During the time that I worked inside my first casino in my hometown between 1989 and 1994, there was a guy that nearly always took money from us on roulette. At that time I was heavily into blackjack and the first book that I ever read on that subject was the pivotal “Beat the Dealer” by Edward Thorp. In that book, there was an account of one of the earliest known card counters. No one knew his name but the local dealers nicknamed him “the salmon”.
The reason for this nickname was because Salmon swim against the flow of the river by swimming upstream. This blackjack player was doing precisely that by consistently winning when all about him were losing. This nickname struck a chord with me because this was exactly what a guy was doing to us on roulette.
I did not even know his name and I am certain that the casino was unaware of just how much he was ahead in the five years that I was there. What made it worse was that the guy was so utterly annoying and the last person in the world that you wanted to see win. He was fat and balding and although he was never abusive, he just had a really annoying way about him which is hard to explain. The reason why the casino never clocked him was because he never bought in for enough to get on the spender sheets and he never cashed out enough to get noticed.
But he turned £10 into £100 so often that he became almost legendary in my eyes. How did I know that he was consistently winning? Simple, because I was actually clocking him even though the casino wasn’t. Why was I doing this? None other than for personnel interest and I also had another member of staff helping me as well who would clock him on my days off.
In the space of a year the guy was ahead by about £20,000 which was a truly astronomical figure for the amount of action that he generated. While he did in fact lose, it was rare and his losses were always miniscule. Once or twice he would appear on the cashout sheet when his winnings exceeded his usual wins. I remember one occasion quite clearly, he had been watching me spin for about thirty minutes before eventually tossing a 50p chip onto number 17.
The moment he did it I knew that the ball would be close to 17 and this was on a John Huxley mark IV wheel as I recall which is a very high performance wheel. As the ball fell from the track into the area where number 17 was, I was mesmerised by the ball and was hardly paying attention to the layout like I should have been. There it was coming to rest in number 17 and it pained me to put the dolly on the number and pay the man. Look out for part two of this article coming shortly.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Killer Roulette”
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