Up Periscope - Beware of the wolfpacks

The warmth of the casino is a welcome relief from the cold night air and the friendly faces of the pretty female receptionists make it seem even warmer. The beautiful girls, the lovely paintings on the wall and the overall ambience of the place make you feel very welcome from the moment you walk in. Of course all this is a deliberate ploy to put you at ease so you will be more inclined to gamble with your hard earned money.

Was I here to play Roulette or Craps, don’t be silly. I was here for one purpose and one purpose only and that was to play poker and poker is business plain and simple. As you walk through the double doors into the gaming area you enter a beautiful air conditioned room and the soft lighting made the place seem cool and inviting almost like being under water.

The cardroom situated off to the right on a slightly elevated plateau seemed homely, hardly the place where underwater predators would lurk. But lurk they did and if you think that poker is always played on the level by respectable gentlemen then you are in serious need of a reality check buddy. Welcome to the world of the poker cheat and especially the “Wolfpacks”.

This term describes them adequately because they hunt in packs and select vulnerable isolated targets to prey on. “Flood tubes one and four, open outer doors, range to target one thousand metres…..fire”. Chip stack after chip stack sunk without trace and they show no mercy and take no survivors. They want your money and they want it now and they have numerous weapons at their disposal in order to get it.

I am lucky, the “sonar” on this particular ship is very experienced and sophisticated and I can steer around the potential danger spots and I also know the cheats very well which does tend to help. Others however are not so lucky, the new players fresh off the internet wanting to try their luck because they know a bit about poker are easy prey. I swear to god that I can almost see some of them holding an imaginary mouse as they get dealt a hand.

I walk up the three short steps into the cardroom and I get knowing glances from several of the tables. I say nothing as the boys are hard at work if you can call it work that is. If you think that cheating in poker in the 21st century involves marking cards, tinted lenses, switching decks and all the other stuff that you have probably heard about then you may be in for a surprise.

Card mechanics are like dinosaurs in the poker world, sure there are still some of them plying their trade but it is a dying art. The newer more subtle methods do not require anywhere near the same level of training and preparation and they are almost undetectable. Too many players are aware of the moves of a card mechanic for it to be of much use these days.

Most bricks and mortar games have house dealers and mechanics cannot get access to the cards unless they are active in private cash games. I know of one professional cheat known as “the darkness” who earns £1000 per week ($1700) just stealing chips from other players stacks. It amazes me at times just how careless players are with their chips. “Darky” is not even a winning player, he probably breaks even during the games but the profit comes from the angles that he pulls and the outright thievery. The fact that “the darkness” used to be a professional pickpocket is no surprise.

This is why many “pro’s” cannot hack it online, they simply cannot execute most of their moves in that arena. It is also a big mistake to think that professional poker players never cheat either. In the same way that it is a mistake to assume that wealthy people never steal. Many pro’s cheat because they simply enjoy the extra income that cheating brings.

One of the most effective and subtle tactics when it is done well is “best hand play”. Two or more team members signal their holdings to each other and they simply let the best hand play and the worst hand drops out. If the best hand then loses the pot to a non team member then that player has been denied what should have been a much bigger pot. This tactic can be very destructive in limit play where a good players edge is not that big to begin with.

I would normally avoid a place like this like the plague but someone owed me some money and I had word through the grapevine that they had been playing here recently. As they had not been answering their cell phone for ages then I had no choice but to look this guy up in person. If he could afford to play the cash games here then he could afford to pay me back the grand he owed me.

I could really make a killing in a place like this if it wasn’t for the f*****g teams. You don’t grass these people up either, not if you value your kneecaps. I played at the one table where I didn’t recognise any “wolves” although they stay clear of me anyway. The game was small (£100 minimum sit down with £5 blinds) although all the players had at least a grand on the table.

I looked across to my left and saw “Dr Death”, he was the leader of one of the most successful cheating teams in the area. He was a doctor of something but not medicine or so he claimed. I call him “Dr Death” because anyone who seems to play at his table ends up getting killed (in a poker sense of course). The “Doctor” is a very good player in his own right and really doesn’t need to do the things that he does in order to win but once a greedy b*****d always a greedy b*****d is what I say.

I know full well that he sometimes places passive “non players” into games so that he can change seats if he needs to get position on someone. There is a lot of pot-limit Omaha played here where position is very crucial in that game. One of his classic moves is to “whipsaw” someone in between two team members and they do this in games like hold’em where the overlay of a powerful hand over a mediocre hand is greater than at Omaha.

He may limp in for instance under the gun with aces and get three other limpers, his partner on the button will raise with junk to get the others involved for more money against a premium hand. I have seen a six handed game here with four “wolfpack” members in it……slaughter! Their signalling methods are very subtle and complex and are nearly always audible and not visual.

This prevents other players from spotting anything untoward. At that precise moment a tall skinny kid with a Scottish accent walks past me shaking his head and talking to no one in particular, “a canna believe ma feckin luck”. I give him that sympathetic look but he has just come off the “Doctors” table so I doubt that he has lost due to bad luck.

The time is ticking and it is 2.00 a.m, I have been here for four hours and still no sign of my man yet. The game is failing to keep my attention and my mind starts to wander as I look around the card room. It suddenly dawns on me just how much utter low life and people of ill repute are situated in this tiny area at this one time, but what does that make me? But I would rather not self analyse myself that way because I don’t like the truth.

I’ve just lost a pot where some knuckle head backdoors me which pisses me off more than it really should, I guess I just want my grand back. I am tired so I leave the game and cash in still minus the money that I came here for in the first place and if I don’t get it soon, I might just name and shame the SOB in my next article and I hope that he is reading this.

As I walk out of the casino, I take a quick look back at the card room. The “wolfpacks” are busy doing their thing and the “fish” really do not stand a chance……poor b******s.

This article was produced for Bluff Europe poker magazine and has been reproduced here with their kind permission.