It was around October 1998 when we first started having problems with losing the signal on our mobile cell phones. Cell phone technology was nowhere near as sophisticated as it is now. I certainly did not like the thought of the team acting on their own. The two “counters” that “Steve” had brought with him just knew basic counting and no more and both of their careers had hardly been filled with success.
I certainly couldn’t trust them to visually track the deck as they simply didn’t have the experience despite being counters for a good few years. I hated not being there in person although I did go along to scout a few casinos every now and again. We had a particularly brutal session in October that hit our confidence badly.
We had lost over £7000 and received heat doing it, always a terrible combination. It is bad enough losing money but when you lose money and get heat then there are problems. This had to be sorted and quickly as getting heat is the first step in getting barred.
They were obviously not doing the things that I had taught them to do and when. We obviously needed another big player as “Steve’s” cover was severely compromised. Any casino should be happy to have taken your 7k and especially when the team had never been ahead at any stage of the session.
When I asked the team what sort of “heat” it had been, it was a combination of “subtle sly looks” and “cutting deeper shoes”. Casinos do this basically when a player is winning money even if they don’t suspect that a player is counting. They would never have suspected shuffle tracking because there is just no way that they would have had that kind of knowledge. So this meant that the team were looking like conventional counters, this was precisely what I had warned “Steve” (our financial backer) about before we even started.
These two associates of his were set in their ways as far as I could tell but they were all we had at the time and this could only be done by a team. If I hadn’t let these guys come along then the entire thing would have been a non starter. It was definitely time to get back to basics and this meant more training sessions which would not have gone down too well……more on that later.
regards
Carl “The Dean” Sampson
