A poker dealer at a Florida racetrack casino has been been charged with felony fraud after being caught on CCTV stacking the deck, which allowed an ex-employee win almost $30,000.
30-year old Tishun Butler, a dealer at Derby Lane racino (a popular combination of racetrack and casino) in St. Petersburg, Florida is alleged to have been caught on surveillance video ‘placing the hand’s winning card between the burn card and the losing card’ according to wfla.com.
He then ‘allegedly manipulating the cards to give the appearance he was shuffling, while hiding the action from the designated player’ and the criminal charges claim that an ex-employee who was said to be in on the fraud ‘maxed out his bets in the second set’.
With a maximum bet of $2,000, the alleged accomplice cashed out $29,600 but denies cheating and has yet to be charged in connection with the incident, although dealer Butler is charged with ‘scheming to defraud (more than $20,000, less than $50,000),’ which as Cardschat.com reported is ‘a second-degree felony and carries up to 15 years in prison and $10,000 in fines’.
They also point out that Butler was previously charged with ‘possession of cannabis’ and ‘driving with licence cancelled, suspended or revoked’, at the time of arrest in 2015 listing his employer as ‘Derby Lane’ and his occupation as ‘dog walker’.
The false shuffle is almost as old as decks of cards themselves, often the first trick any aspiring amateur magician will learn. It has also, however, been the source of many huge scams throughout the history of card games.
In 2009, the San Diego Union-tribune reported on a massive case of ‘false shuffling’, their intro exposing just how widespread it was…
CHEATING SCHEME BY THE NUMBERS
- 25: Casinos targeted over five years
- $7 million: Amount authorities say was stolen
- 30: Conspirators alleged to have been involved
- $868,000: How much they won in 90 minutes at one casino
- SOURCE: Federal court documents’
44-year-old Phuong Quoc Truong, better known as Pai Gow John, was one of the ringleaders for what was described as ‘one of the biggest, most audacious card-cheating rings in modern history’.
Jeff Murphy, a casino security expert in Oregon, stated at the time:
“In the 20 years I've been in the business, I haven't seen anything this big, this well-orchestrated, this successful. It was simple. That may have been the beauty of it.”
According to the Union-Tribune, ‘The ring, based in San Diego, went so far as to bribe dealers in other states and fly them here for training in the shuffle. They sent scouts to Mississippi to assess a casino's vulnerabilities to the trick.’
They added, ‘When everything was set, they would move in and occupy several seats at a table run by a bribed dealer. They would bet like they knew what cards were coming — which, thanks to the false shuffle, they did. At one casino in Indiana, at mini-baccarat, they won $868,000 in 90 minutes.’
Also in 2009, four members of the ‘Tran Organization’ were sentenced for a high-tech ‘mission impossible version of the "false shuffle”, using hidden transmitters and card predicting software to cheat casinos across the U.S. and Canada’, with prosecutors alleging that they made up to $2.5 million from their shuffling scheme.