To Catch a Blackjack Thief

It is never an easy thing to have to admit that ones own team member is a thief. But this was what we had to face back in 1999 when it became clear to us that one of our team members was being far from honest. It was back when I was active with my first blackjack team and one of our team members was found guilty of signalling in our financial backer on highly marginal counts that we had not agreed on.

The deal was that we would only come in at a true count of +3 or greater which gave us an edge of around 1% or so. But we later found out that one of our guys, the same person who I had personally trained up and entrusted was in fact bringing in the big players at counts of zero and even minus one.

We had started badly and I figured that this counter didn’t actually think that we would be active for all that much longer anyway. So he figured that if he brought in the big player and basically gambled with his money then he could generate some income for himself if things went our way for a while. As it turned out they got worse and at one stage the whole operation was on its knees.

It didn’t take us long to catch this guy and in fact the process of catching him wasn’t difficult, I just taught our backer to count. So that when he came to the table, he would know what the count was and would then know when he had to leave. Of course I didn’t tell the culprit that I had done this and he carried on in the ignorance that our financial backer who was also our big player had no knowledge whatsoever.

On one instance this guy signalled in the big player and after they lost their initial £200 bet, they were “instructed” by the counter to increase the wager. In actual fact the running count for that round was minus five so in no way should we have been ramping the bet. On the contrary, it should have been the other way around.

Then on the next round of play, the dealer received a blackjack to our nineteen and this round of play was minus six so there had been eleven more high cards and aces dealt out in that two round period but yet our player wasn’t indicating to our backer that the advantage was over.

The only way that playing on in this instance would have been justified was if the true count had been larger to begin with. As soon as we made it a rule to indicate what the true count was and that I wanted two players at the table so that one could control the shuffle tracking and the other could card count then the cheating stopped.

We all knew what he had been doing but rather than confront him, we merely dropped him from the team with the pretence that we were packing the entire thing in. With any form of gambling that involves the use of teams, honesty and dishonesty is always a major part and it only takes one bad member to bring the entire thing crashing down.

This article was written by Carl “The Dean” Sampson – author of Princes of Darkness :The World of Highstakes Blackjack