Last week, a video surfaced apparently showing a false shuffle taking place at Legends Poker Room in Houston. On Monday, a known card sharp who co-founded the Hollywood high-stakes poker game that inspired the book and movie, Molly’s Game, released a video exposing how he claims the dealer cheated, and provided some valuable advice for poker players.
The incident at Legends, a controversial scandal-ridden Texas poker room, was exposed by Shaun Deeb, who released a video on X that was sent to him by another poker player. Most who commented on the tweet agreed that a rigged deck or false shuffle occurred, while some suggested perhaps the dealer was just inexperienced. But Houston Curtis, author of Billion Dollar Hollywood Heist, left little doubt about what transpired at Legends in a detailed YouTube video.
Part I Exposes Alleged Poker Dealer Cheater
Curtis created two videos on dealer cheating in Texas poker clubs with Part I having been released Monday, and that one focuses on the aforementioned Legends Poker Room incident. In Part II, he will discuss a separate but similar incident at another Texas card room. Before getting into Part I, let’s take a quick look at the video Deeb shared on X.
If you watch closely, it appears the bottom cards are never shuffled in with the rest of the deck. Curtis is confident this was done by no accident, and that the dealer is “100% cheating.”
“He puts the cut card out in front of him first. That is no-no number one,” Curtis explains before going on to say that players should ask the dealer to stop shuffling the deck if they catch the dealer place the cut card in front of the deck before riffling begins.
Curtis then goes on to explain the dealer is performing a push-through shuffle as opposed to properly shuffling in the cards, and then gave a breakdown on how it all went down at Legends.
“He is starting at a normal riffle, but then he pushes at a v-angle,” Curtis says.
“Those packets are getting pushed through each other, and once they get far enough through, he just grabs them on the other sides and pulls them back. They have not been shuffled at all. Then he does it again in a really obvious way. Then he whips what is already the bottom part of the packet around and places it on the cut card and completes the cut.”
Curtis began his recreation of a shuffle with a fresh deck that had never been shuffled. To prove his point about the push-through shuffle taking place in the Legends video, after doing the demonstration, he then flipped the deck over, spread it out face-up, and all the cards were still in their original order, meaning they weren’t actually shuffled.
In the second part of the first video, Curtis moved on to share how the dealer supposedly stacked the deck. It is unclear how the alleged Legends Poker Room cheating hand played out and if a cooler was dealt. He then went on to reiterate proper one-card cut shuffling techniques, and advises poker players to pay attention to how the deck is being shuffled.
Curtis, who previously executive produced Bally’s Big Bet Poker/Live at the Tropicana, has an upcoming book called Million Dollar Mechanics, which shares his expertise on card mechanics.
