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.
Do you recall me saying to you a while ago about the Derren Brown casino roulette trick, well I have attached the video here so that you can see for yourselves what I was talking about. The high profile roulette wheel that was in operation inside this casino are very rarely used. They are perfect for visual prediction simply because the ball once it falls
simply stays where it is a large percentage of the time, take a look.
There are several key dynamics with regards to being able to do this. Your first objective is to ascertain the speed of the wheel. If the dealer is keeping the speed constant all the time then this is a big assist. You can use the green zero number as a point of reference to ascertain how many revolutions the wheel is going.
Then you need to ascertain the ball speed, this isn’t as difficult as it sounds and many dealers will be constant in their delivery of the spin on a regular basis. This was possibly a reason why Derren Brown kept this a secret as to when he would do the coup. Going into mainland Europe could simply have been a play to escape detection as he would be far less known in other countries.
We used to practice this as dealers and anyone who has read my book Killer Roulette will be aware of how many dealers find it possible to actually do this. The modern low profile wheels make it harder but a skilled dealer or punter can affect the house percentage by a considerable margin. Obviously this is not something that the gaming industry would wish to be made public but these are facts.
While this may have been a show and a very well put together show at that, the mechanics behind what Derren Brown did are all too real and rightfully take their place as highly effective methods of casino gambling.
I managed to watch a repeat showing of the Derren Brown program the other night and I must say that I found a few things that didn’t add up. I couldn’t understand why the casino had to be incognito. I can understand how he wanted to catch a dealer unaware so that they don’t try to spin in a deceptive way.
But why keep up this charade after the event? We are still nowhere near to finding out where this casino was except that it was in mainland Europe. Why go to Europe? The only viable reasons that I can think of are that he wanted to play bigger maximums and there are not many casinos who allow £5000 on a number.
At £175000 a hit then a casino can lose seven figures very quickly with those sorts of maximums and that is rare to find casinos wth those sorts of maximums, this could be why he went into Europe. Its possible that a few casinos in London may have those maximums I dont know. But also the wheel was a deep slotted high profile wheel and even the ball composition seemed perfect to me for this sting. It almost looked like the perfect scenario…..too perfect.
His theories though were spot on and if anyone re-reads my past posts on roulette you will see that I have been saying exactly the same thing with regards to the theory of how to beat the wheel. But something else that didn’t ring true, what are the chances of him finding someone who had £5000 in disposable cash that he could readily put his hands on.
Having £5000 that was not already invested or tied up in some other way is relatively rare even for prosperous people. I am not sure about the necessity to relate a moving roulette ball with playing squash and looking at traffic on a motorway, I can understand the connection, its the linking it in a successful way to beat roulette that I found a little odd. There is just no way that a bouncing squash ball shares any characteristics with a roulette ball in composition, density and bounce.
And if anyone who came up to me in the street and waved their arm in front of my face, the natural reaction wouldn’t be to slip into hypnosis but to make a defensive reaction in response to a possible attack…..still if you didn’t look too closely then it made for an entertaining program. Still Derren, you don’t need to practice for a year to hit next door on a high profile roulette wheel, I could have trained you up in far less time
