Card marking is basically as old as the hills but yet it rears its head every so often in various different guises. We all know the power of marked cards and whether it is blackjack, poker or casino stud poker then the power of being able to see into the future to a certain extent is very powerful.
Imagine if the next card out of the shoe in blackjack was a card that made you an unbeatable hand and you knew what that card was. There have been cases of players marking cards in casino stud poker and even though the casino usually inspects the cards every hour, there are ways to mark cards that are not immediately obvious. The older methods of thumbing are not workable now simply because they are too easily spotted.
So the cheats need a way of marking cards that is easy for them to spot but difficult for casino staff to detect. One such way was used a few years ago by a group of Chinese players who used marker tinsel. They hid the tinsel down their fingernails and applied it to certain cards in certain positions so that they basically knew when the dealer had a qualifying hand or not and how big that hand was.
This was taking this to an extreme but this is also something that could be applied to a poker game as well. The player gets access to the cards and in a game like Pot Limit Omaha where you are dealt four cards per round then it wouldn’t be difficult to mark half the deck in a very short space of time.
