Back when I worked in gaming, one of the weakest spots or the most vulnerable when it came to cheating was Casino Stud Poker or to call it by its other name…..Caribbean Stud Poker.
In this game the players are dealt five cards and so is the dealer. You have already placed what is called an “ante”. If you have placed say $5 on the ante box and you look at your hand, you then have to decide if you want to play the hand or not.
If you do then you must place double the ante on the “bet” box behind it and so you would have to place $10 in this example. If you don’t want to play the hand then you must concede the $5 ante and lose it.
The kicker behind this is in the odds that you get paid for the hands that you make. But in a real live casino setting, there are several players sitting within a very close proximity to each other.
This presents the casino with several security issues and the main one is in not letting players have the opportunity to take cards out of play. This is easily checked simply by the dealer checking the number of cards that are remaining.
But there are far weightier problems as well and I have seen players actually place stronger hands on the boxes of players to their left or right who had bet more money. This can be difficult to spot when done quickly and using mis-direction.
Also card marking has been a problem as well in recent years although casinos tend to try to combat this problem by checking the cards every hour. This though presents the problem of them having to wait a full hour before the pit boss or manager can inspect the cards.
In my opinion though, many of the card marking techniques that are in operation today would get by an average pit boss and I will be looking at some of these in further posts.
See you soon
Carl
