Nobody likes losing money to casinos. But most of us put up with the financial beatings, accepting that they inevitably happen when you risk cash in games where the other side has the best of it. Some of us find legal ways to turn the tables. Maybe we card count or hole card or seek out lingering bonuses on slot machines.
But even playing with an edge, no matter how much the casinos despise it, will get us only so far. Hell, I once sat next to hole-carding maestro James Grosjean at a blackjack table. He literally told me the dealer’s hole cards and I still managed to lose money. Decent sized edges do not lead to guaranteed profits.
Then there are the players so desperate to win that they will risk prison terms in order to do so. They are casino cheaters, people who devise and deploy ingeniously devious techniques to get over on the house. Never mind that such moves often entail enough work and training that the time, better spent, could have led to legal, long-running, profitable occupations.
Cheating Casinos by Being a Magician
A guy who goes by the pseudonym of Dustin Marks told me about becoming a crack sleight of artist to get over on the house. He would land dealing gigs in casinos and use his magic skills to rig decks and deal winning hands to collaborators at the tables.
Marks' partners played as if they were ordinary gamblers. But they generated wins that were extraordinary.
He told me about one scam, involving a couple-dozen partners, in which he and his crew played with a 50% advantage. As Marks explained it, he dealt and his collaborator sat at first base. Before the opening hand was divvied out, Marks flashed what the first hit card would be. That prevented the guy from ever going over. Then, as he corralled cards at the hand’s conclusion, Marks flashed his compadre’s first card, and that dictated a bet size for the coming hand.
Asked why he did it, he told me, “I was never fond of gambling. I always wanted a sure thing.”
Getting Over on Slot Machines
Luckily for Marks, he exited the shady game before getting caught. Tommy Glenn Carmichael was less fortunate. A TV repairman turned slot-machine cheat, Carmichael was a wizard when it came to creating devices that triggered unwarranted payouts from slot machines.
As explained in the Paris Review, Carmichael used a guitar string and a piece of metal shaped like a nine to essentially hotwire machines into making consistent payouts that added up.
Working with various teams, Carmichael, now deceased, is said to have been a two-armed bandit who illegally extracted millions of dollars from the one-armed bandits.
It was going great until a fateful day in a Las Vegas branch of Denny’s. Carmichael was plying his trade on a vulnerable machine, when police swarmed the casual dining spot and arrested him. As a result, Carmichael did time in a federal penitentiary.
Sprung five years later, he returned to his craft with a vengeance. Using enhanced equipment – primarily, light wands that tricked the machines – Carmichael earned $1,000 per day.
He described his increasingly high-tech gambits as “credit cards that never ran out.” In the end, though, he was arrested again, went broke, and traded in his black hat for a white one. Carmichael turned to creating anti-cheating devices that were sold to gambling entities.
Marked Cards & Bogus Chips
Others lacked the ingenuity of Carmichael and enjoyed no second acts after the whip came down from law enforcement.
There were the card-markers who glued grains of sand to their fingertips and altered the backs of cards used in the game of Casino War. Others, including a Chinese gang nicknamed the Jade Blades, employed tiny razor blades under their fingernails.
And it’s not only games in the pit that get flimflammed. A poker player by the name of Christian Lusardi played a poker tournament at Borgata in Atlantic City and brought his own chips – never mind that the whole point of a poker tournament is that players start with set amounts of chips that are for the tournament only. When Lusardi sensed the heat on him intensifying, he flushed bogus chips down the toilet, clogged the pipes, and wound up getting busted. The next place he played poker was in prison, stuck with a five-year-long sentence.
The Card Eater!
Then there’s at least one baccarat scammer who foiled the cheater catchers. The guy was part of a team that made a habit of slipping an 8-denomination card in and out of the game, Considering that it is a key card in baccarat, the team played with a significant advantage.
Eventually, though, casino security realized what was going on, surrounded the card man and tackled him to the ground. Before he could be fully apprehended, the cheat folded his card, swallowed it and foiled casino officials.
“He ate the evidence!” a source told me. “It was brought before the Gaming Commission. They said, ‘You have no proof. Pay the man. Have a nice day.’”
‘World’s Greatest Casino Cheat’
Fake slot machine tokens, bribed dealers, and fast fingers for introducing 10s and aces into blackjack games (credit that gambit to a woman nicknamed the Vegas Vixen) all worked until they didn’t.
Same for the moves engineered by notorious Richard Marcus. Anointing himself the “world’s greatest casino cheat,” Marcus ran a team that made its bones with a ploy known as past-posting. They would surreptitiously swap chips in and out of betting circles, depending on the outcome of the hand. If he won, he’d slip in $10,000 via a pair of $5,000 chips. If he lost, it would just cost him $110, via a black $100 chip and two five below.
Like Dustin Marks, he retired from the cheating life when peril seemed to loom – but before it struck. Also, like Marks, Richard Marcus managed to avoid jailtime. Unlike the rogue magician, though, he found a second career after giving up on scamming the house. He wrote books such as American Roulette and consulted with casinos to catch others of his ilk.
Hence, as Marcus and Carmichael prove, there is little honor among casino cheats
