Cheating III

20 October 2022

By Royal Flushes

CINDY: Last week we shared with you one of our experiences with a cheater.

ABBY: Actually a few cheaters.

CINDY: True. A player, a dealer and at least one of the floor people. The dealer would pay out a blackjack for the player when the player only had a 20.

ABBY: This was a single-deck game from the olden days. If you had a blackjack, you flipped over your cards and were paid immediately. The player would turn over a 20 here and there and be paid for a blackjack.

CINDY: As the dealer paid off the blackjack, the floor person would turn his back and act as if he was watching another table. These three, the dealer, the player and the floor person were definitely in this together. Oh, and the eyes-in-the-sky were on the blink so there was no filming of any of this. They seemed able to steal at will.

ABBY: We both went to the ladies’ room and talked this over. Should we do anything? Do nothing? Leave the casino? Tell someone in authority about what’s going on the casino?

CINDY: This was a small, somewhat out-of-the-way casino. Was this some kind of plot by the staff or most of the staff or just these three people? What if the whole staff were engaging in crimes against this casino?

ABBY: What if the place was on the rocks and the workers were taking what they could get before the place folded? What should we do? Doing nothing seemed wrong to both of us. After all, someone’s money was being stolen.

CINDY: When you are caught in such a dilemma, at least when we were caught in this, there wasn’t a simple solution. What do you do, if anything?

ABBY: But we were going to take some kind of action. Just what though?

CINDY: I thought we write a letter and tell exactly what we saw and who was involved. We aren’t inventing anything. We are just telling the authority what we saw and who we saw doing this.

ABBY: We would send this to the owners of the casino who we assumed were not stealing from themselves.

CINDY: If they were stealing then there was really nothing to do except involve the law.

ABBY: Did we want to go that far?

CINDY: We were in a moral morass in all of this. We only played in this casino once, that night! Did we really want to be involved in some legal case? The casino was in a different state than the one we lived in. Did we really want to ride this situation into the wind?

ABBY: Not really. But a well-written letter would suffice. The authority at the casino, the owners or company that owned the place, could get the eyes-in-the-sky fixed and start running the place properly. If not? Then that was their problem and we felt we had done the right thing.

CINDY: When we got home the next day, we wrote a letter telling the owners what we had seen. We gave the name of the dealer and the floor person but we didn’t know the name of the player. We wrote where he sat in case the eyes-in-the-sky actually worked and had taped everything.

ABBY: We hoped that was the case.

CINDY: It wasn’t.

ABBY: In a month or so, the casino closed.

CINDY: And that was that.

ABBY: Yes, that was that.

CINDY: Were we right? Were we wrong? I really don’t know.