To celebrate his forthcoming regular column in WPT Poker, we hooked up with star of The Real Hustle, Alexis Conran.
I’m sitting in a Soho café in the heart of London, and, while waiting for the waiter to come and take my order, I’m considering asking my interviewee sat opposite me if he fancies trying to blag a free cup of coffee. Y’know, just to see how it’s done. In the end, I bottle it and decide to just order one the traditional way.
Alexis Conran, along with co-presenters Paul Wilson and Jessica-Jane Clements, has been fronting the BBC series for 6 series. If you’ve never seen it, the show demonstrates countless classic scams, cons, and hustles, as the team try out some notorious scams on members of the public, filmed with hidden cameras. The aim is to reveal how scams work so that the viewer can avoid being ripped off by the same con. The famous ‘Fake Till’ scam (where Alex sets up his own till in a clothes store, disguising himself as a shop assistant, and proceeds to clean out a slew of shop customers) was recently voted ‘Top Hustle’ by viewers of the show.
You might think a master of the sleight-of-hand and someone who reveals how to scam on national television might be a strange subject for a poker mag. But Alexis is a huge poker fan, regularly playing in tournaments up and down the country. It doesn’t, however, stop him showing me a neat little trick for stacking the deck.
“This is one of my favourite things about cheating when you’re dealing. When you deal, you’re in complete control of the deck. Once you’ve dealt, everyone’s looking at their hands and you do this…”
Alexis then cunningly drops the bottom two cards from the pack – which just happen to be aces – before placing the pack on his own rubbish hand, leaving him with aces to play with.
Not that he’s condoning cheating of course, but he’s had a fascination with the manipulation of cards, and people, from an early age. Perhaps something to with his father, and when he talks about his conman jailbird father, you probably won’t be surprised to know the actor and magician is no stranger to the world of grifters and scammers.
“I always started off being fascinated by things like that. I guess I must have inherited a gambling gene from my father. My Dad and my Mum separated when I was about 7 but I used to see him regularly and he took me to pool halls and bizarre game arcades. He was a very smart, charismatic, intelligent guy but he had that minor flaw, which can destroy you, which was gambling addiction. His addiction then led to fraud because he was borrowing money to play with and not repaying it. That fraud became more and more advanced – selling houses that didn’t belong to him, writing fake cheques etc.
“I guess it’s the same with poker players, where a lot of pros don’t play to win money, it’s like Anthony Holden talking in Big Deal, money to a poker player is like fuel to a racing driver. It’s a means to an end. That’s the distinction, isn’t it? I think my Dad fell into that school. It was never about the money for him.
Alexis’ father got caught and went to prison when Alexis was still at school. The interest obviously was passed on, as he went on to become a magician and immerse himself, if not criminally, in the world of conmen.
A trained actor, Alexis met a magician called Andy Nyman, now a partner of Derren Brown, the TV psychologist-magician-showman. Andy introduced Alexis to card magic while they were both in a play. He was utterly transfixed. On the dole (or ‘resting’ in acting profession parlance) Alexis sat at home religiously reading magic books with card trick after card trick all obsessively going in. A few years later, Nyman contacted Alexis to help him out performing a magic show. Terrified, Alexis nevertheless pulled it off with aplomb.
“I never ever thought I’d be doing this for a living. It never crossed my mind. But I was very lucky. I was introduced around that time to three of the world’s best sleight-of-hand artists in the world. It’s like a poker novice being introduced to Doyle Brunson and Phil Ivey at the start of his career.”
Cut to ten years later and The Real Hustle. Alexis had, on top of his acting and (very lucrative) close-up magic gigs, been picked up by Objective Productions (who also produce Derren Brown’s show) to front a programme showing the real-life workings of the professional conman. BBC were interested and the show, still a fixture on TV, became a huge hit, spawning 6 series and a US spin-off.
“Part of the reason I wanted to do the show was because of Hustle [the BBC1 drama series]. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we showed what goes on in the real world?’ and it was only shortly afterwards that we were approached. What we have tried to achieve is be true about the scams. We fight on a daily basis with producers and directors who want to change the way scams work to make them easier to shoot. But Paul and I are so anal about how the scams should be done.”
And how about the real conmen? Any problems with the real-life hustlers out there?
“Conmen are not worried about a show like ours. We’re only showing things that are already out there, and have been covered already by the press.
“My line about conmen is that ‘conmen are the hackers of human nature’. They mess with what you’re pre-programmed to do in real life. They put on a badge or a suit to gain your trust. They mess with social engineering; that’s what they do. The truth is the majority of conmen are despicable people. They prey on the weak; they prey on the elderly. They’re the guys who rummage in cancer patients’ bags. Let’s make no bones about this. Saying that, most conmen are intelligent enough to have done something else in their lives. They’re very special but have chosen to adapt themselves in different ways.”
“We deliberately miss out steps to our scams on the programme, so we’re not showing you HOW to do the scam yourself. We’re not being irresponsible. If you want to find out how to hack into a hotel safe, go onto YouTube!”
Has Alex ever been tempted to pull off a hustle in real life? With a grin, he says, “Well, maybe I’ve cheated in a poker game once or twice. Seriously though, if you do what I do, you can’t go around without trying out a few things. But I’d never cheat in a game where I was dealing. There’s no point, I enjoy playing the game too much. I’m actually quite a moral guy. There’s no point doing an Edward Norton-in-Rounders. You’d get your face bust!”
Read Alexis Conran exclusively in WPT Poker, starting next month.
Alexis’ Favourite Poker Hustles
The Real Hustle isn’t all credit card and blackjack scams; poker scams have also been a key element of the show. Here, Alexis runs down his Top 3.
1 – The Hendon Mob Get Mobbed
“They had no idea what was happening to them.” This was the first poker scam to appear in The Real Hustle. A loaded deck at a ‘private’ game involving Barny Boatman, Joe Beevers et al sees the Brit poker legends taken to the cleaners. See next issue for a deeper look at this top scam.
2 - The Big Bluff
“The look on the guys’ faces is priceless!” Voted no.10 in the list of all-time The Real Hustle scams, five Vegas locals are invited to a poker game in Alexis’ hotel room. Co-presenter Paul Wilson fakes a heart attack, leaves the room with Alex to fetch his ‘pills’, while hostess Jess swaps the moneyboxes and scarpers.
3 – Lady Luck
“I love this one because so many things went wrong and we still pulled it off.” Filmed for The Real Hustle: High Stakes, this is an age-old scam where a ‘damaged’ pack of cards at a big Harley Street home game is replaced by a stacked deck from a shop round the corner. |
