Skilled casino cheating specialist Richard Marcus ran cheat teams for years. He is now an expert game protection consultant working for casinos worldwide to spot cheaters who exploit the tedium of the dealer’s job. While most cheaters eventually get caught, some go for years without getting nabbed. The 21st century has brought a new breed of cheater, who uses ultra-modern methods like hidden cameras and infrared dyes to swindle casinos.
Marcus recently looked at how the four-month gap from bubble to final table during the WSOP Main Event might have helped a cheating game plan. If anyone knows the importance of time in planning, practicing, improving, and finally executing scams, it would be Richard Marcus. The former casino cheat said in a recent article that unless Harrah’s officials used the FBI and Scotland Yard to carry out 24-hour surveillance not only on the nine participants on the final table but all their families and friends as well, not to mention anyone else who might be linked to the players or the event, and this for a period of 114 days, all those pre-final table statements made by officials that they would watchdog each fundamental factor of the WSOP to guarantee the integrity of the match, and that no cheating would be tolerated, are essentially rubbish.
Marcus is the Vegas cheat who perfected the art of casino cheating from the 1970s to the early 1990’s. He and his teammates Mark “Balls” Abramowitz and Pat Mallory had a stealing spree through the world’s toniest casinos. Their main scheme was past posting – laying down or swapping out chips after a winning bet is known. In the end it was their nemesis, Andy Anderson, who made it his mission to bring them down, after years of being hot on their tail.
There is a fair amount of interest in casino fraud these days, both on the side of the cheaters and on the side of the casino trying to stop them. As a former fraudster, Marcus has the unique advantage of being able to spot cheaters’ silent communication, which few surveillance people know how to do. He boasts that his eyes “would do them a helluva lot better than their cameras and the rest of their billion-dollar surveillance systems.”