A GAMBLING FRIEND OF MINE told me about a tightwad player who bought the minimum stack of chips in a $100-takeout poker game. He anted along for an hour or so without ever even playing a pot, much less winning one, and then cashed out $124 worth of chips! I've heard several similar stories, and I don't doubt any of them. Copping chips is one of the more common methods of cheating at cards and gambling games.
In such games as poker and red dog, be suspicious of anyone who frequently counts the pot or otherwise finds an excuse to finger the chips. Watch especially the jolly player who seems happy when an opponent wins. If he "helps" the winner by pushing the chips or money across the table, he may be using some sort of chip cop. This is a goo or a liquid (often a magician's product) that sticks to the cheat's palm or fingers—
and the chips stick to the goo. Several commercial preparations are available, or the cheat may make his own by heating and scraping the goo off household adhesive tape. I've also seen chips copped with the aid of a tape that is sticky on both sides, and a dab of sticky wax can be used under a ring, usually on the middle finger.
Some accomplished chip coppers need neither goo nor tape. They can palm or otherwise steal chips as shown in Figure 74. Some do this while holding their cards, as illustrated in Figures 75 and 76.
Large gambling casinos are sometimes worked by professional coppers, who will invariably station themselves next to a big winner with a large pile of chips. (This sort of thing was dramatized vividly in Fedor Dostoevski's short novel The Gambler.)
Figure 74
Figure 75 Figure 76
One such petty cheat who worked Monte Carlo specialized in stealing chips that dropped onto the floor. She used copping preparation on the bottom of her shoe!
According to Gamblers Digest, a pit boss in Las Vegas detected a young lady copping from winners. He glued a pile of chips together and planted them at a table with a shill. Sure enough, the young lady tried to cop one—but came up with the whole pile.
Exit one female chip copper.
More serious, from the casino's point of view, is the dealer who steals chips from the house. To help prevent this sort of thing, many casinos require dealers, croupiers, and other employees to wear special uniforms that have no pockets. During the 1930's, Monte Carlo experimented with using small gold coins instead of chips—only to find that too many croupiers had too many urges to scratch their necks. After that, they started using large chips, especially at big-money games like baccarat, in which the "chips" are almost as large as a slice of bread. Harolds Club in Reno uses a good many women dealers, and according to a book by Harold Smith, Sr., they had an employee with "nose trouble." The table was losing money, so Smith watched the girl closely. He discovered that each time she put her handkerchief to her nose and went to the ladies' room, she was stealing. After this, Smith made it a rule that when a female dealer left the game for any purpose, she had to dust her palms off.
Instead of trying to steal money, or chips, directly from the house, many dealers simply overpay a confederate who is playing against the house. One ingenious method of overpayment came to light quite recently in connection with an assassination contract to knock off a Nevada hotelman, who in turn had been indicted for "murder, attempted murder, burglary, and conspiracy." The victim of the murder was linked to the "hollow chip" cheating ring because a device used to cheat casinos was found in his home.
According to a UPI report datelined Las Vegas,
The device is a machined aluminium tube painted to look like a stack of casino chips with a real chip, usually of $5 or $10 denomination, glued to the top.
A dishonest casino dealer can slip two $100 chips into the tube and give them to a confederate at the gaming tables. The transaction would appear to the casual observer to be a legitimate payoff to a winner at craps or blackjack.
Phil Hannifin, chairman of the state Gaming Control Board, said the cheating ring bilked a half dozen casinos of $300,000 to $400,000 during the last several weeks.
So ... copping chips is not necessarily in the rent-money category.
Many private gambling sessions are conducted with chips instead of cash, and in some of these games the bank often checks up in the red. In other words, there are more chips out than the bank can recover. If this happens too frequently in your group to be marked off as error, there may be a simple answer. Consider the chips. Are they
the ordinary kind that can be matched at any drugstore? If so, someone may be ringing in a few bucks' worth during each session. The best solution to this problem, if it is a problem, is to mark the chips in some way before each session. One method is to streak them with paint, a whole stack at the time, as shown in Figure 77.
Whoever banks the game should do this at least a day before the action so that the paint will have time to dry.
Figure 77
And of course the markings should vary from session to session.
The large casinos have registered chips that are very, very difficult to duplicate. The fact is that it's often just as easy to counterfeit money as chips; it's more practical, too, since the money can be unloaded in more places.
Actually, private and illegal gambling sessions are popular with shovers of counterfeit money. Who, for example, looks very closely when fading two twenties in a skull-craps game? Another point is that anyone who gets stuck with counterfeit money in an illegal gambling game is reluctant to report it or to pinpoint the source.
In total volume, most of the counterfeit money is passed in private and illegal games, but the casinos do have their problems. Once two English spinsters dumped 300,000 counterfeit francs on Monte Carlo over a period of several days. The trick was to buy chips with the counterfeit money. If they lost, so what? If they won, they would ask the casino to hold the money for safekeeping. When they finally cashed out, they got 189,000 francs and headed for Cape Town, where they were arrested. The 189,000 francs, however, was not all profit. About half of it had been paid to them in their own counterfeit francs!