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American Roulette: How I Turned the Odds Upside Down---My Wild Twenty-Five-Year Ride Ripping Off the World's Casinos (Thomas Dunne Books) | 
 enlarge | Author: Richard Marcus
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
Buy New: $2.95
You Save: $11.00 (79%)
New (26) Used (18) from $2.90
Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 335826
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 5.6 x 1.1
ISBN: 0312336012
Dewey Decimal Number: 795
EAN: 9780312336011
ASIN: 0312336012
Publication Date: November 8, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
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Product Description
In American Roulette, Richard Marcus tells his never-before-heard story, of ripping off casinos. The book follows Marcus, along with several of the world's great professional casino cheaters, as he travels from Las Vegas to London and Monte Carlo, pilfering large sums of money from casinos by performing sleight of hand magic tricks with gaming chips. As skilled cheaters, they back up their moves with psychological setups to convince pit bosses that they're watching legitimate high rollers getting lucky, while in fact they're being ripped off blind.
With the exploding growth of casino gambling, heightened by Indian reservation and riverboat expansion, more and more elaborate casino cheaters are illegally assaulting the green-felt, getting rich off of novice casino personnel. Richard Marcus's insider story is a window into the hidden world of intriguing personalities and tense situations he encounters as a member of expert casino-cheating teams who use their wits to turn the odds upside down and "earn" millions. American Roulette is a fascinating story not only for those who occasionally casino-gamble, but for everyone with a little larceny in their heart.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 If you don't how to read, then read this book April 12, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I can see how this book got five stars across the board. I could not pout this book down. It was a fast paced read. I never heard of past posting until this book came out. It is interested to read the authors progression into the cheating schemes and how the schemes are improved over time. I highly recommend this book, especially for those who don't like to read or don't know how to read.
Great book, hard to put down January 23, 2007
Very entertaining book. Just reading it, I could feel my adrenaline level rise. It felt like I was there in the casinos, trying to avoid the watchful eye of the security cameras. If you liked Bringing Down the House, I think you'll like this book too.
Cool Under Pressure? These Guys Are Icebergs! June 20, 2005
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
As a big fan of caper movies and con stories (Ocean's 11, The Thomas Crown Affair, Catch Me if You Can), I can enthusiastically recommend American Roulette.
Richard Marcus (most likely not his real name, in fact, the name is the same as that of the actor in a TV series called The Pretender) tells of his successful career as a casino cheat. He started as a garden-variety gambler, lost all his money, found himself homeless in Las Vegas, and became a blackjack dealer.
Marcus was recruited by a well-to-do casino rip-off gang and rose to the top over the years. He tells great stories about which casinos the gang hit, how they engineered the con, the trouble they ran into, and how they were nearly caught several times. The gang even made their way to casinos in Europe and Australia, although their base was in Las Vegas. The opening of casinos in Atlantic City and across the U.S. made for some easy pickings as well.
American Roulette is not an instructional manual on how to scam the casinos. In fact, as Marcus points out, even if you were to learn the mechanics and technicalities of the scam, there is something more basic to the success of the con game and that is being cool under pressure. These characters are glaciers.
American Roulette is a terrific read, and would make a fantastic movie.
 entertaining autobiography of a casino cheater January 18, 2005
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book tells the author's story of how he lost everything he had gambling, took a crappy job as shill--promoted to baccarat dealer--at the Four Queens in Las Vegas, and then had the opportunity to join a group of gambling cheaters and thieves. The cheating moves described in the book are mostly "pastposting"--placing high bets after the outcome is known by swapping in a new stack of chips for the ones previously bet. The trick is that high-value chips are concealed underneath low-value chips, and the cheater often has to issue a "claim" by pointing out to the dealer that he's been underpaid for the bet. The book begins and ends with a move he calls the "Savannah" which is an opposite maneuver--a high bet is placed, with the high-value chips concealed by lower-value chips, and if the bet loses, the high-value chips are pulled off. With that move, the winning bets are legitimate and surveillance tapes show that the high-value chips were there all along.
The group also would occasionally make money with other scams, like "railing"--stealing directly out of the chip racks of their fellow players. They also narrowly avoid getting involved in a card-marking scheme, violating their own rules of not using any specialized equipment that could be incriminating.
The book is most interesting for the characters involved and how they dealt with "steam" from the casinos when they caught on to what was happening.
The author appears to have no guilt or remorse for his actions on the grounds that casinos are regularly "stealing" from people every day (though that certainly doesn't justify the thefts directly from other gamblers, and ignores that gamblers are willing participants who know the odds are stacked against them).
I read _Bringing Down the House_ about the MIT Blackjack Team about a year and a half ago, and the comparison between the teams is interesting--the MIT team's methodology was far more sophisticated (and wasn't technically cheating), but both had to use similar psychological techniques.
It's surprising that the casinos didn't come up with better countermeasures quickly (a rule that there are no payouts for high-value chips not announced in advance, for example), but I find Marcus' overall tale quite plausible, in part because of the factors he points out in the last few pages of the book--"practically all casino jobs are monotonous" (p. 369). The boredom results in lack of attention and the jobs' high turnover results in inexperienced people up against very experienced cheaters.
A great book if you are interested in casinos January 8, 2005
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
While I am not sure how much of the book is poetic license, the author does a great job of describing his career as a casino cheat - down to the exact moves. What makes the book great is that you begin to really get a feel for what this life was like. While on the surface his life appeared glamorous, the work seemed to be constant stress. (you'll have to read the book to see why)
This book was almost as good as "Bringing Down the House" - just as well written, but the schemes themselves were slightly less interesting. I would highly recommend this book to anyone that has an interest in gambling and/or casinos. For those that don't, I would not suggest this book.
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