slisk250
Straight Flush
There is a player in the larger games that has a rep as being very good and dangerous. He plays the higher stakes cash games that I won't play over here. I've played against him in tournaments and he is solid, knows his way around the card table.
I was at a game off camp that I've been to before. The host is an honest dude. Sometimes, we have a pair of dedicated dealers sitting across from each other in place of having guys deal from the end of the table. It turns out the player in question was in a middle seat so was dealing quite a bit.
After about 30 minutes, my friend I arrived with asked me to come outside for a smoke break. Odd because I don't smoke and he usually goes alone. He told me what he saw and to watch for it when we returned to the game. We are convinced that when others are not watching, he fans the top few cards quickly and reads them by looking at the back of his shiny reflective phone case sitting on the table behind his chips. I saw it a couple times too after he alerted me to it. He was kind of blocking the view from one direction with the way his stack was arranged. I believe he made a few bets with knowledge of what the turn or river might be. So next time there is an actual break, we talked about how to handle it off to the side out of earshot. Not wanting violence to ensue, we just cashed out and let our friends and the host know what we saw via email shortly after.
Pay attention to the dealer if you don't know them enough to trust them!
I was at a game off camp that I've been to before. The host is an honest dude. Sometimes, we have a pair of dedicated dealers sitting across from each other in place of having guys deal from the end of the table. It turns out the player in question was in a middle seat so was dealing quite a bit.
After about 30 minutes, my friend I arrived with asked me to come outside for a smoke break. Odd because I don't smoke and he usually goes alone. He told me what he saw and to watch for it when we returned to the game. We are convinced that when others are not watching, he fans the top few cards quickly and reads them by looking at the back of his shiny reflective phone case sitting on the table behind his chips. I saw it a couple times too after he alerted me to it. He was kind of blocking the view from one direction with the way his stack was arranged. I believe he made a few bets with knowledge of what the turn or river might be. So next time there is an actual break, we talked about how to handle it off to the side out of earshot. Not wanting violence to ensue, we just cashed out and let our friends and the host know what we saw via email shortly after.
Pay attention to the dealer if you don't know them enough to trust them!