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BGonline.org Forums
Cheats
Posted By: Jake Jacobs In Response To: Cheats (Chuck Bower)
Date: Tuesday, 4 October 2011, at 1:27 a.m.
Hi Chuck (all):
Thirty years ago I knew a guy in Las Vegas named Sal, who cheated with this method. His infamy apparently lives on, as in the aftermath of a memorial piece I wrote about Max, in which I mentioned Sal, I received queries from people who remembered him.
As described to me, Sal would set one die, place the other on top, and slide them down the table. Near the far end the top die would tumble off and bounce like a properly thrown die. The other would come to rest with its six showing, never having tipped.
The staff should call no roll, but Sal's team, at the table for perhaps two hours, would have sprung into action just before the move, asking for a cocktail waitress, tossing a black chip to the dealer for change, etc. Each had their own bit of "business" to perform in as distracting a manner as possible, usually getting the targeted dealer or boss to take their eyes off the table to look at them.
If the staff were looking at the table, it was at the cash the Big Player, who had just walked up, had flung down: table limit on the field, five hundred on boxcars, etc.
Despite that, they were spotted on occasion. Munchkin was working at the Castaways one day, and spotted the move. He knew Sal casually at that time (didn't know that was what Sal did up until then), and confronted him later. "What do you, care?" Sal asked. "It isn't your money." Munchkin assured him that no matter whose money it was, if he spotted Sal in the Castaways again, he'd blow the whistle.
But Sal told me that when his team played the Trop, the Box started humming the theme to "Let's Make A Deal." So the speculation about inside help, especially if the cheats plan to use the move more than one time in a session, is quite reasonable.
I knew some people who played on Sal's team, which disappointed me as, while I knew Sal as a rogue from the beginning, the others were friends. I don't believe (as they did) that because the casinos are such slime pits, and unethical themselves, that cheating is a fair response.
Sal was murdered, in his bathrobe, stabbed a couple of dozen times. It sounded like one of those sex murders like Bob Crane or Sal Mineo or Ramon Navarro. But five or six years later I was rooming in AC with one of his former team. She told me that another teammate, some years after Sal's death, was arrested. It seems he had advertised for ten-year old girl models. The mother of one told a friend she thought there might be something wrong with the ad, so when she and her daughter didn't return home the friend called the cops, who put out a statewide APB. They found the guys Winnebago driving around in the Nevada desert. When they pulled him over they found the girls - there wa another her age - were alive, but the mothers were stuffed in the camper's storage space.
And it was remembered that at the time Sal died there was about $25,000 in team money unaccounted for. And that the killer had "come into an inheritance" just then.
At any rate, no one who knew Sal would play him backgammon for money. The man had spent hundreds of hours developing his ability to manipulate the dice. "Nuff said.
Except, if you are interested, there is an entertaining book called Crossroaders, about a similar sort of team. They had a different method of making sure a six was locked up. I have trouble believing they could really play as they did for hours at a time, but otherwise the book has verisimilitude.
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