11:19 UTC July 10, 2010 by Carl

Just how far can you go with regards to cheating inside a casino using illusion and time misdirection? Personally I feel that a great magician could be the perfect person to cheat. I once had a demonstration from a highly trained magician and this is certainly a person who I would not want dealing my poker game for sure.

But time misdirection is the art of performing magic tricks by getting the target to look away from the move while you are doing something. The key with misdirection is that the subject must at no stage feel as if they are being manipulated into looking away. To give an obvious example, any misdirection that was so blatant like finger pointing would likely not work in a magic context simply because your subject is expecting you to do a trick and also to perform some sort of deception.

However in a gaming sense then the player to a certain extent has the advantage. The key to misdirection is to make the subject or subjects want to look somewhere else. I have heard of teams of professional cheats that used misdirection as their primary weapon, obviously these people didn’t reveal their true identities or the casinos in which they operated.

I feel that one of the primary targets for cheats are other punters. These people can be incredibly careless with their bets and money. But the key to extracting money from casinos is not to be too greedy. Past posters get caught because they try for too much too soon. Trying to get £25 on the number when the table maximum is only £25 is asking for trouble. CCTV camera’s will be inspected even if the move actually got past the gaming staff. But getting away with £1 on the number is a far easier proposition and those £35 pay outs at 35-1 really start to mount up over time.