Dirty Poker: The Poker Underworld Exposed [Paperback]

 

 

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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!

My advice is save yourself the money and simply Google the three types of cheating descibed in the book, Collusion, Card marking and Fake chips.

The rest is just personal stories and speculation based on this guys particular view of the world. He's a cheat, he thinks most everyone else must be too.

Interesting but not particulary educational.

Richard Marcus is the self styled World's greatest casino cheat and rose to fame through the publication of his first book, American Roulette which was the story behind his casino scamming over a significant amount of time. This book in itself is well worth a read with some fascinating anecdotes.

Dirty Poker is a continuance of the first book but concentrates on all types of Poker and is largely stories of Poker scams going back many years, including collusion between top players in major tournaments and how internet poker is rigged amongst other things.

Again, this was a book I really enjoyed although there is something at the back of my mind which thinks there is an element of literary license in this book. Throughout, very few names are given and the stories are surrounded by tales of mystery men. However, Marcus does have a gift for telling a tale and the segment on internet poker cheating has a ring of truth about it. In fact, I get the feeling all of it is true to some extent but has been embellished to make the story interesting. In this regard he has succeeded. Well worth a read.

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