This wacky 'Raymer robbed' story
 

Another 2+2 steal, a specialty of mine. You guys catch this one? Anyone heard of this guy Deen Cassin? Raymer posts later in the thread, and verifies most of the story, but it sounds rather bizarre.

he seriously has agressions issues - lol :eek:

lol yeah what he says at the end is especially weird...

Thanks for the link dude, very interesting

I like how he denies being portly and replaces it with fat :P the mans got spirit. Sucks that theres idiots like that out there, but kudos to fossilman for making a stand.

BTW notice how he calculated his odds here? Man, thats a poker player lol

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The whole thing sounds really weird TBH

im high while reading this and laughing my ass off. i cant see greg raymer ever fucking anyone up.

i havent read it yet, but that part of it that is quoted is hilarious.

i am not sure that i can see raymer fucking anyone up, but i figure he could hire someone to do it at this point in his life.

i have to assume that anyone who would attempt to rob someone outside a room in the bellagio is somewhat dumb/desperate to begin with, and that they didnt exactly have anything planned out.

they probably expected no resistance when they pulled out the gun, and when raymer resisted at all, they werent going to shoot him, so they split.

dumbasses. they should have at least known that he probably has a box in the poker room for his money. either that, or he busted out in the semi-big game (last time i was there he wasnt playing 4k-8k, he was a step below. probably 2k-4k, but i couldnt see the table limit)

one thing i will say, i personally think he was very stupid to fight back someone holding a pistol - he said hes a family man so why is he taking such a risk?. However, (and this is a contridiction - big time - lol !) a big part of me admires him for taking a stand against these a'holes. He didnt let them push him around

im going to vegas for the first time next june - surely the security in the casinos is tight as hell. How did someone get all the way into the hotel with a gun???

honestly, the security isnt that tight at all. i was at the bellagio two weeks ago, and the only obvious security was for parking my car. there were other security guards around, but it wouldnt have been particularly difficult to sneak something by them. it would have been easy to get a gun in there, unless they have some sort of x-ray scanning device in each entrance, which i doubt.

in the 2+2 thread there is a lot of talk about how casino security isnt nearly as tight as you would think, and they are right. there may be cameras everywhere, but i think that they catch significantly less than you might think. the numerous travel channel shows about catching cheaters are presumably paid for by the caisno industry in order to discourage cheaters, and the cameras may be able to catch everything that goes on, but they surely dont actually catch everything.

Isn't that Terry Benedict's casino? The security looked pretty tight in Ocean's 11!

(it's a joke, I promise!)

I'm not so sure ...
 

I'm sure it varies, but as a whole, I imagine security is pretty damn tight.

A friend of mine is a pretty good card counter. One trip he overdid it at Mirage, and made $7g before they made him quit. Two years later, with different color hair, he sat down at an MGM blackjack table, and not 10 minutes went by before the pit boss told him he needed to cash out. The good news is he is still welcome to play Craps/Poker or any other game other than blackjack.

i think that the casinos have a much higher interest in blackjack players, just because the strategies for beating the game are so well known. also, i dont doubt that the casinos have the ability to watch you, it is just that there is so much going on that they cant possibly watch everyone at once. i think that is really a myth propagated by the casino industry in their shows on the travel channel.

plus, the hair color isnt exactly th best disguise around.

That's actually a pretty sweet story. Does anyone else find it at least a little fucked up that casinos can do this? I mean if you're going to open a casino ie a place built solely for gambling, doesn't it stand to reason that you should have to gamble yourself when that 1% of your visitors finds a way to turn the odds around into their favor, especially when its only done in one single game. I can understand where they're coming from, but I just think its messed up that they can say that you can't play their games unless the odds are in their favor. Just sounds like the annoying kid you used to know in elementary school to me.

it is annoying that the casinos frown on legal activities like card counting. so few people can actually count cards well enough to give them a real edge over the house that it is really an insignificant concern for them. i dont think that you should be allowed to use a team approach to bj, but if a single person wants to count cards then it should be allowed.

i believe that george maloof, the owner of the palms, said that he doesnt care if anyone counts cards there. it provides good advertising for th ecasino, and the economic impact is so minimal that he will overlook it. additionally, they cant bar you from counting cards in atlantic city, but they combat the counters by restricting the maximum bet size for you.

how exactly do they know if someone is counting cards - i know the theory behind counting cards but how does the casino company know a counter from someone who is just being lucky

he doesnt nod his head when hes counting does he - lol ;)

i think that they just watch very closely. obviously they dont see anyone counting the cards specifically, but what they do see is how the player varies his bets as you progress through the shoe. i would assume that if they see you increase your bet significantly in some sort of pattern, they will bar you for counting cards.

of course, there are ways around this, but most people who try to count cards really do not swing the game into their advantage because they do not know how to adjust their bet without getting labelled a counter.

More on card counting
 

We are a little off-topic, and might want to start a new thread ...

Card counting is actually not that complex, though I am unable to do it (one cocktail waitress bends over, and I've lost the count.) The problem is that until the count swings very high, your edge is not that great. My buddy was playing a $25 table, and treading water, when all of a sudden, they did a new shoe, and the count just happened to skyrocket in his favor. He started betting $500 a hand, and made his 7 grand pretty quick. Count fell back to earth, and so did his betting. He might as well have been holding a neon sign as to what he was doing.

The definitive card counting story is "Bringing Down the House" about the MIT syndicate who took Vegas for millions. It's a great read.

that is pretty much a telltale sign of an amateur card counter, they move their bet between the table min and max, but never in between. it is just far too obvious that they are counting.

i know one of the people that was in a bj team at MIT, and he has some great stories about team play all over the world. very cool stuff, but some of it would make you shit your pants in fear.

I'm willing to shit my pants. Gotta take a dump anyway. Let's here a story.

one of the good stories revolves around how you actually get the money to the casinos . because it is illegal under US law to fly with more than 10k on you (i believe that this is part of the war on drugs, or something asinine like that), the players had to come up with a creative way to get the money to vegas. so what tey often did was strap 50k to their chest with tape, and then bundle up to disguise their extra bulk. he said that going through customs with that money so conspicuously taped there was nerve wracking, just because the consequences from the us govt are reasonably severe.

his other stories revolve around getting backroomed, particularly when they were think out of the country. they are fairly similar to what is talked about in bringing the down the house, so i wont repeat them here, but the idea of being in some quasi-regulated costa rican casino and getting nailed by the griffin guys, who flew there specifically in pursuit of you is pretty serious.

This is a great thread.

BTW... my take on card counting - I think it's a shame that casinos won't allow (much of) this, but I certainly don't blame them. They are in business to make money, and by allowing card counting... well, that would be bad business. It's great that there is a way for smart people to beat a game (until they are noticed), but I understand that casinos can bar anyone from playing anything for any reason. They are private establishments, and that is their right.

A thing of the past ...
 

TP, you'll be in Vegas in a couple of weeks, right? Let us know how many automatic shuffling machines are in place -- I haven't played BJ in a while, but I seem to remember them being more and more common. If the dealers shuffle after every few hands, card counting is no more

well, card counting can still work, but advanced tactics like shuffle tracking will be completely gone. this has already been combatted with thin cuts of the shoe, but the shuffle machines definitely change the game for the better counters.

counting cards will still be effective, but with thinner cuts the count may not be quite as representative of what cards you should expect to see later on in te shoe.

It took long enough ...
 

but the official news media has finally picked up this story.

Cool,

But y'know Greg has been playing high level poker for a long time now right? I'm sure he has seen/experienced some things even wilder than this. Isn't he writing a book?

Cheers,

Gutzz

PS. Course I'm sure some other pros have some real crazy stories to tell. Mike M. is the first one that comes to mind (he's in jail right?).

Tool
 

If I win 5 million, I am not going to risk my life for 1K. Sorry. That is STUPID.
Hire a detective to find the robber and kick his ass or something.

He explained his logic in the 2+2 thread, and I liked it. Basically, he figured his greatest chance to survive was to fight back right then. If he didn't, once they had him subdued, he thought it would be easy for them to kill him, and he wouldn't be able to do anything about it.

i think that his logic was pretty good as well. he has a pretty bad shot once he subdues to the robbers, and essentially he is at their mercy.

in poker terms, he bluff raised them on the flop, and they laid the hand down.

Caught!
 

Link courtesy of Iggy.

As far as counting goes...I was a card counter in the mid-80's. (I dropped out of UNLV to do it after meeting some pros.) Before I switched to poker, I got barred once, backroomed once, and shuffled up on just about everywhere. Managed to stay out of the Griffin book by pure luck.

Honestly, I hated the casinos. I couldn't stand the fact that they made it clear that you weren't allowed to THINK before you placed a bet. Made me nuts. Bill Maher made a joke recently about Vegas security: "In Vegas you can't do MATH in your HEAD without Joe Pesci dragging you out to the Desert."

The funny thing is that counting is really, really easy. Much easier than poker. All it is, essentially, is roughly tracking the ratio of big cards to not big cards. (By adding or subtracting 1 to a running count in your head) If the deck is higher in big cards you have the advantage. If it is full of little cards, the house has the advantage. You bet more when you have the advantage, less when they do. It's pretty much that simple. And boring. God is it boring. If it wasn't for endlessly waiting for them to spot you, you'd get no excitement at all. And all for an advantage of--if you are careful--maybe 1%.

What's great about poker is that, in so many cases, there may not be a right answer. The difference between one choice and another is sometimes debatable. In blackjack there is only math, and your choice is either right, or wrong. Boring. Very mechanical.

Spotting a card counter is easy. If a bunch of little cards come out and a guy raises his bet, he's probably a counter. Plus, most of the casinos have counters working for them. If they think someone is counting, they'll just count along with him until they are sure. I had a teammate who got barred from the Barbary Coast (Is that even still there?) in under 10 minutes.

In my case, back then, I was very young, had long hair and glasses and looked kinda smart. Before I even sat down, if you asked the pit boss what a card counter looked like, he'd have pointed to me and 'hey, do you see that guy....'

Btw, the reason they went to a multi-deck shoe wasn't to make it harder to count, but to even out the statistical anomalies that make counting profitable. With a multi-deck shoe, and the cut card in the middle, there is a good chance you're not going to get to a particulary high count (or low count, for that matter) situation.

Sorry for the long (and fairly off-topic) post...

Also, as to the Raymer thing...the guy who taught me to play hold em--a pro stud player--got robbed at gunpoint coming out of the front of the Riv once after cashing out with about $5,000. He always believed it was an inside job.

Interesting post, Dante. Thanks.