Although that is a rather unusual story, it is common for counters to throw a few bets on other games to look more like gamblers. Of course, you must be careful as you are eating into your edge. Playing a positive expectation game, like Video Poker, will probably not reduce heat, and could increase it. Craps is convenient as the tables are often crowded and highly active making it difficult to see what you are betting, if anything at all. The house edge is small if you avoid proposition bets, but the game is fast, increasing the amount you could waste.

Pai Gow Poker (PGP) is an interesting game as cover. It is extremely slow. The cards are shuffled every hand. The dealer must deal out seven-card hands for every seat, even empty seats. Then, there is a pointless ritual with dice. After this, players must try to figure out their hands, much more time-consuming than BJ Basic Strategy. After all of this, 50% of hands push. A pit boss at the MGM once told me that the entire point of the game was to play slowly, so they make no effort to speed it along. That is another advantage of PGP. The pit watches it more closely because dealer errors are easy to make and costly to the house. This gives you a chance to chat with the pit bosses at a game where advantage players are not a threat. Advantage play is possible, but only against other players. On top of all this, the house advantage is very small.

PGP can be beaten in California. In Las Vegas, I have played PGP in several casinos, but only one casino allowed a player advantage. Oddly, that was the old Barbary Coast. They allowed the player to bank every other hand when no other players wanted to bank — which is the normal case.

Incidentally, the first time I played PGP was at the old Desert Inn. I set my hand, and the pit boss asked why I didn’t set it according to the book. I said it was an exception in the back of the book. He smiled and said, “Why would you trust a guy that lies about his name anyway?” Of course, he was talking about Stanford Wong. What impressed me was that he had bothered to read and understand a fairly recent book. Pit bosses are not always known for their intelligence. That does not mean we should assume they are all idiots.

 © 2009 Norman Wattenberger