Dustin Marks is a Magician

Dustin Marks tells listeners how he was drawn to perform magic tricks as a child. He notices that all the good magicians are based in Las Vegas. As a young adult, he moved to Vegas after a series of dead-end jobs. After a few months, he discovers that all the good magicians met on Wednesday nights at Gary Darwin’s Magic Club.  He had to ask questions and search for a few months before finding this club. Like he was told, all the good magicians meet there on Wednesdays. They take him under their wing, and he increases his skills dramatically. From these professional magicians, he learns about the underground group of professional casino rip-off artists known as “Crossroaders.”

Dustin Marks Meets Crunch

He learned from his magician friends at Gary Darwin’s that a man known only as Crunch was a professional Crossroader, and Justin tells how he met Crunch. He learned that Crunch was well known at a local magic shop so Dustin befriended a clerk at this store. The clerk agreed to call Dustin if he saw Crunch in the store. A few weeks later, the clerk is good to his word and Justin runs over to the store and introduces himself to Crunch. The rest is history as Crunch takes Justin under his tutelage and, that very day, invites him to his home and begins a series of classes in how to cheat casinos.

Dustin Marks on Cheating Casinos

He tells about working with large crews to take a casino for over $100,000. We learn that this crew will have a couple of dealers already working at the casino and several players to set up the deck by taking all the chairs at a particular table where another crew member is the dealer. After a few plays, the dealer gets the card into the correct order as the players drift away. Another member of the crew will come to the table and demand that he be the only player and will place large bets on several hands. He will take several tricks and leave. They will come back on another shift and do this again. They will move to another casino with a cooperating dealer and do it again. Another technique for earning smaller amounts at a steady pace required him to have a dealer as his partner.

Dustin Marks on Techniques

We learn many techniques to get better odds, some even legal. One is called card palming. He could keep an extra card in one hand and switch it out with a bad card in his hand. Another is “pressing your bet.” In that technique, if the player gets a very good hand, say a 19 or above, he can slip another chip on the betting line to increase his bet after he knows his hand is good. Justin said how the same thing applies if he got a bad hand, and he talked about ways to take away a chip and lower the bet. The legal method of getting an edge is to find a dealer who is sloppy and might show cards as he dealt.

The Cheater’s Appearance

One of the main lessons Dustin Marks learned as he cheated casinos was he needed to blend into the background and not draw attention to himself. he explained how the cameras are really designed to prevent the dealer from stealing and to provide evidence for lawsuits. If the guys watching the “eye in the sky” started watching the cheater because he drew attention to himself, the cheater was finished.

Show Notes by Gary Jenkins

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