Flat-Hand Luke
GGB’s editor discovers that modern card cheats have taken poker skullduggery to a whole new level—and suddenly his own seven-card stud trauma doesn’t seem quite so bad.
I just read that the poker room at South Point Casino, usually my Las Vegas home, has implemented “slide dealing” to prevent anyone from seeing the cards as they’re dealt, which has been more of a problem with “flat” dealing.
I meant the South Point is my Las Vegas home. I don’t live in their poker room. In fact, I don’t play poker, ever since I was cleaned out by this elderly woman at the Flamingo whose straight flush beat my full house.
It may have been the old Barbary Coast.
Unless it happened there, too. I choose not to remember traumatic events like this. All I can say is that it was in the mid-1990s. Believe it or not, it was seven-card stud. Yeah, the old-guy game. This was pre-Chris Moneymaker, and before millennials went crazy over No Limit Texas Hold’em.
Anyway, back to the South Point story about switching to slide dealing. Not being a poker guy, before I could even digest this morsel of information, I had to figure out what the heck they were talking about. Luckily, Card Player linked a video to the article on the magazine’s website.
Pitching the cards “flat” is how everybody does it at their dining room table. Sliding them means you put them flat on the table and slide the cards to the player.
My first thought, before really knowing what I was talking about (I have a lot of thoughts like that), was: How on Earth can anybody identify cards while they’re being dealt, and make decisions based on seeing cards for a nanosecond? Is it some kind of savant thing? Maybe X-ray vision, like Superman?
Well, almost. In this case, technology is Superman. The article cited the 2024 case of “casino gangsters” who scammed European casinos by reading poker cards as they were dealt.
(What happened to the days when “casino gangsters” meant Frank Costello and Bugsy Siegel? Ah, the old days…)
The article laid out the scheme in detail:
“French authorities said the suspects used a cell phone on the table during blackjack and poker games. They took low-angle photos of the card faces during dealing.
“The second player also had a cell phone taped to his stomach. He recorded images of the cards via tiny holes in his shirt. The pair also used microscopic earpieces so small that police said they could remove them only with a magnet. The two players’ cohorts, who stayed away from the casino, then received the images and told the players which cards the dealers were dealing.”
Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat. I can’t imagine such dexterity. I have trouble with twist-off caps. Let’s see—first, I have to tape a phone to my belly. Should I set the camera on photo or video? Do I have to keep pushing the shutter button? I could say I have indigestion. How do I contort myself to point at the dealer’s hands as he’s dealing? I’d probably look like I was having some sort of fit, or doing the Watusi.
And do I have to poke holes in a perfectly good sweater?
What about the receiving end? I can only imagine I’d repeat what the other casino gangster said into my microscopic earpiece. “Seven of clubs? Got it.” “Was that the King of hearts or diamonds?”
Police claim the team bilked one French casino for €200,000 over several visits. Oh, well. We can take solace in the fact that there are casino gangsters out there with hearing loss from tiny earplugs stuck in their heads and hunks of magnet in their earholes.
I don’t see a gang this sophisticated taking over the poker room at the South Point. The highest poker room win at the casino was $526,283, for someone who hit the Pai Gow Progressive with a seven-card straight flush in December 2025. Most regular table pots are a fraction of that.
Incidentally, I knew about that poker room win offhand. No way did I ask an AI search assistant what the highest win was in the poker room at the South Point. Hey, I’m a professional.)
In any event, I’m glad I’m a craps player. No one’s reading the result of my dice while they’re in the air and calculating where they’re going to land. Even if they did, there would be no way for the casino gangsters to switch to “No Pass” if it’s a seven. I don’t care how many holes they punch in their sweater.
Maybe I’ll go back to playing poker the next time I’m at the South Point. As long as there’s no flat-dealing going on. Otherwise, I’m out of there.
Where’s the seven-card stud table?
