Part I: Card Game Cheating · Deck Substitution
Cold Deck
How it works
A cold deck is a deck already stacked, brought into the game in place of the deck that was shuffled. The cards the players think they are using never come into play. This is not a false shuffle. A false shuffle keeps a known run inside the deck already on the table. A cold deck is a second deck.
Where it appears
Poker, and any card game in which the deck can be exchanged
On the record
In United States v. Morris, 532 F.2d 436 (5th Cir. 1976), the court described a cold deck used in poker games played in hotel suites in Las Vegas and at Lake Tahoe. The Las Vegas Sun of 8 June 1999 reported that dealer Gordon James Graves and players Charles Sanzeri and Andrew John DiVecchio were charged over a cold deck on a $44,000 bad-beat jackpot at Sam’s Town. That report is of charges. It is not a report of a conviction.
Detection & preventionADVISORY
The paid halfHow a monitoring room catches cold deck, and what stops it recurring, written for the desk, not the reader.
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Published as a detection reference for surveillance, compliance and gaming-operations professionals. Thresholds and tuning are set by the property. Nothing here is instruction: the method is described so it can be recognised.