He would quickly grab his three card holdouts and slam his hand down on the discards, saying “what’s wrong with these cards”, while placing his holdouts on top of the pile. What I started to do was once I had seen that he had accumulated his three card hold-outs, while bring in the cards for the next hand, I would crimp the edge of a card and have to call for a set up. On that three-man team, the player that always sat in the number one seat never tipped and it started to make me a little, well agitated, to be polite. These cheaters did not tip much but they did tip, well, mostly.

Speaking of which, we made a living by receiving tips from the winning players. When their workday was over, they had to kick back to the house a portion of their winnings, I do not know how much. These were working men doing a job cheating at cards for a living. That always made me smile and when he saw it, he would smile back as he walked back to the table.

I have seen him stand up and walk to the water cooler to get a cup of water and come back with the cards still hidden in the pants crease. The oldest member, a nice guy about 60 wore loose black pants that he would pull up on one leg to form a pocket where he held his holdouts. At least one patch on each leg was a pocket to store his holdout cards in. The youngest member of the team wore blue jeans that were made out of mostly patches. Sometimes the deck in play would be missing as many as 9 cards due to the hold outs. Each of the three had a different method of how to hold out low cards beneath the table and switch them back in to win a pot. They would start up a game of 50/100 seven card stud low only. I thought the three-man team was the most fun to watch. It made it a lot easier when the dealer was told to look the other way.

They regularly used two, two-man teams and one three-man team. Starting at midnight the mob brought in teams of card sharks that would use various ways to cheat the tourists out of a lot of money. This was a high limit poker room with daily games of 50/100 - 100/200 - and 200/400. No matter want we did see, we saw nothing. Here is a for instance - While I worked on swing shift in the poker room at the Dunes poker room, about 1978, we were told that after midnight we saw nothing. Keep in mind that I started dealing in Las Vegas in the 70s in casinos that were controlled by the mob.

How to learn to deal poker