Poker Cheat Caught
Introduction
It’s not very often these days that you hear of a poker cheat being caught, let alone a poker cheat being caught in one of the very best poker rooms in the country. But, the fact that the poker room concerned is remaining tight lipped about what happened must only confirm how embarrassed they are about it and the damage it could do to their reputation.
What happened
The Bellagio in Las Vegas - home to poker fans top spot - Bobby's Room
Even better, or worse for the poker room, was that the cheating wasn’t done by a poker player – but by the poker dealer. The allegation, so far neither confirmed nor denied, is that last week a dealer somehow took 1k chips from the pot at the table – in the world famous and elite Bobby’s Room, inside the Bellagio on the Las Vegas Strip. The cheat, or rather theft, happened when a pot was split and the dealer either palmed the chips until he could get them into a pocket or, more likely, used a hold-out of some sort, such as those used by poker cheats storing cards up their sleeves. This latter process is the more likely of the two as the dealer would have to turn his hands over having touched the chips anyway. The lack of communication from the Bellagio isn’t helping all of the speculation that’s going on around this incidence. Given that an employee was arrested at Bobby’s Room last week there must be something afoot there, that they really ought to clarify.
The Pitbull conspiracy
It’s almost worthy of a conspiracy theory that the Bellagio incident occurred in the same week that the ongoing concerns about the online poker game website Pitbull, re-emerged. Pitbull has been accused of various things from software glitches (not really a cheating issue is it) to stack shaving which, if proven, will be very serious indeed. However, has the Bellagio incident merely been floated in the media to indicate that ‘bricks-and-mortar’ poker rooms are just as susceptible to cheating from errant employees as any of the online poker rooms?