A dealer sleighting the pickup!

Hi all, I'm in venue now (and there's a Rhino walking around someplace) on a seriously strange night.

I got absolutely hammered in one store, moved out of town to another smaller one, and gloriosky, a pitch game very sequenceable. Now it was my turn to wield the hammer, got back almost all of what I lost in the last place.

After a bit of this a new dealer came back, an old mousy looking guy, and to my delight his riffle was the poorest of them all. But as I watched him pick up the cards, I discovered he was sleighting the aces back into the discards, either tucking it in someplace other than where it was supposed to go, or moving another card over the key that was obscured by his hand. At first I thought it was just a coincidence, then I noticed only aces were treated like this and none of the other dealers were doing it. Due to playing conditions I could not switch tables.

Now the conventional wisdom is not to play with any dealer who is sleighting anything, anywhere, so I dropped my bet and kept my eye on him. When he went on break the little vermin stood off to the side smoking a cigarette, glaring at me, and I went ape on his relief, got all my money back then some using a combination of counting and sequencing and a heavy spread. Then I got the hell out of there, but I'm planning on going back tomorrow quite violently.

So what's the remedy for a dealer who does sleights when picking up the cards? Is this illegal? I didn't want to complain about it to avoid letting him be sure I was doing what they thought I was doing.

When his shift is over, follow him out and beat the crap out of him

Alright AM,
I don't think you have any recourse legally as i'm fairly sure that pick-up/shuffle proceduer is set by the house and can be changed at will. It does seem odd that he's sleighting the A's rather than just adding a number of strips to the shuffle, but that just shows ignorance as to the nature of the game.
An idea that you could use to make his life somewhat more uncomfortable would be to wait for a round with an A in it that you got a 4 or 5 card 22. Now after the rounds complete and the cards have been cleared, ask him to back out the cards (say that you think he mis-paid you and that you should have won that round). If he's destroying the sequence, he'll have great difficulty backing out the cards making him look bad and possibly discouraging him from breaking the normal pick-up proceduer.
It's not going to happen very often, but if you can do this a couple of times i'm sure he'll start feeling pretty irritated as he's going to look like an idiot.
Hope this helps mate.

RJT.

RJT said:

Alright AM,
I don't think you have any recourse legally as i'm fairly sure that pick-up/shuffle proceduer is set by the house and can be changed at will. It does seem odd that he's sleighting the A's rather than just adding a number of strips to the shuffle, but that just shows ignorance as to the nature of the game.
An idea that you could use to make his life somewhat more uncomfortable would be to wait for a round with an A in it that you got a 4 or 5 card 22. Now after the rounds complete and the cards have been cleared, ask him to back out the cards (say that you think he mis-paid you and that you should have won that round). If he's destroying the sequence, he'll have great difficulty backing out the cards making him look bad and possibly discouraging him from breaking the normal pick-up proceduer.
It's not going to happen very often, but if you can do this a couple of times i'm sure he'll start feeling pretty irritated as he's going to look like an idiot.
Hope this helps mate.

RJT.

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That's a good idea. Most casinos have a shuffle procedure that a dealer is not permitted to deviate from, and also a pickup procedure. So adding a step to the house shuffle would get him in trouble, but a sleight on the pickup could be easily seen as inadvertant. It looked like he was trying to disguise the sleight, Three-Card Monte style, so that I would get a false key card. I didn't let him get away with that and the keys I recorded still worked, I was just getting too few of them.

RJT's idea is perfect in my opinion

The procedure in every house, I think is designed so the dealer can back out the cards from the discard tray and recreate the hand. If the dealer can not do this it will force the pit to call the eye and perhaps after a few of these the dealer will be written up for procedural failure, which is extremely important to his bosses.
One backup of the cards should fix your problem but if it does not, then you know he has been instructed to do this perhaps in an attempt to keep aces out of play.

ihate17

I told you they cheat all the time !