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Dirty Poker
Do you: Ever wonder if you have been cheated at poker? Have any idea how much it goes on? Know about collusion, sleight-of-hand, marked cards and chip dumping? Cheating in poker is more common than people care to believe. Although most cheating occurs in private games that do not follow strict gaming procedures, it is also common in regulated card rooms, casinos and even online. There are many ways to cheat, some subtle, some not so subtle. Richard Marcus knows about them all. Ten years ago poker was a minority interest. The advent of online play has changed all that - poker is now big business. Millions of players play every day, both live and online. If you are one of them you will want to ensure that the games you play in are clean. This book will tell you how cheaters operate, what methods they use and how to spot them. Table of Contents: Introduction: “Why this book?” Chapter One: “Poker cheating: It’s been going on for ages and not about to stop.” Chapter Two: “The underworld of legal casino poker.” Chapter Three: “It happens here, there, everywhere.” Chapter Four: “Underneath the tournament tables.” Chapter Five: “The Underworld Series of Poker.”The granddaddy of crooked tournament play. Chapter Six: “Crooked Fingers in World Series Ring Games.” Chapter Seven: “Online-Oncrime.” Chapter Eight: “For those of you who play at home.” Beware of best friends who are your poker night enemies. Chapter Nine: “The top ten poker scams of all time.” Chapter Ten: “Where will it go from here.”
272 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 17, 2019
Should we believe him?
Richard Marcus loves to tell a story. There are some pretty good ones near the end of the book in Chapter 8, and some pretty lame ones sprinkled throughout the text. The problem is, it is hard to tell in the reading just where Marcus's story telling leaves off and the reality begins.
Just how prevalent is cheating in the world of poker? Marcus is here to tell us that it is rampant, in the casinos, in the clubs, in your home game, online, and even in the World Series of Poker. Should we believe him?
To be honest, I am not quite sure how much to believe and how much to take with a grain of salt and how much to flat disbelieve. Marcus tells a lot of poker stories and he seems to know a lot of cheats, but how are we to know that he is on the up and up? After all the guy is a self-confessed cheat himself, a guy who not only cheated the casinos, but in this book reveals how he and some confederates cheated other poker players. What's to keep him from cheating the reader--that is, to hype the danger of cheating in order to sell some books?
I'll give you the answer to that in a word: nothing.
However just because he would lie doesn't mean he is lying. And just because he likes to hype the cheating doesn't mean it doesn't take place. In any human activity involving love or money, there will be some cheating going on, you can count on it.
Here are some of my conclusions about the book. First, there are a few mistakes in the text and more than a few misconceptions. One of the mistakes is on page 67 where Marcus says that dealers in the California card clubs (in the 1990s), in particular at the Bicycle Club, take the "two decks of cards, one red-backed and the other blue-backed" with them when they change tables. Not true. The dealers take their trays with the chips, but the cards stay on the table. Only the floor men and the managers are allowed to bring and remove cards from the tables.
One of the misconceptions is his idea that professional poker players are not getting proper money odds for entering tournaments such as the WSOP because of what "the host casinos remove from the entry fees to pay expenses and take commissions" (p. 107) and therefore shouldn't be entering those tournaments except for the fact that they can put the odds in their favor by colluding in various ways. Marcus calls this "the WSOP Consortium" (p. 109)
Now it might be true that regular pros who play against one another time and time again on the poker tour, might find it convenient to make some kind of agreement before hand to equally distribute winnings regardless of who in the "consortium" actually wins or loses. I can recall reading one of Doyle Brunson's books about the early days on the road in Texas and noticing that the same guys playing together would, even without necessarily having the intent, help one another rather than the current tourist they were playing against. So this can and probably does happen to some extent at the WSOP. ("Chip dumping" at the right time is a major possibility.) However, the real reason that the pros enter these tournaments is that they are actually getting a big overlay for their $10,000 entry fee because the vast majority of the players are significantly less skilled than they are.
His idea that there is not much more than a two percent difference in skill among the top professionals is probably about right, but this does not mean that the average pro only has a two percent advantage over the field. There's a lot of luck involved in any tournament, but the average skill level of the players who actually end up in the money is much greater than the average skill of a similar group of players who bomb out near the end of the second day.
Second, Marcus's description of how to actually cheat at the tables is a little off the mark. He seems innocent of the fact that even regular players would notice the "whiplash" betting going on by two or three players working in collusion. Such collusive betting patterns wouldn't last long anywhere I ever played poker. His story of how he and his cheating friends, "Carla" and "the Preacher" worked their colluding magic in Aruba in "Chapter Two: The Underworld of Casino Poker" is almost laughably amateurish. It might work on a drunken night in Aruba, but don't bring that cheap stuff into the Bellageo!
Third, while trying to explain why some honest players continue to play when they know cheating is going on, Marcus recalls something a horse player told him. His buddy "Phil" said he still took the trouble to handicap a race he knew was fixed because he didn't know which horse had been fixed to win the race. Marcus concludes that this makes sense because, say it's a basketball game that is fixed: "it's a 50-50 chance that the fix went with you or against you." (p. 147) So go ahead and handicap the game.
But it makes better sense not to bother with handicapping since it's fifty-fifty anyway (and don't bet the game either, since you lose the vigorish). Save your energy for the game or horse race in which your handicapping skills can overcome the odds.
Despite these objections I still recommend this book because Marcus definitely does give the reader a true feel for the kind of cheating that is possible (and the chapter on internet cheating is eye-opening, if nothing else), and because he does do a great job of telling a tale--true, stretched or otherwise!
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
Richard Marcus loves to tell a story. There are some pretty good ones near the end of the book in Chapter 8, and some pretty lame ones sprinkled throughout the text. The problem is, it is hard to tell in the reading just where Marcus's story telling leaves off and the reality begins.
Just how prevalent is cheating in the world of poker? Marcus is here to tell us that it is rampant, in the casinos, in the clubs, in your home game, online, and even in the World Series of Poker. Should we believe him?
To be honest, I am not quite sure how much to believe and how much to take with a grain of salt and how much to flat disbelieve. Marcus tells a lot of poker stories and he seems to know a lot of cheats, but how are we to know that he is on the up and up? After all the guy is a self-confessed cheat himself, a guy who not only cheated the casinos, but in this book reveals how he and some confederates cheated other poker players. What's to keep him from cheating the reader--that is, to hype the danger of cheating in order to sell some books?
I'll give you the answer to that in a word: nothing.
However just because he would lie doesn't mean he is lying. And just because he likes to hype the cheating doesn't mean it doesn't take place. In any human activity involving love or money, there will be some cheating going on, you can count on it.
Here are some of my conclusions about the book. First, there are a few mistakes in the text and more than a few misconceptions. One of the mistakes is on page 67 where Marcus says that dealers in the California card clubs (in the 1990s), in particular at the Bicycle Club, take the "two decks of cards, one red-backed and the other blue-backed" with them when they change tables. Not true. The dealers take their trays with the chips, but the cards stay on the table. Only the floor men and the managers are allowed to bring and remove cards from the tables.
One of the misconceptions is his idea that professional poker players are not getting proper money odds for entering tournaments such as the WSOP because of what "the host casinos remove from the entry fees to pay expenses and take commissions" (p. 107) and therefore shouldn't be entering those tournaments except for the fact that they can put the odds in their favor by colluding in various ways. Marcus calls this "the WSOP Consortium" (p. 109)
Now it might be true that regular pros who play against one another time and time again on the poker tour, might find it convenient to make some kind of agreement before hand to equally distribute winnings regardless of who in the "consortium" actually wins or loses. I can recall reading one of Doyle Brunson's books about the early days on the road in Texas and noticing that the same guys playing together would, even without necessarily having the intent, help one another rather than the current tourist they were playing against. So this can and probably does happen to some extent at the WSOP. ("Chip dumping" at the right time is a major possibility.) However, the real reason that the pros enter these tournaments is that they are actually getting a big overlay for their $10,000 entry fee because the vast majority of the players are significantly less skilled than they are.
His idea that there is not much more than a two percent difference in skill among the top professionals is probably about right, but this does not mean that the average pro only has a two percent advantage over the field. There's a lot of luck involved in any tournament, but the average skill level of the players who actually end up in the money is much greater than the average skill of a similar group of players who bomb out near the end of the second day.
Second, Marcus's description of how to actually cheat at the tables is a little off the mark. He seems innocent of the fact that even regular players would notice the "whiplash" betting going on by two or three players working in collusion. Such collusive betting patterns wouldn't last long anywhere I ever played poker. His story of how he and his cheating friends, "Carla" and "the Preacher" worked their colluding magic in Aruba in "Chapter Two: The Underworld of Casino Poker" is almost laughably amateurish. It might work on a drunken night in Aruba, but don't bring that cheap stuff into the Bellageo!
Third, while trying to explain why some honest players continue to play when they know cheating is going on, Marcus recalls something a horse player told him. His buddy "Phil" said he still took the trouble to handicap a race he knew was fixed because he didn't know which horse had been fixed to win the race. Marcus concludes that this makes sense because, say it's a basketball game that is fixed: "it's a 50-50 chance that the fix went with you or against you." (p. 147) So go ahead and handicap the game.
But it makes better sense not to bother with handicapping since it's fifty-fifty anyway (and don't bet the game either, since you lose the vigorish). Save your energy for the game or horse race in which your handicapping skills can overcome the odds.
Despite these objections I still recommend this book because Marcus definitely does give the reader a true feel for the kind of cheating that is possible (and the chapter on internet cheating is eye-opening, if nothing else), and because he does do a great job of telling a tale--true, stretched or otherwise!
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
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January 20, 2023Wow, this is an exciting book about cheating in poker. I had no idea that it was so familiar in private games and regulated casinos. Thanks for sharing the information about all the different ways people cheat. It's definitely eye-opening. I've never really thought about it before. If you're looking for a reputable and fair place to play poker, I recommend checking out Wild Joker Casino. They have strict gaming procedures to prevent cheating and ensure a fine player experience.
December 26, 2021
Reading this was an act of curiosity on my part around the mind of the author.
I found, though, that because I've never played poker, most of what he described didn't mean anything to me.
Did I get to the end it? No. But I've finished with it now.
I found, though, that because I've never played poker, most of what he described didn't mean anything to me.
Did I get to the end it? No. But I've finished with it now.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews