all time, Robert Asiel, talking about shooting weighted and mis-spotted dice (“tees”) in Nevada casinos in the 1960s:
“Andrew, some of the reasons for my long success is because I wasn’t greedy. I took a little bit at a time. Shooting the tees — one, two, three rolls at a time. And yeah, maybe if I shoot a few rolls and come back out with the dice and I’m still playing, don’t seven out, make a new point, well then I might bring them back in.
We had signals. It was safe and careful. I knew what I was doing. I was in charge. I didn’t want to get caught and I didn’t want my partners to get caught. So, I was careful: one, two, three rolls. Play every day, play in every casino. What’s wrong with that?"
Thieving Bastards: True Confessions of the World’s Greatest Cheats
If you enjoyed this short discussion on cheating , then you are in for a treat. My forthcoming book is packed with inside stories on the operations of scams discussed here. It features transcripts of interviews with poker cheats, dice cheats and other crooks. It includes the first expose in print of “the octopus” and its inventor, plenty of stories about the old cheat who invented the “talking shoe”, as well as many other scamming methodologies and scores that have never been revealed.
These historic interviews, conducted over the last 30 years, give you a ringside seat to the action, explaining in detail the motivations, the crooked techniques and the cold-blooded psychology that separate the professional cheater from the honest player.
For updates on publication dates and notifications on when you can order, be sure to sign up below to our mailing list.