How We Do It: Buying a Seat

When it comes to securing a target, I’m not into gimmicks and shortcuts. I’m old-school that way: I believe in hard work (despite a dealer looking at my hands and saying, “You never work”), pounding the pavement, getting to a target on time (which means early), and securing the real estate quietly. There is a young generation of players who take our terminology literally, and think that the easiest way to acquire real estate is to purchase it. They run around, often getting to games late from oversleeping or laziness, and then think that a simple, grand solution is to buy the seat from any civilian in their way. I prefer acquiring real estate through foreclosure; buying a seat has a huge long-term cost, which matters to anyone who wants longevity for that specific target or that casino.

The problem is that the seller of the seat, and any witnesses to the sale (e.g., the dealer), are going to talk. What do you think will happen if you pay $300 for a seat to a lady from Iowa. For years to come, she will tell her friends about the guy who gave her three hundred whole dollars just so he could sit in the seat she was playing at the casino. Imagine what will happen if you pay $300 to a Viet, or, say, an Armenian, to get that seat. Perhaps “cultural profiling” is a better term than “racial profiling,” but I don’t think you’ll get much pushback from citizens of those countries. (Will Sam Lau or Bob N weigh in here?) You could inadvertently create competition for that target game, and in fact the target casino, and other similar target games.

I can count on one hand the number of times in my career that we’ve bought a seat, and this post should not be construed as an encouragement or endorsement of the practice. If you’re going to shoot heroin, I advise you to use your own fresh needle. I’ve actually bought a seat only once, in a hand-dealt Three Card Poker game fifteen years ago, after the dealer set it up by telling the player that I was getting frustrated by losing: “he needs his lucky seat,” she said. Then the player asked me, “You want to sit here?” I just said, “Yeah, let’s switch. You can have my chips.” I knew that I had $165 in chips sitting on the table, and the guy jumped up so fast to take the deal that I was scared his head would hit the ceiling! I was a known, eccentric regular, in an era before carnival games were widely played. One of the floorwomen once said that the “M” on my hat stood for “Moron.” Heh heh.

My rogue BPs have sometimes bought seats, sometimes without telling me until later, because they know I don’t approve, but with anything in advantage play, it can be done horribly, and it can be done smoothly, and you have to pick your spots. I picked my spot that one time (and they did talk about it—fortunately, the Telephone Game ended up distorting the story in a way that covered me). When my BP Santi once bought a seat on a hole-card game for $500, I learned my first lesson about buying real estate, and lambasted Santi for not observing it: before buying an asset, you should know what it’s worth! He had overpaid for the lucky seat on a game that I thought was marginal. I told him that we might have an expected profit of only $1000 for the session, so paying $500 up front was not worth it, especially considering the heat risk. To know what the game is worth, the playcaller must weigh in, and you should decide beforehand what you’re willing to pay, and even that decision depends on who the seller is.

The most important rule to follow is that you never want to make any transaction in front of the target dealer (in the case of hole-card game). Obviously you don’t want the target dealer to see what transpires, and, you don’t want any witnesses to realize that you are targeting that dealer. So, you want to make your move when the target dealer is on break. Wait until the dealer’s first break, and you might even get lucky and the seat might open up by then.

Next, you don’t want there to be any witnesses at all. Try to wait until other civilians at the table have left, or taken a bathroom break. Using the standard techniques, you may be able to drive off the witnesses first.

The last general principle is that you don’t want to pay too much. If you pay too much, then people will get really suspicious. They wonder: “Why is that seat worth so much?” Discuss.

I think, or rather I assume, that the above principles are obvious to the kids running around buying seats. I hope they have at least observed those precautions. Now we get into some moves that probably have not been used, but should be.

Imagine you want to buy a guy’s house because you know there is an oil deposit under it. Do you go and say, “I’ll give you $5 million for your one-bedroom house”? Of course not. What you do is show the guy a two-bedroom house that’s available and at a price that he can’t refuse, and get him to move there. You then take over the vacated property, and he never realizes that you desperately wanted his original property.

I have actually seen my BP (the one named after a Coors beer that won’t slow you down) pull this off, and acquire a seat for $25. Here’s the scenario. I need the anchor, but there’s a hard-core degenerate sitting in the seat. We both size it up and realize she will never leave. The target is a high-yield target, but not a return game (where the dealer has the table all day). When you have only an hour of potential game time, you may not be able to wait, hoping for the hard-core degenerate to bust out, especially if she’s the type who seems to have a bottomless purse of hundred-dollar bills (you know the type I mean, five-letter word, sounds like …) So my BP is already sitting in Seat 1, and I need the anchor. The degenerate makes a play that saves the BP on his waiting bet. The BP then says to her, “OMG, that’s the first hand I’ve won all day, you’re good luck. Come sit by me,” and as he says so, he pats Seat 2 and says, “Lucky chip for you,” and puts a green chip on the felt at Seat 2. So the degenerate moves over to play next to my BP, and then I join the game a moment later in the vacated Seat 7. The degenerate does not feel that we just bought Seat 7.

I’ve seen my BP apply the same principle, perhaps more convincingly, by drawing the degenerate to a different table. I want Seat 7, which is right behind Seat 1 of the adjacent table. My BP sits at Seat 7 on that adjacent table, which is empty at the time. After losing a hand, he calls out to the degenerate and says, “Hey, I need your help! I need someone to play first base. Come play first base. Here—lucky chip!” and he tosses a green chip onto Seat 1. The degenerate basically just swivels around, plays Seat 1 at the adjacent table, consequently vacating Seat 7 at our target table. I then take Seat 7, and the degenerate is playing a different table and doesn’t even know that I grabbed her old seat. Again, she has no idea that we just bought her seat, and none of the other witnesses do either.

We once had a drunk guy playing heads-up in the lucky seat on our target single-deck game. Naturally, because drunk random play is superior to a civilian’s sober, deliberate, idiotic play, this dude wins every hand for fifteen minutes straight, and we give up on waiting as a solution. A sexy member of our crew plays a few minutes with the drunk guy on the target single-deck table, and then says, “I like the 6-deck, let’s go play that,” and then she brings him over to the six-deck table. We paid nothing but a bit of bleeding cost, and the target was drawn elsewhere, without realizing that his seat is what we wanted.

Now here’s the clincher. Regardless of whether you make an outright offer to buy the seat, or entice the degenerate to leave the seat, the best thing to do is use a disposable teammate as the buyer. You never want the spotter or BP to get the heat and future gossip from buying the seat. Imagine how strong this seat-buying scenario looks. You have your disposable teammate (call him “Keith”) come up, while the target dealer is on break, of course. Keith sits at the adjacent table, bets two hands of $150, but before the hand is dealt goes to the degenerate and says, “Dude, I can only play two spots, but we gotta change this up. I need you to play a spot for a minute or two. Here, play this [hands him four green chips]. Keep it if you win.” Choose your amount wisely, but your goal is to pick an amount he can’t refuse, but below the amount that would become a permanent topic of loud discussion. When the degenerate goes to play a round or two, then Keith has two excellent exit plans: If Keith wins, he will profusely thank the degenerate, saying “I knew it, I told you,” and then walk out with his winnings. If Keith loses, he just starts cursing and walks out, and all of us who were in eyeshot of the event shake our heads and say, “What an idiot.” Either way, the degenerate doesn’t realize his own seat was the target, and the “crazy” buyer of the seat is long-gone, and everyone can cover for him or throw him under the bus, as appropriate.

Even if Keith tries to directly buy the target seat, while the main dealer is on break, the move is so much stronger than the typical poorly executed purchase. “Dude, can you let me play a few hands?” and then Keith offers a couple black chips. Once Keith has the seat (and the spotter should now be in the adjacent seat), he can play one hand for $300 or so (making it look like he’s going for the lucky one-big-hand play), with the same exit plans as the previous case. You can make up all kinds of cover stories after Keith is long gone. “Yeah, that guy paid me $300 for a seat one time on Caribbean Stud. It worked out for him—he got Quads. He’s a terrible poker player, though—big fish.” Keith basically gets the seat, plays a hand or two, hands off safely, and is long gone before the target dealer ever returns from break.

A safe handoff could take a few minutes. After winning or losing the medium/big bet, Keith should drop to a small bet until a safe handoff can be made. The seller of the seat may still be watching out of curiosity, adding risk to the handoff. Reducing the bets to boring levels will make him lose interest. Because the whole process could take time, try to execute the play at the beginning of the target dealer’s break.