Spotting cheats: Working list of methods (18 Viewers)

Dealing Seconds

Deal the 2nd card from the top to keep the top key card going to the desired person.

This card mechanic shows how, among many other card mechanic things. Apparently he uses 13 controls to deal a hand to his partner, I saw none.
 
Dealing Seconds

Deal the 2nd card from the top to keep the top key card going to the desired person.

This card mechanic shows how, among many other card mechanic things. Apparently he uses 13 controls to deal a hand to his partner, I saw none.
They know. But they won't ask. It had to be shaved cards. After the wash, he manipulated the cards, very fast before he explained the shuffling and cutting for the 6 handed deal. He was feeling them and stacking the kings. But hands down the most talented mechanic I've ever seen.
 
Back near the dawn of the internet, to start getting educated for precautions in poker, I found Darwin Ortiz "On Card Cheating" DVD on a torrent. It was excellent and explained some of the 13 techniques in that clip, I remember the push-through riffles, the fake cuts, undoing a cut, and the base/second dealing. He did running up a full multi-handed "double duke" deal from discard pickups, which I guess is something like the pinnacle of it all. IDK how its done in the clip though, maybe the kings were shaved as mentioned.

The most powerful step to protect a game with a fair deck is ensuring every shuffled deck gets a clear one handed cut that includes completing and squaring the deck, ideally on a cut card. (A slightly offset cut completion can be undone)
 
False cuts are the easiest on the list in order for these things to work you have to be able to position the cards and while it’s not the hardest thing to do, most people could only position the top card or two.

Past posting is quite easy as well

I don’t really believe the hype, and the book is poorly written but does have merit. This book has different cover that comes with it. It doesn't explain how to do the mechanics, it is mostly a boast from the point of view of a braggart.

IMG_1615.jpeg
 
* Partnering / undeclared profit sharing

These go part & parcel with other forms of collusion, such as signaling, squeezing, etc.

It makes little sense for two players to partner up without some financial arrangement. 50/50 splits of wins and losses seem most likely, but one can imagine more complicated deals.

I stopped playing in a home game where it appeared to me the host and his best friend were working as a team -- always sitting next to each other, entering way more pots together than normal, squeezing a third player, etc.

I also noticed that the friend always stayed until everyone else had left, no matter how late it went. While this might be just a sign of a tight friendship, it struck me as odd given the vagaries of poker. Even very skilled players sometimes have a bad night, bust out after several rebuys and leave early, or just got a big day tomorrow... In the context of other suspicions I came to suspect they were settling accounts after the other players left.
 
False cuts are the easiest on the list in order for these things to work you have to be able to position the cards and while it’s not the hardest thing to do, most people could only position the top card or two.

Past posting is quite easy as well

I don’t really believe the hype, and the book is poorly written but does have merit. This book has different cover that comes with it. It doesn't explain how to do the mechanics, it is mostly a boast from the point of view of a braggart.

View attachment 1397024

I'm confused. What is the actual book with the alternate cover (shown above)? I find no references to that title or author.
 
Dammit this is all very depressing. Is it going to hasten the takeover of electronic tables?
I don't think so. Electronic tables will keep pushing their way in but I doubt its because casinos are worried about a chip here or there in a poker pot, more just wanting faster, more efficient ways of squeezing players.
 
My game is dedicated deal but a couple of years ago a player busted out but wanted to stay and I thought “ok, deal for us I’ll take a much needed break.” That was his style of dealing; he’d run the whole frigging board.” That lasted like one hand.

I’ve been dabbling with the concept of guest dealers to give myself a break and an adamant about technique. No muck gathered until the hand is finished and then, of course, none of that run streets in advance crap.
I know part of the reason you deal is because you want it done a certain way. (The right way). I know I have passed audition :), as has your SIL. But that's the only way, you can't put anyone in the box until you see how they deal.
 
Just saw this thread and love it!! Making people aware of cheating techniques is the best way to decrease cheating. I just started a thread where I’m going to make videos demonstrating many (if not all) of these techniques. @Taghkanic I’d love your (and other members’) input on what y'all would like to see in videos! :)
 
Working list of methods below; I’ll try to flesh each out in a comment, not necessarily in order:

* Bottom-dealing
* Premature burns
* Pot shaping
* Three-card Monte
* Stacking decks
* Fake cuts / shuffles
* Peeking
* Signaling
* Partnering / undeclared profit sharing
* Seating shenanigans
* Crooked dealers / hosts
* Marked decks
You have “partnering,” “signaling,” and “Three-card Monte,” but I’m not sure if any of these pertain to “sharing” or “swapping” cards…a very crude example is player in the 8 seat needs another spade in the hole, and player in the 9 seat slides it over to them undetected.

Also, flat out stealing chips from other stacks is worth noting.
 
You have “partnering,” “signaling,” and “Three-card Monte,” but I’m not sure if any of these pertain to “sharing” or “swapping” cards…a very crude example is player in the 8 seat needs another spade in the hole, and player in the 9 seat slides it over to them undetected.

Also, flat out stealing chips from other stacks is worth noting.
whenever I get up from my seat to go to the bathroom I think it’s the biggest/easiest risk of theft/cheating
 
I read an e-book a while back that talks about various ways to detect card mechanics and other cheating forms. The writing style is not great, and the book seems more designed to teach you how to cheat, rather than how to detect the cheater. In one section, the writer even recommends learning the techniques so that you can "white hat" cheat the cheater, although there is nothing (other than the player's ethics and morals) to prevent the reader from expanding that to include all players at the table.

https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/manuals/magic/Frank R Wallace - Neocheating.pdf
 
whenever I get up from my seat to go to the bathroom I think it’s the biggest/easiest risk of theft/cheating
It’s amazing how much has changed in poker etiquette. When I first started playing poker in casinos, I was encouraged to keep my big chips in the back, and even to take them with me when I left the table to use the bathroom in order to deter theft. But that was when casinos/card rooms almost exclusively ran limit games, so it wasn’t as big of a deal if someone couldn’t see all your chips. Today with big chips up front or on top of your stack, I feel like they’re much easier targets.
 
The most powerful step to protect a game with a fair deck is ensuring every shuffled deck gets a clear one handed cut that includes completing and squaring the deck, ideally on a cut card. (A slightly offset cut completion can be undone)
The possibly overbearing solution to any related offset cut problem is requiring cutting onto a discard tray such that two sides of the deck are blocked by discard tray's walls.

I use the usual 6-deck blackjack acrylic ones at my game, which has the side benefit of being tall enough that a 1-deck shoe can just fit in there once the alternate deck is shuffled and shoed. The finger cutout also makes cleanly picking up decks post-cut easy. We use designated dealers though - might be difficult shifting that around in a rotating self-dealt game.

A general trend is that most things to do with cards can be more or less fixed if you're willing to have a lot of equipment cluttering the table and strictly enforce procedures around its use, unless of course you encounter the pro cheat specialising in getting past that protection, but the biggest protection against that sort ofc is keeping the stakes too low for them to bother.
 
is stacking deck the same as so called "cold deck"?
A cold deck is one method of stacking the deck.

My understanding is a cold deck is when the cheat rearranges a deck and then swaps it with the deck in play after a shuffle.

Called a cold deck because it may not have been handled as much as the deck in use, so it may feel cooler to touch. To handle a cold deck might be a sign of such a switch.
 
Last edited:
It’s amazing how much has changed in poker etiquette. When I first started playing poker in casinos, I was encouraged to keep my big chips in the back, and even to take them with me when I left the table to use the bathroom in order to deter theft. But that was when casinos/card rooms almost exclusively ran limit games, so it wasn’t as big of a deal if someone couldn’t see all your chips. Today with big chips up front or on top of your stack, I feel like they’re much easier targets.
I'm a tournament guy. Whenever there's a break, and everybody's moving around, I'll always bury my big chips on the bottom of a stack before I leave the table.
 
I'm a tournament guy. Whenever there's a break, and everybody's moving around, I'll always bury my big chips on the bottom of a stack before I leave the table.
Smart. I’ve personally seen a couple chip thefts, and heard of a bunch more where people either grab chips from stacks or in one case, a full stack right off the table. (A guy went to dinner and left his chips on the table. A few minutes later, there was a dealer change, another guy walked right up to the stack at the empty seat and said “my buddy’s wife is giving him the third degree for being late to dinner, so he’s not coming back to the table” and racked up all the chips…and then 10 mins later the player who was at dinner came back and lost his mind when someone was in his seat and his chips were nowhere to be found…)

Protect those chips!!
 
Last edited:
Miss calls and other angle shooting.

I know that’s pretty general, but it’s definitely worth noting as its own category of cheating. More than once I’ve had players intentionally miss call their hands at showdown in hopes I muck, or push chips forward then after I show my hand state “that wasn’t a call!” (I know sometimes there can be human error, but I definitely have ran into people doing some of this stuff very intentionally.)
 
* Chip matching

At the suggestion of a poster in the thread below, I'm adding this method. (Can't think of a more creative name.)

https://www.pokerchipforum.com/threads/tournament-ends-up-with-more-chips-cheating.125109/

This involves introducing chips which match those used by the host, whether a home, private or casino game.

For example, if a home game uses commercially-available chips such as Milanos or Majestics, a player could readily obtain some of the same denoms and slip them into his stack. Presumably they would want to use higher denoms, but people are weird / irrational so it could even be lower values.

In the thread linked above, a casino found that its tournament wound up with far more chips than had been issued to players, but all the chips were authentic... One theory is that the casino had used the same chips for some prior lower-buyin tourneys as for its higher-buyin event. So cheats bought entries to the cheaper events, pocketed the high-denoms, then added them to their stacks in the pricier game.

Casinos and most higher stakes private games seek to have unique chips, presenting a different challenge to the cheater. There have been reported instances at casinos where someone has introduced chips which resemble the house chips but do not actually match, relying on the inattention of dealers and other players to launder the fakes.

https://www.njoag.gov/man-sentenced...shing-2-7-million-in-phony-chips-down-toilet/
 
Last edited:
For example, if a home game uses commercially-available chips such as Milanos or Majestics, a player could readily obtain some of the same denoms and slip them into his stack. Presumably they would want to use higher denoms, but people are weird / irrational so it could even be lower values.
One of my biggest pet peeves on PCF is when noobs sign on and say "What's a good breakdown for 600 chips for 1-2 to 5-10 NL? I am going to get (insert name of stock chips here) so I need to order in quantities of 25."

Ugh, if you are playing anything bigger than 25¢-50¢ , you can at the very least afford semi-customs from @BR Pro Poker for the price of 2-3 buy-ins at 50¢-1 and up. Small investment in security.
 
* Chip matching

At the suggestion of a poster in the thread below, I'm adding this method. (Can't think of a more creative name.)

https://www.pokerchipforum.com/threads/tournament-ends-up-with-more-chips-cheating.125109/

This involves introducing chips which match those used by the host, whether a home, private or casino game.

For example, if a home game uses commercially-available chips such as Milanos or Majestics, a player could readily obtain some of the same denoms and slip them into his stack. Presumably they would want to use higher denoms, but people are weird / irrational so it could even be lower values.

In the thread linked above, a casino found that its tournament wound up with far more chips than had been issued to players, but all the chips were authentic... One theory is that the casino had used the same chips for some prior lower-buyin tourneys as for its higher-buyin event. So cheats bought entries to the cheaper events, pocketed the high-denoms, then added them to their stacks in the pricier game.

Casinos and most higher stakes private games seek to have unique chips, presenting a different challenge to the cheater. There have been reported instances at casinos where someone has introduced chips which resemble the house chips but do not actually match, relying on the inattention of dealers and other players to launder the fakes.

https://www.njoag.gov/man-sentenced...shing-2-7-million-in-phony-chips-down-toilet/
It is better know as 'running in chips'
 

Create an account or login to comment

You must be a member in order to leave a comment

Create account

Create an account and join our community. It's easy!

Log in

Already have an account? Log in here.

Back
Top Bottom