Every move Dustin and The Kaiser were down with in Las Vegas worked because they knew the territory — the bosses, the casinos, the small tells that told them when it was George  and when to scrub the play. Then they took their act on the road to Reno, and found out how much of their success depended on home-court advantage.

GRANDMA
The trip started small — literally, at a two-table casino along the drive north to Reno. The dealer they nicknamed “Grandma” turned out to be an old-time cheat who was stacking the deck against them.  After a few hands, they cut their losses, tossed her a 25 cent piece, and told her to go take lessons. The were lucky they got out of that casino without being hurt.  A stupid move.

THE TWO CARD DROP
At another small stop, Dustin sat down to test a new move — one built around an unusual way of cutting the deck that exposes his first card. Ten minutes later, Kaiser sat down at the same table, a total stranger as far as the dealer knew, and cut the deck exactly the same way. The dealer noticed immediately and asked if they knew each other. They didn't just get made — they learned a real lesson: a move only works if it looks unremarkable, and two strangers doing the same weird method of cutting the deck is opposite of unremarkable, it suspicious. 

TONOPAH
This is where the trip turned. Working the play for real — Dustin cutting, Kaiser reading and signaling from third base — they noticed the dealer had stopped making conversation and started staring, hard, at Dustin's hands every time he cut. Worse, Dustin was not getting the cards Kaiser was signaling. The dealer had figured out the move and was dealing seconds to ruin it. They scrubbed the play, split up — Kaiser to the car, Dustin to the cashier's cage, stalling just enough to make sure Kaiser was in the driver’s seat and ready to go. Dustin walked out past two men who didn't look like they wanted to shake hands. Once Dustin hit the front door, he took off like he was shot out of a cannon to the car. Kaiser took off and they did not look back.

THE PLAN THAT SOUNDED GREAT UNTIL THEY THOUGHT IT THROUGH
With the 2 card drop too hot, they considered a backup: Dustin auditions as a dealer at the blackjack table and stacks The Kaiser a blackjack. It's the kind of plan that sounds airtight at 25 years old and falls apart the moment you actually think it through — audition tables are deliberately full of players, a surprise max bet from  a stranger  and the dealer would get him pulled before he was allowed to deal the cards.  They came to their senses before it ever got dangerous, and forty years later, they're both glad they did.

WHY HOME TURF MATTERED MORE THAN THEY REALIZED
Back in Las Vegas, Kaiser kept something close to an informal database — tracking which bosses worked which shifts, and how often he'd already played against each one, so he'd know when not to play at a  table rather than risk of being remembered. That kind of preparation wasn't possible  in Reno. They didn't know the bosses, didn't know the shift patterns, and had no read on who they were dealing with. Four days later, they left Reno winning enough to pay expenses and with a conclusion neither of them expected to reach: the skill wasn't the hard part. Knowing the terrain was.

MORE FROM OUR WORLD
 Episode 15 -- We Took Our Blackjack Cheating System to Reno
WANT MORE STORIES LIKE THIS?
Subscribe to Cheating at Blackjack on YouTube, or check out my other ebooks at dustinmarks.com.

​Episode 10 introduced The Kaiser. Episode 14 finally focuses on Dustin. For the first time on the podcast, Dustin sits on the other side of the interview — and the answers trace back a lot further than four years of cheating blackjack in Las Vegas.

A CHILDHOOD SET IN MOTION
It started with an accounting mistake. Dustin's father won a trip to Las Vegas he technically shouldn't have won, and came home with stories about Vegas and a small roulette toy for Dustin, who was 7 years old. The same year, an amateur magician performed at a family gathering — and something clicked in Dustin’s brain and his love for card magic was born. No mentor, no internet, no VHS tapes yet — just library books on card magic and, eventually, a copy of The Expert at the Card Table, the book that became his bible.

THE TEN-YEAR-OLD WHO GOT HUSTLED
Around age ten, at a family friend's gathering, a mysterious older man — rumored, maybe, to be part of the mob — offered to play Gin Rummy with Dustin. Three hands. Three exact predictions: how he'd win, how fast, and the top card of the deck before it was even turned over. Dustin didn't know the method at ten years old, but he knew something had just been done to him. That single afternoon planted the question that would define the next chapter of his life.

​VEGAS, $2,100, AND NO PLAN
In 1983, with $2,100 to his name, no job lined up, and nobody he knew in the city, Dustin moved to Las Vegas — to find the authors of the magic books he had been reading. They lived in Vegas.  It took weeks to track down Gary Darwin's Magic Club, an unadvertised weekly meeting of the city's top magicians. He walked in to the magic meeting to find Jimmy Grippo, Michael Skinner, Alan Ackerman, and Paul Harris sitting in one room. Six weeks earlier he'd been reading their books in the Midwest. Me and Jimmy Grippo.

FINDING MR. CC
At those same meetings, Dustin kept hearing about one reclusive figure, referred to here only as Mr. CC — reportedly the best anyone had ever seen with a deck of cards, specializing in gambling moves. Tracking him down took months. He finally had a lead from a friend who worked at the Gambler’s Book Club. Dustin nicknamed him “Bookstore Paul.” When Paul finally called with a possible sighting of Mr. CC in the bookstore, Dustin made the twenty-minute drive in under ten. Three words changed the rest of his life: “Follow me home.” What followed was a six-hour private demonstration of card, dice, and chip moves so far ahead of casino countermeasures that Dustin understood, immediately, that these moves were light years ahead of the casinos.
​

​WHY HE WALKED AWAY
Four years of cheating ended the way a lot of good runs end — not with a catastrophic bust, but with the walls closing in a little at a time. Dustin's mentor was eventually arrested elsewhere, and the FBI was later found to have surveilled his wedding, an event Dustin had attended. Guilt by association was enough. He shifted to legal card counting, before retiring completely in 1990.
​
“I THINK I WAS BORN TO DO THIS”
Asked to look back on it all, Dustin doesn't hesitate: stacking the deck under a boss's stare, fully in the zone, is still the best he's ever been at anything. It's the thread that connects a seven-year-old with a toy roulette wheel to a retired cheat who went on to write the books, and now, decades later, tell the story on camera with The Kaiser.

MORE FROM THIS WORLD
 Episode 10 — Meet the Kaiser
 Episode 14 — Meet Dustin Marks
WANT MORE STORIES LIKE THIS?
Subscribe to Cheating at Blackjack on YouTube, and check out his ebook: 
Dustin's life here.

  A Deep Dive companion to Episodes 12 & 13 — The Computer Cooler
By the time a computer cooler was actually going down, the crew that built it had already left the casino except for the recorder and the BP— and the two of them couldn't have been more different.

THE RECORDER — BUILT TO BE FORGOTTEN
The recorder's whole job was to disappear. Mild-looking, easy to overlook, the kind of guy nobody in a casino ever remembers seeing. That wasn't an accident — it was the requirement. In practice, he never made a mistake. Not once. Every card he recorded had to be exact, every time, or the whole play falls apart and we would not know it until it was too late.

THE BP — BUILT TO BE WATCHED
The BP was the opposite of the recorder in almost every way — loud, comfortable with attention, the guy the whole pit was watching. And that was the point. When a computer cooler play is live, it draws heat. Big bets and eyes from everywhere. The BP absorbed all of it. As long as the pit was watching him, nobody was looking hard enough at the quiet guy who'd already done the real work.

THE SIGNAL — NO ELECTRONICS INVOLVED
Here's the part people don't expect: the recorder didn't feed the BP through an earpiece or any kind of electronics. The information was signaled visually, recorder to BP, in plain sight, in a casino full of people paid to watch for exactly that kind of thing. That's the real skill behind a computer cooler — not just the computer doing the math, but two people passing information across a casino floor without either anyone but them knowing it.

TWO PEOPLE, TOTALLY DIFFERENT, ONE JOB
Temperamentally, the recorder and the BP had almost nothing in common. And by the time the play was actually going down, it didn't matter — the rest of the crew was gone, and it was just the two of them left standing in the casino, running it out to the end.

MORE FROM THIS WORLD
     Link to Episode 12   Computer Cooler part 1
    Link to Episode 13   Computer Cooler part 2

WANT MORE BREAKDOWNS LIKE THIS?
Subscribe to Cheating at Blackjack on YouTube.

Episode 13 of Cheating at Blackjack
Last week covered the mechanics of the computer cooler. This week is about what it actually felt like to be part of one — told from two different perspectives, on two very different nights.


The Night of The Computer Cooler
Dustin's story starts with three straight nights of failure. Every time they found their dealer, squares were sitting at the table — and you can't get rid of a square off a game without risking suspicion. Night three, the game was finally  locked up.


What followed was a tightly choreographed play: the recorder wearing a computer strapped to his back under his jacket, the captain timing the play to the second, a fake $10,000 buy-in across the pit to attract the eye in the sky's attention, and a woman deliberately positioned to distract any boss who wandered too close to the table and the sky shuffle.

Once the play was going down, the team's dealer goes on break — leaving an unsuspecting relief dealer to unknowingly deal the entire, precisely arranged shoe losing thousands to the BP (Big Player).

The real tension came afterward. With no cell phones, no way to know if the BP — an older, rough-edged character named Iggy, with his own complicated history — had made it out clean, the whole team gathered at a house and waited. When Iggy finally walked in with $150,000 in cash in a paper bag, the room erupted like they'd won the Super Bowl.


Kaiser's Two Coolers
Kaiser's version of the story is a study in contrasts. Recruited personally by Dustin, he took a shortcut on his false shuffle that could have blown the whole operation if anyone had actually been watching — and one did notice. A floor supervisor leaned in and told him, quietly, that what she'd just seen "looked awful familiar." Nothing more was ever said. In hindsight she was probably involved in a computer cooler play  herself. 


His second cooler, a single-deck play at a $2,000 table, became one of the tense moments either of them describes on the show. When security refused to place the fill on the table mid-hand — standard procedure — Kaiser broke procedure completely, arguing directly with casino staff to pay the bet  so the play could continue. It worked, three times in a row, capped by a big player doubling down on a hard 12 for $2,000 with the card turned face-down against normal procedure — a move so strange it pulled every boss's attention toward analyzing the decision itself, rather than anything happening at the table. The team walked away with $24,000, and nobody was ever questioned.
That was a thing of beauty.
Watch Episode 13
🎤 Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music

 The Kaiser and I recently sat down with hosts of the Hey Bighead podcast to talk about the world we  came from — how we actually met, and the real work behind four years of cheating Las Vegas casinos at the blackjack tables.


We got into the main moves — Flashing and stacking the deck — along with a breakdown of computer coolers, one of the most sophisticated plays we ever did. And of course, no conversation about those years is complete without a few of the stories that still make us laugh looking back.

This is the first time The Kaiser and I were guests on a podcast together and we told stories we have never told before!  The podcast runs over 90 minutes! 

Watch the full episode 
More at dustinmarks.com

Episode 12 of Cheating at Blackjack
Long before computers, there were coolers — a pre-arranged deck stacked so the player wins every single hand. This episode traces the whole evolution: from a single-deck switch in the 1950s to a full computer strapped to a man's back in the 1980s.


The Original Cooler
In the early decades, a mechanic would physically switch a pre-stacked deck at the table — often using a distraction, like an attractive woman cutting into the dealer's  to make the switch while nobody was looking. Once switched, the dealer had no idea anything had happened, and the big player would proceed to win every hand, taking as few hit cards as possible to squeeze every dollar out of the deck before it ran dry.

The catch: a single deck only stretched to about five or six rounds heads-up. That limited how much money could actually come off the table before the cooler was spent.

Why the Six-Deck Version Was Too Dangerous
Switching a full six-deck was a different animal entirely — bulkier, far more visible, and a genuine risk given that older casinos relied on people physically watching from mirrored catwalks above the tables, not camera systems. Get spotted mid-switch, and there was no clean way out. On top of that the cards were slippery and there was a real danger of dropping them.


Enter the Computer
By the 1980s, the solution using  a hidden computer. A dealer  at a dead game would let shills fill every seat, then a "recorder" would come to the game — wearing a motherboard strapped to his body, tracking every card dealt using a hidden keypad. Once the shoe was fully recorded, the dealer would perform a specific false shuffle (the "sky shuffle") to preserve the exact sequence, hand the cut to a team member marked at the right spot, and then go on a  break — letting an unsuspecting relief dealer take over, having no idea what she was actually dealing.
To surveillance, or anyone reviewing the footage afterward, there was nothing to see. It looked exactly like all procedures were followed.

The Irony of the Timing
Just as computer coolers were becoming operational, Nevada passed its device law — making it a serious felony to use any kind of device to beat a casino game. A computer almost certainly qualified.

When the Play Almost Broke
If a boss ordered a dealer to burn a card mid-shoe, it could throw the entire recorded sequence out of order — except the system had a built-in "discard" function that reset the count and let the operation continue without missing a beat. This is the typical cat and mouse game. The casino comes up with a procedure and the cheaters come up with a method to overcome the procedure.


Shorty Time
The most vulnerable person on any computer cooler team was the recorder — quite literally wearing the evidence. On one job, a sudden gust of wind blew a recorder's jacket open in the parking lot, exposing the motherboard strapped to his back. Four teammates nearly tackled him on the spot, tucking his jacket into his pants before anyone could see.


What's Next
Part Two goes further (live on 8-14) — a full walkthrough of an actual computer cooler play, told from two different vantage points: Dustin as the captain running one play, and Kaiser as the dealer on another.
Watch Episode 12
🎤 Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music