The Other Side of the Road

We all piled into the chubby cabbie's black cab (Joe paid the fare as any other client would), an d he sped us around to all London's tourist sites. We visited Buckingham Palace, 10 Downing Street, Big Ben, Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, and to Joe's great liking, Winston Churchill's underground war room. Sandy and Marla, of course, took a tour of the famous Harrod's department store, and when they emerged we were stuck another £1,000. Joe, on the other hand, found a small second¬hand shop where he bought the cabbie his suit. The guy was thrilled and asked Joe if he could keep it after we left town. We all got a big laugh out of that, and it was Sandy who asked him, "Who else do you think is going to fit snugly into that suit?"

Once inside a casino in London, an American-style pastposting team encounters certain factors that inhibit it from doing all its homegrown moves. The highest denomination chip we could work with was £100, because at £500 the round chips got bigger, and at £1,000 and up they changed form and nationality, resembling the rectangular plaques seen in French casinos.

Another inhibiting factor was the logistics of their gaming personnel. Their floormen and pit bosses were called junior and senior inspectors. Unlike American casinos, British casinos game were supervised with undivided attention. At each roulette table an inspector was perched in a high chair above the layout in front of the wheel, much like laddermen in Vegas baccarat pits. He never took his eyes off the layout. As a pastposter sitting on the bottom of the layout, you felt the intensity of his glare; you even got the feeling he was strategically placed there to keep you under surveillance. Doing the straight-up move underneath the piece was too difficult to tempt even Duke. The blackjack move was also out of the question due to the center, the dealer would know that someone had tampered with the original bet, simply because she never would have let a sloppy bet like that go unattended before spinning the ball.

Duke created his own diversion with his right hand as he put the move in with his left. His right hand threw a twenty-five-pound chip toward the dealer which he purposely made land in the neighbors box, a European-style wager in which you bet a group of five numbers that were next to one another-or neighbors-on the black-red-andgreen-slotted disk inside the wheel, but not on the layout. These neighbors bets were handled entirely by the dealer. Players did not place neighbors bets themselves because the neighbors box was too far away, in front of the dealer. Instead, they passed their chips to the dealer and verbalized the bets they wanted. The dealer then placed their chips accordingly.

We took advantage of this never-before-seen facet of roulette to distract both the dealer and the inspector sitting above. Because Duke's tossed chip threatened to interfere with the yet-unpaid winning neighbors bets, both the dealer's and the inspector's eyes were instinctively drawn to it, giving Duke the fraction of a second he needed to do the one-handed switch. And he had only one shot at it. Once the move was in, there was no going out to retrieve it if the result was sloppy. By that time, the neighbors distraction would be over, and you would be caught red-handed if you tried to make a last-second adjustment.

What I saw just as Duke disappeared from the table was the six move-chips perfectly placed at the intersection of the vertical street line and the imaginary line cutting through the heart of the numbers 4, 5, and 6, exactly on the spot where I had placed my six roulette chips before the spin.

My claim was very low key. No need for all the hysterics we used in Vegas; we were selling ourselves to a different mentality. Instead of jumping up and down for joy after having crawled around the floor looking for my missing black chips, I just simply said to the dealer in a normal voice as I pointed to the move-chips, "Look at that, I bet £300 on the street by accident and it won. It must be my lucky day in jolly old London."

Article Source: http://www.articlebillboard.com/