There's a funny article in the Boston Herald about a group of retirees who just got busted for running a senior citizen's illegal poker club.

Each night for five years, 60-something hostesses would serve cocktails to heavy-smoking seniors as they tested their luck in poker and on video games, authorities said.

Link

Richard Marcus, author of the recent book on casino cheating, American Roulette, has started a blog. While much of it is straight marketing for his book, he has written some interesting tidbits that have at least piqued my interest in his book.

An Italian roulette cheating team that I first met over two decades ago when my team and theirs literally bumped into one another while cheating at the same roulette table in Lake Tahoe (see page 122 in my book AMERICAN ROULETTE) was out in force all over the Vegas Strip. One of my surveillance informants who works at a Strip casino themed after one of the more popular major cities in the world, recognized one of the Italians, who was dressed up as a goblin, by a tattoo on the back of his hand. I'm told the tattooed hand was sliding a stack of roulette chips from a losing number to the winning number before the dealer got his marker straight up on the layout.

Link

One of the things I dislike about general media coverage and fictional portrayals of poker and other casino-related activities is how much of them tend to focus on cheats and hustlers, to the point of making that seem like that's all there is out there.

That said, those stories are often more exciting and have a lot more conflict and intrigue than a straight "Johnny won at poker" story.

I've heard numerous second- and third- hand stories about the robbery of the tournament in Austin recently. The Austin-American Statesman finally published a story on it.

After pistol-whipping some players and ordering the men and women to give up their wallets and strip, the robbers ransacked a room in the clubhouse, said Reynolds, who was not injured but lost $60 to the robbers. At the last minute, the game's organizer had reduced the amount players had to bring from $100 per 150 tournament chips to $25 for the same number of chips to attract more players. Twenty to 25 people attended.

The robbers stole the $1,000 prize money and about $1,000 more from the victims, Rodriguez said.

Link (thanks, Rob!)

The main tidbit I've heard that wasn't covered in the story was that the first thing the thieves apparently did was to walk up to each table and pistol-whip the biggest or strongest looking guy at each table. I've heard a couple other things, but nothing substantiated enough to write about here.

The main takeaway from this whole thing is that robbing home poker games simply is not worth it; poker games generate the image of a lot of cash in play, but the reality is that the average low or mid buyin home game doesn't really have all that money in play. So note to thieves: if you're going to coordinate a four-person armed robbery, please give strong consideration to alternatives to poker games. There are much better targets out there.

If anyone has any other details about the incident, please post them here.

Cut and Deal is a new stock photography site which is dedicated to poker and gambling-related images. It includes a series of photos of a poker-playing woman who bears a resemblance to a young Jennifer Harmon. Link

It's interesting to watch the second- and third- level businesses crop up behind the explosion in poker's popularity. I wonder how far we can get up Maslow's hierarchy of poker needs :)

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