Slide, not throw
PokerStars has announced that, in an effort to prevent cheating, slide dealing will soon become the standard method with which to deal cards in all live events. It was first introduced at last year’s EPT Barcelona, will be used in select events at the upcoming EPT Monte-Carlo, and will be “fully implemented” by EPT Barcelona in August 2025.
Slide dealing is a major change from the traditional pitch dealing. Anyone who has played poker in a casino has seen the pitch style of dealing: the dealer holds the deck and tosses the cards to each player. With slide dealing, rather than grasping each card as they are dealt, the dealer uses one or two fingers to slide a card directly from the top of the deck to the felt and then to the player.
Here is an example of slide dealing (though it does not have to be this fast):
The big difference between the two methods is that in the pitch method, the cards catch air, while with the slide method, they always maintain contact with the table.
New cheating method the catalyst
Why the change and all the dealer retraining that has been needed to implement it? Over the last couple years, there have been increasing reports, particularly in the high-stakes cash game world, of cheaters using tiny cameras to spy the faces of the cards as they are dealt.
The scheme really came to the poker public’s attention last August when Matt Berkey talked on the Only Friends podcast about alleged cheating at casinos. It was never proven conclusively, but he gave an example of an unknown player in a high-stakes game who appeared to be an amateur, but racked up huge winnings. This person never showed a losing hand on the river, an extreme probabilistic oddity. He wore headphones when nobody else did, and had his phone and earbuds case arranged on the felt and rail in a suspicious manner.
The player also always sat directly to the dealer’s left. It all added up to one conclusion: that he had a micro camera positioned to see the cards as they were airborne and then was told by someone in his earpiece who had what. Again, it was never confirmed, but Berkey and other players were confident that the man was cheating.
There has been one time that such cheating was actually confirmed. Last year, French authorities discovered that two blackjack and Ultimate Texas Hold’em players used pinhole cameras to spy cards as they were dealt. And they didn’t even need to position objects on the table to do so – they had the cameras concealed in their clothing. It is suspected that they had an accomplice relaying information from the parking lot, but that person was not caught.
Slide dealing eliminates this sort of cheating, as the cards are always face down on the felt, rather than in the air. Thus, no matter how small or well-positioned, a camera cannot see the cards between the dealer and the player.
Photo credit: World Poker Tour via Flickr
The post PokerStars Set to Introduce Slide Dealing at All Live Events appeared first on Poker News Daily.
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