questions about my job

To paraphrase Glenn Frey, it's the lure of easy money, it's got a very strong appeal.

When people find out what I do for a living I get a lot of questions. When I was in surveillance, I would get a lot of questions along the lines of do people cheat and or how do people cheat. Now that I'm dealing again I've been getting a lot of questions along the lines of do card dealers cheat.

Short answer: no. Long answer: rarely, but occasionally it happens.  But only if the dealer has a certain set of skills and the proper motivation. What is the proper motivation? Money.

So let's talk about cheating. In broad terms, Casino cheating can be broken down into two categories, stealing from the inside and stealing from the outside. 

Stealing from the outside is when a customer does it. It can take the form of slot machines or cheating at table games for the most part. Slot machine cheating is just about a thing of the past and has been ever since they started doing bill in/ ticket out machines. But that'll be the subject of another blog post at a future time.

So that leaves cheating from the inside, which is stealing by employees. And since I'm dealing blackjack now I get a lot of questions from friends and acquaintances asking me if dealers cheat, and if they do, how do they do it and what does it look like.

The first thing I want to state, because I know this for a fact,  is that cheating for the house by a dealer rarely, if ever, takes place. In fact I feel 99.999999% confident in saying that. Why you may ask? Because it doesn't pay anything. No dealer ever gets a bonus or any other benefit from taking the players money and putting it in the chip tray. If you lose hundreds of dollars playing Blackjack oh, it's not because the house cheated you. It just doesn't happen.

Now, what dealers do get money for is from players when the player wins. That takes the form of a toke bet or a tip. And the player is motivated for that since they receive money. And most dealers make minimum wage so they depend on those tips.

So if it dealer was to cheat, it would either be for the the player or for themselves. Stealing for themselves would take the form say,  palming a high value chip from the rack and placing it in their pocket surreptitiously. That type of thing will have absolutely no effect on the player, of course.

 But cheating for the player, of course, will have an effect on the players bankroll. But this post is starting to get a little long, so we'll go into that next time.

Be sure and subscribe to this blog to get all of my posts and updates as they come out. You can also follow me on Twitter @casinologger or Facebook by clicking here. If your in the casino industry connect with me on LinkedIn by clicking here.