Ironically it’s not always the fairly inexperienced staff they’ll go for, since the rookie dealer is concentrating hard on all the security procedures they have been taught, and supervisory staff usually focus their attention on the newbies. The key to all of this is knowing where the staff are looking and what they’re paying attention to. The winning cash chip bet is then claimed by the guy sitting quietly near the wheel, so it looks like they couldn’t possibly have been late betting.

As the ball drops and the dealer looks into the wheel to see the winning number, the mechanic will drop his cash chips, with some stolen colour chips (the “Top hat”) on top of them, then subtly leave the table. What generally happens is that as the ball is about to drop, the distractors go to work, while the mechanic is placing a few late bets around. The kind of hectic roulette layout where cheat moves can flourish The other will be the guy who picks up the winnings, who throughout the spin will be sitting quietly well away from the actual cheat move (which usually occurs in the high numbers, at the end of the table furthest from the wheel and thus hardest for the staff to see). Two might be the distractors – maybe leaning across the table as the ball drops, while one will be the “mechanic”, who actually places the bet, perhaps two £25 chips, on the winning number (for a £1750 score, not bad). In practise there’s a lot more to it – generally there will be a team of players, who have various jobs. Top Hatting on roulette is simple in principle – the player or team of players place chips on the winning number after the ball drops and settles in the pocket. In casinos, there best known form of past posting is generally known as “Top Hatting”.

This is, simply put, placing a bet after knowing what the result is – I think the name comes from horse racing (cf the movie “The Sting”) where people find a way to get a bet on after the race has been run, before the bookie or person accepting the bet realises.

The most common and simple version of cheating is Past Posting. Mind, it’s not like there aren’t quite a few forms of cheating that merit a mention too, so let’s get started. This is a separate post from the one about card counting – I don’t want to kick off big debate about whether card counting is cheating or not, it’s more that counting merits its own post as there’s quite a bit of depth to go into. Ok, so they probably won’t send in the armed police, but you still don’t want to mess around

Casino table game cheating