Poker Cheating in the News

I woke up this morning (24 October) to find my phone crammed with messages from people all over the world. News had just broken that the Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups and several other sporting identities had been arrested and charged with allegedly running rigged poker games across the USA, including in Miami, Las Vegas, Manhattan and the Hamptons.

According to the FBI indictment, the conspiracy had spanned years, hauled in millions of dollars and involved members of four of the five major crime families. The scam had used famous sporting identities (referred to as “face cards”) to entice the victims (referred to as “fish” aka “suckers” in classic jargon), reassuring them that the games were all run on the square.

Cheating technology: everything old is new again

The news is now awash with lurid stories about this massive conspiracy (there are 31 people named in the indictments), the mob connections, and especially the use of cheating technology that reads like something out of James Bond’s “Q section”. It’s the latter issue I want to talk about in this post.

These spooky tools included electronic card shufflers that had been gaffed with code so the alleged conspirators could secretly know the cards being dealt to every player on every hand. This information was transmitted to a player in the game known as the “quarterback”.

I can’t say I was surprised.

Although I had no knowledge of these specific allegations, I have long been aware of this approach to cheating at poker and other games. In fact, the original blueprints for some of these ideas go back thirty or forty years.

The crooked shuffle machine mentioned in the indictment is just the latest version of concepts that go back decades and take many forms. Do a search online for “poker analyzer” and you’ll find plenty of Chinese sites that sell apps hidden in iphones or chip racks that can read a bar code on the side of the deck, calculate every hand and then transmit the play of the hands to a tiny earpiece.   

Earlier concepts used covert cameras inside blackjack shoes to identify and transmit the next card to an earpiece. Professional hustlers I know who are now in their eighties and retired referred to these systems as “talking shoes”.

If you want to see one of these newer devices in action, there’s a great video here that co-incidentally includes an appearance by my old friend Sal Piacente, a world expert on casino game protection.

A vintage shot from the eye in the sky of a game on the go at the Rainbow Club in Gardena. Photo copyright and courtesy of Ron Conley.

Doctor X and his “Octopus” system

The indictments also mention the use of an x-ray camera system that could read cards lying face down on the table.

It just so happens that I know the man who created a very similar system to the tables revealed in the indictment, who I refer to as “Dr.X”. In fact, I interviewed the good doctor (a genius with a laboratory for scams) about 25 years ago for my forthcoming book, Thieving Bastards. One system he built was referred to as “the octopus”, based on military and medical technology, and would work with cards that weren’t even marked:

“It’s a light table that I developed where you can throw cards face down on the table, that aren’t marked, and yet a hidden camera system sees the card just as if it’s laying face up on the table.

There’s no mirrors or anything on the card. There’s a system in the table of invisible light beams and that’s all. There’s no marks on the cards but the only way you know they’re not face up is that the pips are on the opposite corners when you view them – because you’re seeing right through the card just perfect. Anyway he had me make an octopus version of that which means that the central control station had eight umbilicals that went to each player’s seat at a table.”

To make things confusing, the doctor later invented a completely different camera and secret ink system that he called “X-Ray Vision”, that also could be used for cheating, this time using a mark that could only be seen by a unique hidden camera:

“You know, as a young kid I took up an interest in magic, but I was actually more interested in the tricks of the gamblers and I fantasized right from my youth about how good it would be to have an invisible mark on a card. It’s more or less been a lifelong pursuit to develop that to the max – looking for the invisible.  And I had some success along the way […] I invented X-Ray Vision, which is a mark you can put on a card that a camera sees, that’s as big as if you had written it with a big black magic marker. That was for hustlers.”

This later system was sold for many thousands of dollars more than thirty years ago and was at that time at the cutting edge of cheating technology. The inventor sold it to professional thieves but also — as is often the case with gambling supply houses — to magicians. Thirty years ago, he made a good living selling the system to magicians alone.

Dr.X was an old man when I spoke to him around 2002 and is now long gone. But all of these ideas have been reverse-engineered and built by other gambling supply houses since that time. In fact, pretty much all of this modern technology we see today — from marked cards to magnetic dice — is now coming out of Asia and is available through dozens of websites. You’d be best advised to avoid these sketchy sites but it certainly shows that there is a big trade in crooked equipment for gambling thieves.

An example of a site trading in “gaffed” shoes, cards and computer analyzers.

“Never play cards with strangers”

What’s the age-old lesson to be learned from the allegations in the news today?

While casinos occasionally get hit by scammers, you are far better off playing in a legitimate commercial property than ever setting foot in an underground club or big money private game. Check your brain in with your coat if you risk the action in one of these clubs. Chances are that underground clubs will be “run flat” which means they are set up to cheat the players. Some of these big money private games are also “hot seat games” or “brace games”. That means that very often the ONLY person who isn’t in on the scam is you, the sole targeted sucker.

As I said, commercial properties are safer than “flat stores” but it hasn’t always been that way. Even in the bad old days of Gardena, when dozens and dozens of road hustlers were operating all up and down the West Coast, ”ripping and tearing”, it was often the case that some floor manager was green-lighting the activity of the crews, raking a 20% cut of the action.

So what should you do if you suspect you are being cheated? Don’t say a word. Pick up your money and go. You don’t know who the hell you’re dealing with, you probably won’t be able to prove it and nobody else who’s a sucker is likely to believe you.

Thieving Bastards: True Confessions of the World’s Greatest Cheats

If you enjoyed this short discussion on cheating technologies, then you are in for a treat. My forthcoming book is packed with inside stories on the operations of scams just like those that appeared in news reports today. It features transcripts of interviews with poker cheats, dice cheats and other scam artists. 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 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.

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