It's time to Name names (regarding cheaters)

I am personally aware of 2 marked cards incidents this yr at the WSOP. First was well know pro Mike Holz in the $1.5k PLO8 at a table near me having both the decks in the dealers tray inspected and then replaced after floor confirmed ALL the Aces thru 4's in BOTH decks were marked. 2 new decks were brought in. DISGUSTING STUFF. 2nd incident is the person I always travel with and share rooms and meals and could be my best friend who happens to be a shootout killer. He gets heads up in his $1500 shootout table with sone euro guy and it wasn't until he was dealt AA and the gentleman was on his feet asking to inspect his chips stack (SUS for sure) now about 90 mins into heads up play this guy folds his first hand pre flop for a single raise?. Something that did not happen but now dude is on his feet and folding ? HMM ok . My buddy called the floor asked for a deck change and lost to a cooler soon after. When asked about it both times the floors in both incidents said they don't investigate marked cards just replace them as needed. Watch out!! the card marking teams are alive and well in vegas and I was sure to offer this info up to all tables I played June1st -15th while I was down there donating $$$,$$$,$$$

Issue is venues don’t really care and players don’t have unions or stand together to protect players in any meaningful way. I can tell you about a ton of incidents but ultimately no one really seems to care/do anything so it’s not worth the effort.

He could at least report it anonymously. In general you should always be on the lookout checking the cards for marks, cover your cards with a large card protector or multiple chips, and lookout for players who are looking at players' cards when it doesn't make sense.

Also, it's good to keep an eye out for anyone who watches every card while the dealer is dealing, or always watches when they deal a certain position because very likely they are looking for the dealer to slightly expose a card. When they do this every time when my card is dealt, the next time I give them a really hard stare while my card is being dealt and wait for eye contact and then they stop doing it - and often their reaction is a strong burst of sudden fear so obviously they were up to no good. Really there's only two reasons to look at the cards like that: (1) To make sure the dealer isn't exposing cards and then let the floor or dealer know if they are or (2) to take advantage of the dealer exposing cards.

I believe this problem could be solved by having better shufflers which check for chemical markings, depressions, or other types of markings that could be left. Several decks could be going through the machine at once to keep speed of play up.

Player cards could be required for poker rooms and over time there could be a database that tracks when these incidents happen and who was at the table. If someone is doing this repeatedly, there will be a pattern in the database after a while that when X person sits at the table cards start having "defects".

You guys seem very naive about how much casinos care about game integrity for poker. I’ve played with people that have stolen chips off other peoples stacks and are allowed to play again. There is no protection for players in poker that’s the reality.

Well their procedure uses burn cards to minimize the impact of a marked card. Obviously if the camera showed someone marking the cards they would do something about it, but probably it's really hard for them to detect, so what can they do? If the player or dealer reports a marked card they replace it. Maybe every player should have a card protector that fully covers their cards, or maybe the poker room could provide them free to use, and then there'd be no point to marking the cards in the first place.

Actually this brings up a procedure I don't agree with, which is that if a card is exposed preflop they use that as the burn card, but that means the top card of the deck is no longer a burn card and will now be part of the flop so if it's marked and they look real quick before the dealer puts the exposed card on top then they know one flop card already.

We’re discussing different issues but if you think there are ways to protect yourself if the house isn’t motivated I know of one situation where a team of 2 was marking the edges of the cards and sat in the 2 and the 5 seats and could tell what was going to come out on the board even with burn cards from their system so if venues aren’t going to take measures to ensure game security through monitoring and punishing people I don’t think there’s any real procedures you can put in place that will totally prevent cheating. In my experience they just don’t care about game integrity in poker so players are always going to be in a bad situation.

I read threads on here about people getting scammed and this happens ALL the time..even with scams where people have money stolen from and they still dont out the person. They write some BS like "DM me for more info"

Are you serious, do I have to download some weird encrypted email and use Morse code just have the name revealed?

Everyone wants to be so hush hush at the weirdest times.

I guess people are just hoping to get back their money but with other scams or scandals like cheating, i think they should name names (of course there should be some form of substantial evidence that isn't just he said/she said) and the accused can easily stand up and defend themselves. I mean this isn't a court of law.

My experience is the same that the house doesn't care other than to follow the procedure already in place. Generally dealers and floor are already busy doing their physically demanding job and marked cards are just another annoyance to deal with. Maybe it should be like a poster suggested above that the shufflemaster detects any marks. That's crazy about that team...but then the sides of the cards would be marked right so if you just look at the side of the deck wouldn't it be obvious? I'm very vigilant with checking cards, so I think they would only get it by me if it was an invisible ink type setup. But still, if they play strange enough I might still figure out something is off. I've played against a player before I was 100% sure was cheating but I didn't know how but it was so blatantly obvious that he knows when he was going to flop a big hand and only put a lot of money in preflop with garbage hands in those cases. A normal fish also puts money in preflop with junk when they miss too.

Well if they really cared then they would at least report it anonymously. If they don't report it or try to stop it then they don't care. It's suspicious that they acknowledge it yet don't care about it...makes you wonder what they do care about.

See also "Protest" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Naming names isn't enough. Cheaters need to either go to jail or face other meaningful consequences.

jared I guess

It’s the same thing when all the Jake and Ali stuff came out. Alex Foxen was the first guy to stick his neck out and claim Ali looked at Paul’s cards (see tweet with pic and sim). Everyone else jumped on and said they agree and have heard this for a while, but no one had the confidence to say anything publicly.

The credit goes to those that stake their reputation on what they believe is the right thing, not the guys who retweet stuff afterwords.

The problem with naming names is that if you name a name, you had better have solid evidence. It is not good to have faux cheating scandals like Garrett Adelstein's snit fit about Robbi Jade Lew.

You would know far better than I, but the general sense I've always heard is that overall, casinos are more interested in making sure it doesn't get cheated, and less interested about whether or not its customers get cheated.