That has got to be the worst mechanic of all time. The scary part is that the really good ones could tell you exactly what they're doing and demonstrate the move, and you still couldn't see it.

people think that mechanics dont work in casinos or cardrooms?
Oh COME ON now...

I remember many years ago when the Florida rooms had tiny limits but big Bad Beat Jackpots, a dealer got fired for after dealing a couple BBJ and them reviewing the tape closely.

Years later I saw him dealing in Las Vegas. lol

edit: Actually I think the jackpot back then was a Spade Royal, so probably much easier for a mechanic to make happen.

This goes back a lot of years. But in the 1980s, a friend of mine in a high stakes game in California noticed that one of his chip stacks was missing after he returned to the table. And the camera film was able to show that the player who sat next to him took the stack.

A few weeks later The Mirage in Las Vegas opened and my friend came to Las Vegas for the opening. And after playing for a while, the new dealer just happened to be the person who took his chip stack. And that was the only day that this person dealt.

Mason

Bit embarrassed to say but I have played thousands upon thousands of hours of live and I needed someone in the comments to explain what I was looking at before I saw it and I agree with you, he seems terrible at it because it's mega obvious.

It's a sad state of affairs in the poker world these days. Just look at all the NVG threads relating to bots, colluding cheating, and on and on.

One of the worst parts to me is just the mental energy that gets drained when you feel like you have to be hyper-vigilant all the time. It can really take your attention away from trying to play the game well.

In S Florida the card marking was REALLY rampant about a year ago. It still happens but it seems like it's died off a little since a few scandals came out and people started looking for it more. Many of the cheats probably just moved on to other methods.

The card marking one in particular is frustrating to me because it would be so easy for the casino to just introduce a new setup once an hour, and rotate the existing decks to other tables. That would make marking cards way less easy and profitable. Instead they usually act like it's an undue burden to switch out a single obviously marked card, and will rarely ever switch out the entire deck.

Also in case anyone thinks I'm being paranoid. Just a few weeks ago a dealer at one of the places I play went through an entire deck and showed that cards were all marked in consistent ways (this happened after the game broke). It wasn't marked aces like you would expect either. It was something like sevens and eights along with certain suits that were marked.

I'm not sure exactly how the offenders use the info. They might just attack the big blind more when they know they are holding a weak card. Also the markings give them info about whether players could have a flush, straight or trips. Even if you keep your hands on top of your cards, which a lot of regs do when they suspect this is going on, the cheaters can still see other players' cards and eliminate those cards from your range, so it still gives them an edge even if they have no info about your specific hand.

Anyway, there are lots of ways people cheat but this post has already gotten too long. In some ways players were better off when the mob ran the casinos. In those days at least cheaters had to worry about getting their bones broken or their body dropped in a hole in the desert.

Except when the cheaters worked for "the mob"

Wow, yeah... I read your post before watching the video. Is that Deeb's own video? Whoever shot that must have had the same "can't be unseen" reaction.

So I guess the question now becomes who he was dealing for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRhzYoasLR4

FYP



It has been many years since I dealt, but I don't remember any rule about not putting the cut card out front first.

Thanks for the video. He did a good job describing the action. And as I wrote in my post in this thread the cheat actually started before the video of the cheat started. Shaun knew something was up but didn't completely know what. But if you guys ever film something, keep the footage of the previous hand included because the cheat starts a lot sooner than you might think.

I've been dealing for 11 years and never heard of that before. I'm currently trying to get out of the habit of doing it and am being more careful to fully release the deck before cutting.

Overall, the community should be a lot stricter about requiring proper dealing procedure, especially in places like Texas that have less regulation and mostly hand shuffling. Players should speak up when they see sloppy procedure, but in a way that isn't accusatory - most of the time it's probably casual/sloppy procedure and rarely it'll be a mechanic. But enforcing it all the time is the way to go.

Riffle, riffle, box cut, riffle, release, cut card forward, one handed cut, deal. And dealers shouldn't roll the deck or cover the deck or have two hands on the deck other than to grab the top card to pitch/deal the board - and the deck should be held level and reasonably low to the table while pitching.

Also cut cards should cover the entire card, if a corner is broken off or it's narrower than the cards, that's a vulnerability.

At first this is going to be very annoying to do, but management's goal should be to get to the point where players don't need to do it.

This incident got me thinking about it and logically, I'd be surprised if there's a major room in Texas that doesn't have mechanics. Why wouldn't mechanics head to the place with no regulator and 100% hand shuffling? So regs really need to police procedure to try to protect the games as much as possible.

What's even more scary is they can deal properly all but one or two hands a day and steal thousands of dollars a day in just those hands. Stay vigilant!

Cuserounder,
You are exactly right. However, as a stickler for details and procedures (I especially hate that many dealers mess with and compact the muck. As stated above, setting up a deck starts with the previous hand's muck) Texas is a terrible spot to play. The dealers, in my opinion for the most part are very entitled and take very little consideration of the players and the fact that we are playing for money. This is the case in both Houston and Dallas, and Shreveport, LA as well I might add. In addition, I have yet to have a dealer take constructive criticism and/or advice (no matter how good) at any place in the above cities without completely ignoring it, or worse, getting combatative about it. This attitude and environment is simply night and day compared to the professionalism displayed by the vast majority of dealers at the Aria and Wynn in Las Vegas.
Racetrack

The answer is Robot dealers.. yeah, I went there.

Will they have USB ports?

this video is priceless. now i fully get what was going on with the dealer's sleigh of hand. i honestly did not get it by just reading people describe what he was doing. but this video makes it crystal clear. bravo, sir.

....aaaaaaaaaaand now i'm paranoid my local card rooms are all mechanics.

Great video!

The key takeaway to me is that after shuffling dealers should always:

Square the deck.

Briefly remove both hands from the deck while moving the cut card in front of deck.

With ONE HAND, cut the deck and then place the bottom stub on top.

This simple 2-second proper cut makes setting a deck infinitely more difficult.

I was watching the dealers closely during my session today and exactly one did this consistently. Most of the rest made a move very similar to the way the cheat in the original video cut, placing the cut card in front before shuffling and combining the motion of the final riffle into the cut. Dealing this way makes it easy to cheat.

Those Houston rooms are ****ing gross. Although it was very funny to me visiting one and seeing the same people I used to play with in the home game scene there, now working in the rooms.

I'm mainly just shocked that places like this operate with manual shuffle. Shufflers are not a new technology, yo.

A number of years ago I used to live in Tampa FL and there was a 1/2 PLO game with a $5 mandatory button straddle and unlimited restraddles that ran every Monday and would get 5 or so tables.

Games were great action, there were a couple of Cuban guys who always showed up at 10am when it started and would rush to take seats 1 and 6 at the table. We knew they would signal each other to try and trap players between them, but their hand selection was so bad we didn't really care so much.

But then I went through a 2 month period where I was losing to these guys in spots that made no sense, they'd find their way to the river and get me everytime and I'd see their hands at showdown and be scratching my head how they made it that far in the hand.

I wound up doing a google search and found a tweet from Kristey Arnett about two Cubans who were kicked out of the Commerce and believed to be marking cards, and they always sat diagonal from one another.

I hopped into the tweet thread to revive it and explain what I was experiencing and was told it sounded like them.

I sent the info to the manager of the poker room in Tampa and his response was "I've been in this industry 25 years, we use a burn card, how could they possibly know the outcome of the hand?"

I told him I didn't know what they were doing or how they were doing it, but something was off and if those two were playing I wasn't. He said he'd put a fresh deck in on Monday and monitor it throughout the day.

Fast forward two weeks, I haven't played there. I get a text from a friend that the two Cubans were escorted out by security and were banned for life. The manager wouldn't tell me squat, they want to just brush it under the rug.

But I knew dealers and found out they were using their fingernails to mark the outside edge of the cards based on the value of the cards (so broadway/aces at the top, middle cards in the middle, maybe they didn't put markings on the low cards?)

The guy in seat 1 can see the side of the deck, so they won't know suits, but they'll know if the flop should favor high, middle or low cards and then play hands most likely to connect.

They got away with this for a long time at this location. They would both get up and take a walk when certain dealers sat as well, so maybe those dealers held the deck in a way they couldn't easily read it.

I noticed they were wearing Best Bet Jacksonville hats all the time and got in touch with a manager there who said "oh yeah, we banned those guys two weeks ago!"

They got caught somewhere in Texas, at Chasers in New Hampshire, etc.

Unfortunately all that ever happens is they get the boot and move on to the next room to fleece players, never facing any real justice or consequences for their actions.

no, but they are an expensive technology

Apparently they aren't totally positive either. Not used in my low stakes tournaments, even if the tables have them, but seen them used in the higher stakes tourneys.

Shaun should of taken a few more videos for confirmation to rule out a clumsy shuffle…

But I hope they kept a list of the people who were playing at that table…just in case

Deckmate shufflers are leased out, and the company might not want to lease to what is essentially an underground game. They would have to find black market units somehow.

Another Texas room was using them 2 years ago and wound up removing them after allegations that they had been hacked:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCPaI8Pqyg8