Two Men Cheated Las Vegas Blackjack Tables for Years—and Were Never Caught.

In the glittering shadows of 1980s Las Vegas, Dustin Marks and his agent, known only as The Kaiser, share the untold story of how they cheated the game of blackjack at several Las Vegas casinos.

This is a world of hidden moves, extreme confidence, and high-stakes deception — where fortunes were made in plain sight, and one wrong move could mean a trip to the desert.

A story of risk, nerve, and incredible winnings… without ever getting caught.

You can watch the episode here: https://www.youtube.com/@cheatingatblackjack
This is the real work!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:38

It's simple. Nothing beats the thrill of doing something you're not supposed to be doing and getting away with it. You know the feeling, you've had it before. Now imagine taking that to the blackjack table. For most, it's just a fantasy. But for us, it was a reality. This is cheating at blackjack. I'm the Kaiser, and this is our host, Dustin Marks.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Oh, welcome. I am Dustin Marks. And in this podcast, you're going to discover how the Kaiser and I cheated the game of blackjack at several Las Vegas casinos back in the 80s. You'll see the exact moves we did, but more importantly, you'll understand the psychology we employ to ensure that we were never caught. Along the way, you're going to find out some interesting stories we have.

SPEAKER_00 1:30

So, you know, the first question on my mind, which I know the answer to, but they don't is, yeah, psych hole. Is that what are you? I mean, what is your background? What is it, what do you have that makes you the expert?

SPEAKER_01 1:46

I uh wrote Cheating at Blackjack and Cheating at Blackjack Squared. I also starred in the DVD, Cheating at Blackjack The Real Work. I was uh on numerous TV shows, I've been on podcasts, I've been on a lot of different media. So I have a well-rounded background, and I've also consulted casinos. How about I want you to share your background?

SPEAKER_00 2:09

I got in this uh I have no credentials. Actually, I have a magic background. I started in magic, I performed magic, and also I'm in the casino industry. I've been in the casino industry for about 50 years. Wow. So I started as a lowly dealer, and now I'm an executive. So that is my big background. I know how they think, work, what they look for, what they don't look for, the laziness. I know all the insight about the inside casino. So that is my background, and I have the magic uh skills to get me through.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

So you know, I got a question for you. How'd you get into magic? Because a lot of our listeners are probably magicians.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

I got into magic. That's uh boy, I'm trying to nail it down. I got into magic because uh my ex-father-in-law was a magician. Oh, okay. He was one of the first trademark show magicians, along with another, that started that whole industry. So through him, I started picking up how to do magic, started learning the sleight of hand and practice religiously. He threw me to the wolves one day and brought over big names and said, Hey, do do a trick. It was Paul Harris, Louis Simonov, and Daniel Cross.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:22

Okay, Daniel Cross was the bar magician at the Desert Inn, which was a high-end casino. Yes, it was. And so, of course, the rest of you all know, and I had to do the stupid packet a trick, and I was shaking so bad. It was horrible, but that got me the bug and uh went on forever. That's how I started cheating casinos. That's a hell of a segue.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

So, how did you get into it?

SPEAKER_01 3:47

Probably like a lot of our audience, I was a little seven-year-old kid, and my father took me to a uh amateur magician, friend of the family type thing. Yeah, I was seven, and he was seventy. And if you can remember back when you're seven, everybody looks old.

SPEAKER_00 4:03

Especially 70.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Yeah. But the minute he got those cards in his hand, he became young again. And something clicked in my brain, and it's never stopped clicking. So, like a lot of it.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

It's like a card in a spoke.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Yeah, exactly. Remember those? Oh, yeah. Better in your fingers and caught in there.

SPEAKER_00 4:21

It was the only thing cards were used for at that time in my life. Now they make money. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

And then what I had to do is I had to get my parents taking me to the local library and check out books on card magic. And no YouTube or even VHS T.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

Back in the days when you had to crack a book to learn how to do anything, unlike today. You had to actually read.

SPEAKER_01 4:42

And you probably remember those books back then. Maybe the thinking was great, but the writing wasn't all that great.

SPEAKER_00 4:49

Magicians are great at entertaining and fooliness, but the writing is not all that wonderful. You had to guess half the time what they were trying to get at. Maybe that was the mystique or the mystery. Possibly. If you could figure it out, you're a magician. So during your uh how long did you do this?

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Four years, and I would guess I was involved in about 500 different cheating plays.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

Over four years, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

Yeah. Now you were my partner a lot of the time. So how many cheating plays do you think you were?

SPEAKER_00 5:22

Though I didn't have the stay you had, I only about a year and a half. I was only in it for about a year and a half, and during that time I'd say about 150 between you and my other agents. That's still a lot. It was a nice chunk of change. And it made me to it brought me to a point where I could have afforded my used VW bug. It was great. It was awesome. So now you're well established. No one knows about me until now.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 5:48

So do I have to worry about the Keystone cops busting in here and putting bracelets on me and hauling me away to funny. They'll be here in about two minutes. So let's make this quick. Let's make this real quick.

SPEAKER_01 6:00

No, you don't. And the reason you don't is statute of limitations. Ah. Which are only three years in the state of Nevada. Cheating a casino.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

So we're kind of like past that little.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

About 30 plus years.

SPEAKER_00 6:15

So you got into how did you get? I mean, you got the magic background, but how did you gear towards cheating? I mean, it wasn't like you went to high school, went to your career class.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

Not a day in high school.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

I don't remember high school. You filled out that form. What do you want to do for a living? And I'm sure there wasn't a box that's cheat at blackjack.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

No, there wasn't.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

So how did you how did you go this route?

SPEAKER_01 6:40

Well, as you remember, Gary Darwin's Magic Club meeting. That's where we met. We'll get into that. But I went there, met a bunch of great magicians, very talented.

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Oh God, they were all here.

SPEAKER_01 6:53

And then I started wondering, you know, who was the very best with a deck of cards? So I asked around, heard names, all of them I either knew personally or knew of, but then there was one name I never heard of before, and they I'll call him Mr. CC. And when they talked about him, it's kind of in a low whisper. Whenever I'd look around. And they said this guy was the best with a deck of cards, especially gambling moves. That intrigued me. However, never came to the magic meetings. It's kind of reclusive. So I went searching for the case.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

It stands for chicken courageous.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

Actually, you know what it stands for? Did I ever tell you, sir? Yeah. Well, I'll share it because it's not that big a deal. Captain Crunch. Captain Crunch. Which is ironic because some of our listeners may know that another very famous person was called Captain Crunch, one of the very first hackers. Way back in the 60s. I don't know why these guys got into it, but they were hacking the payphones. They wanted to make free payphone calls. I remember those days. And the story was there's a whistle in the Captain Crunch serial. And I don't know how this guy figured out, but he blew it into a payphone and he got the dial phone. Free phone calls. So Captain Crunch is very talented in multidisciplines.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Whistleblowing and cheating. Yes. Wow, that is that is really interesting.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Isn't that crazy? Now, how'd you get into the dark art of cheating?

SPEAKER_00 8:27

Well, well, you know, I went to the night school over at Dark Arts and learned how to cheat. No, I was actually I was actually poached. Can you imagine who poached me?

SPEAKER_01 8:37

I love that word poach, by the way. That's a good word. Word of the day.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

Here's how this all transpired in a quick 175,000-word essay. Is that I was a dice dealer. I dealt the game of craps, and that's all I did. That's all I knew how to do. So they come to me, him and his team, come to me and say, hey, look, we want to do a dice play. So we decided we come up with this uh method of doing a pass post play, which in other words means we're betting on a number of half it's already been rolled with a little bit of a variation. So as it comes down to it, we throw it, and so the odds of winning were really, really good. And we had more ways to win than lose by far. Yeah, we made it to everything. There was a caveat. After you're past posting, I picked the number that you know wouldn't lose our money, and we ended up losing the money. Now, originally the play was supposed to be for $600, I'm in for $200. When the money hit the layout, it spread across the layout. There was more than $600 there. There was $1,800 just under the limit. So the first option didn't pan out. We had to actually gamble that $1,800.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

And I almost had a heart attack because I don't like to gamble. Right.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

So we were gambling. It wasn't a cheat now. We're playing legit. Happens that we lost. So now I'm stuck $600 for trying to cheat. What a you would think that would teach me a lesson. It doesn't pay.

SPEAKER_01 10:13

Not a great start.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

It didn't convince me very well. But then as they explained what they were doing and the skills that was required to do that, which I checked both boxes, I was in. And that's how I got like I said, I was poached. I got poached to do one thing and then end up doing the better thing.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

And I remember that Geyser was a dice dealer, and we wanted him to be a blackjack dealer. So he's actually dealing both games. So I told him to tell the bosses, hey, my back hurts. Can you get me off the crap game and on to blackjack?

unknown 10:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

And it worked pretty well. It worked pretty well, yeah. They they pretty much accommodated me, a little to their knowledge, that they shouldn't have. So you did it for four years. I did it for roughly a year and a half, and we each had our own people. Mostly it was you and I banging off of each other. Don't take that literally. But um why did you why did you give it all up? I mean, really, this is just gravy, pure profit. It was, however, had to be.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

And he was kind of good at it. Yeah. I'd been at it for four years, and the person who turned me out did get popped uh a play that luckily I was not involved with. But then they knew I knew him. And I thought, you know, I had a long run, successful, never got caught. This would be a great time to retire.

SPEAKER_00 11:39

So you you were more or less guilty by association, possibly.

SPEAKER_01 11:43

Possibly. You know, I figured then they're gonna really start watching me. And then it's time.

SPEAKER_00 11:48

It's time. Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 11:49

That's how I got out, and I think it was a good move. Yeah, it was a smart move.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

I mean, it's the one thing we learned in our time together doing this is that we never we never pushed our luck. We didn't sit there and say, well, one more, or two more.

SPEAKER_01 12:03

You have a great point.

SPEAKER_00 12:04

And we we knew when to stop, and as he points out, it was time, and we never pushed the issue because that's you get into trouble when you do that. So we worked very well together. We weren't greedy and we just it was time. How did you retire? Well, since you decided you no longer wanted to play, you were a good portion of my income. I had other agents that came in.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

Well, you know what? Why don't you tell them what an agent is? Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

That is a kind of odd word. I had uh people who would come in and play the game of blackjack, and I would dump money to them. I would give them winning hands. So they were the ones that took the money off the blackjack table. And again, we meet up in a dark alley in a some speakeasy and split it up. And so, no, it wasn't really quite that. We just split the money.

SPEAKER_01 12:44

But I want to interject. If he was dealing, I was playing.

SPEAKER_00 12:48

We didn't know each other. Yeah, we were complaining. It was it was more of a hate because if you're a dealer and you have someone like him come up who wins a lot of money and doesn't tip, we automatically hate you. Yeah, that's standard. We wanted nothing to do with you. We wanted to beat the living shit out of you. Take every dollar you had. Well, he took every dollar I had. So that was the attitude. We didn't I didn't like him, and he was a stiff, so we didn't know each other, and we played it off very well. But when you went away, my other agents they continued, but with personal life and other things, they just kind of like you know, life got a hold of him and took him by a different direction. So therefore it was it was time to stop.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

So well, you made a good decision too.

SPEAKER_00 13:33

I made a very good decision because I wasn't going to try to recruit others. A it's very time-consuming, and and you have to trust these people.

SPEAKER_01 13:43

And you know, that's a great point. We trust it, not just each other, but everybody in the group, as far as the small group. I never had a question about anybody, did you?

SPEAKER_00 13:53

No, never. No. I mean, literally, you're taking you're giving this person thousands of dollars to take away somewhere. And if he doesn't meet up at point A when he's supposed to with half your goodies, then you're screwed.

SPEAKER_01 14:10

And you know, there was no way to know how much you want. Not really, no. Because I wasn't going to try to keep track of that and deal the game and cheat, because that would be a tell. There'd be too much going on. Too much going on.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

You're too you're preoccupied with the player rather than the game. Your only focus as a dealer is to focus on the game and deal. Yeah, that's if you're spending too much time worrying about how much he's that's the boss's job to sweat the money, not the dealer. You know, if the if he's if my agent is winning, I'm not gonna sweat it. I hate the guy. He's not tipping. The foreman are the ones that are gonna keep an eye on all that stuff. So I never paid attention. I didn't want to be part of that circle because that would draw attention to me. Because dealers don't do that.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

And that's a trust issue, then it's a trust issue. We have a lot of trust in it. So we didn't have to do that, and that would have that would have been terrible. Have somebody on the team, we never know. A, if we're gonna get the correct chop, and two, are they gonna roll on us? That would have been horrible.

SPEAKER_00 15:04

That would have been horrible. Yeah. So that that was where the trust really came in. And that's why the our groups were very tight and very small, because you just can't find these guys now. Hey, Bob, is that your name, Bob? Come with me and just sit here and collect all my money. Oh, by the way, give me half when we're all done. It just doesn't work that way. No. Uh, also to that point, the reason why is we'd spend a lot of time working together, practicing, and which we'll get into in future episodes because there's a lot of work involved in this. We just sit down and say, hey, here's you win. There is a lot, a lot of practicing going on. It's like you're performing, you have to be very good at it.

SPEAKER_01 15:44

Do you remember my blackjack table at the yeah? So he would come over, we'd practice, I would be the dealer, and he would be the agent, and then vice versa. So it got, we got, I mean, really good.

SPEAKER_00 15:57

Yeah, we had to practice a lot.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

And we had tables and in the beginning, once we were really rolling, then we had it we had it down pretty much as good as it could be.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

It it doesn't get much better than what we had. No, because it was think of it this way it's like when you flip on a light, all you see is light. You don't see all the mechanics and the electricity flowing around doing all this stuff and all that. He invented it. If you flip the switch, you get light. We were that way. As soon as we sat down, we had the skills to cheat. We did it was second nature. We didn't even ask why. We just took the money and took it and run. So we have a lot of information coming up.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

I mean this is this now he's asking. I do, he don't, but no, he's correct.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

We have a this isn't just sit down and one little thing. There's a lot. So there's a lot of these moves and how we set it up, how we played, the different angles we had to look for and account for. So there's a lot of information that's gonna fill a lot of these podcasts. And if you have the least bit of um interest. And thank you. It's a great word, interest. I was thinking more of interest. You would you would want to see these, so definitely subscribe. You're you're not gonna miss out on this. It's great stuff. So here is a great thing. You know what? You should, you know, between you and I, we have like a billion stories. Tell me one of your stories.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

Well, when I played, I always wore a hat, thinking maybe rightly so or wrongly, that surveillance wouldn't be able to see my eyes. And the Kaiser here never wore a hat, and I never knew why. So one day I said, you know, wear a hat. I could tell he didn't want to. I said, wear a hat. I think it'd, you know, be more deceptive. Well, I'm dealing, I know he's coming in, I look up and I see this. Now, doesn't this guy look like he'd steal a hot stove in July?

SPEAKER_00 17:53

I look so inconspicuous. I blend in so well with the rest of the crowd. Yeah. You can see hats don't work for me.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Once I saw that, as soon as I could talk to him, I told him never wear a hat again.

SPEAKER_00 18:07

That was probably the only time I've worn a cap. Period. I mean, really, this is a good look. This is awesome. I mean, I can't see shit, but it looks good.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

Oh, yeah. But that's one of the many, many stories. We'll actually call it story time, where or shorty time, because it'll be a quick little story from the old days.

SPEAKER_00 18:28

Oh, we have a lot of them. I mean, as well oiled as we look like we are. Well, things never go the way they're up quite a few times, which was interesting. How we got out of it.

SPEAKER_01 18:40

That's how professionals uh work. Yeah, exactly. They're able to adapt to situations instead of losing it or you know, running out the door, etc.

unknown 18:52

I'm scared.

SPEAKER_00 18:54

It just doesn't work that way. No, so that's cool. That is awesome. What else we got going on? Do you know what? Do me a favor. Sure. Show me a trick. Okay. This is gonna be a little magic moment. You know, many of you are gonna are are going to be. You are magicians. Yeah. I'm going to be a magician one day. I did bar magic for six years here in Las Vegas. Which what did you say? Which I would say this. This, that I did the hospitality switch, the corporate events, and stuff like this, right? But my true calling was bar magic. That is where you learn the chops of dealing with people and how far you can twist them. And that is a definite segue into the same psychology we used on these tables. So it was a great learning environment. But other than me, what do you got?

SPEAKER_01 19:42

Well, I'll show them something here. This is you know how in the casinos they riffle shuffle and stuff. Riffle shuffle. But this is a little kid's shuffle. I I'm not sure what they call it, but obviously it's not a mess. It's not a false shuffle. But the thing I like about it is two things. It's very unassuming, and it actually is a false shuffle.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

You know, it's interesting because the first time you showed me that you said you're going to do a false shuffle and you spun them together like that and says, Okay, I'm done. Well, do your false shuffle. I don't get fooled easily, and I I do like getting fooled. That fooled me. I thought for sure he didn't he didn't do a false shuffle, and it threw me for a loop, and it's a great shuffle. And if you if it's up your alley, which it should be, learn this one.

SPEAKER_01 20:25

It's called the Rosetta Shuffle. We'll have a link to where you can purchase it from my website. It is a real fooler. Take a little bit of practice, but you know what? It's well worth it. Did we cover what we're gonna cover in the future? I don't think we covered that. Our covered what we're gonna cover, which is what we're gonna cover.

SPEAKER_00 20:45

You put that so eloquently. Well, thank you. What do we got coming up in future episodes? I mean, we're getting down to the nittties and gritties.

SPEAKER_01 20:52

Oh, just a ton of stuff. Uh, obviously, the moves we did. Oh, yeah. In fact, and we'll details tease this real quick. We'll come up with one of our bread and butter moves next segment.

SPEAKER_00 21:02

Next segment. You start right off the bat with something right out of the gate as wow.

SPEAKER_01 21:07

And then a lot of it though, I think, is a psychology because that was, I'm sure you'll agree, so important why we were successful, why we were never caught.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

And and you're right, it was a psychology because we did touch on that earlier. We we knew when we could get away with something. We didn't, we didn't push for more money. We didn't say, well, look, we still got time, let's go for bigger hands. We we just cruised, and that was the psychology of both the base, I mean that the the bosses, the players, because you're nothing worse than having to do gooder, and they're out there. My God, if they see something that even looks remotely fishy, even though if it wasn't, they're gonna be in the boss's ear, saying, Oh my god, that deal. And the B D's gonna the boss is gonna come over, he's gonna start this. They'll call surveillance the big evil, the big eye.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

Oh, yeah. And so you never see 'em, but you know they're always watching. And so

SPEAKER_00 22:00

And we'll get into detail with them as well. But even this other customers are you got to control them as well. He has a great story about that. We'll get to that in a future.

SPEAKER_01 22:10

What I was thinking right now, and you don't know.

SPEAKER_00 22:13

Oh God.

SPEAKER_01 22:14

But between us, we have like 55 years experience in the casino business.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

Dan, that's longer than I've been alive.

SPEAKER_01 22:22

Yeah. It's a trick. So I mean, we really know. You know, I come more from the cheating side. He comes more overall from the corporate, you know. So you got a great balance here.

SPEAKER_00 22:35

Here's another interesting little paradox. I watched the casino to protect it from people like him. In the sense, I have to protect the casinos against me because I'm one of them. And I'm kind of weird that way. Go figure that one out.

SPEAKER_01 22:55

No, you were one of them.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

I was one of them. I played both sides simultaneously. Well, not sorry, not simultaneously, but later, later. I just bounced back between superhero, supervillain, superhero, supervillain. So it was awesome.

SPEAKER_01 23:11

Yeah, once I retired, I don't I'm thinking, I don't think I dealt very much longer, and then I was out completely. In fact, I haven't made a bet since 1990.

SPEAKER_00 23:23

That's a long time.

SPEAKER_01 23:24

Yeah, yeah, really long time.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

I I last bet I made was on you not making a bet since 1990.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

Uh did you win or lose?

SPEAKER_00 23:31

I pulled out before it was time to so again, what are we doing next week?

SPEAKER_01 23:35

Okay, yeah. Okay, this is gonna be a little teaser. I'm gonna be up front with you. Imagine you're at the blackjack table and you know the first card of your new hand before you make a bet.

SPEAKER_00 23:48

That's strong.

SPEAKER_01 23:49

That gives you a hundred percent betting efficiency on that first card. Yeah, but you know what? It gets better.

SPEAKER_00 23:56

Does it really?

SPEAKER_01 23:57

Then, as you have your cards, you see your first hit card. If I have total 10 and I see an ace coming, you damn well know I'm gonna double down. Absolutely. So, how would you like to play blackjack like that? Because you know what? We did.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

That's all we did. That's how we did it. That was our bread and butter. And we have some other goodies in there that just makes your mind go.

SPEAKER_01 24:24

So that's what we're gonna cover next week, along with other Oh, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 24:29

We're not stopping with just that. There's a lot of stuff that we know and did that is very useful to those who want to do uh pseudo stuff.

SPEAKER_01 24:38

I mean, it's uh oh yeah, if you're yeah, that yeah, it's a great point. If you're a magician doing gambling expos, yeah, you'll pick up the lingo, the way we spoke, the real stuff. Yeah, if you want to connect with your audience, one of the first things you gotta do is have credentials and be authentic.

SPEAKER_00 24:59

Yes, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 25:00

That goes a long way, especially if you do more of a serious type of show.

SPEAKER_00 25:04

Definitely. Anyway, you don't want to miss. Definitely subscribe. We're gonna come back next week.

SPEAKER_01 25:09

Yeah, so don't be a square. Share.

SPEAKER_00 25:14

Yeah, that's clever, isn't it? Until next time.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

Take care.