Every morning when Harry Milas wakes up, he sits at his desk and picks up a pack of playing cards. He starts every day by dealing “seconds” – dealing out the second card in the deck, rather than the top card – then “thirds” and “bottoms” (just what it sounds like), over and over. He practises shuffling and cutting the deck, too. If he doesn’t do this for up to an hour every morning, he’ll be “in a mood” all day. He even takes his cards on holidays. “It’s the opposite of riding a bicycle – it’s a knife that I have to sharpen every day,” he says.
Milas is a professional magician, and, at 32, a bona fide sleight of hand expert. There are no rabbits in hats or doves up sleeves; no Gob Bluth-style pizzazz. Instead, his magic generally involves cards, dice, coins and rubber bands: small tricks he can perform both up close with one person, or in front of thousands from a stage. He also performs mentalism, or “mind-reading”: a preternatural ability to read body language and speech that usually leaves people giddy and suspicious.
Professional magicians like Milas mostly work in corporate entertainment – sales team celebrations, Christmas parties, EOFY events and the like. “The amount of times that I get asked by bankers or managers, ‘So, is this what you do?’ I can tell, they’re so desperate for me to say, ‘Oh no, I work at Westpac, this is just for fun’,” Milas says. “They hate when I say, ‘No, this is it. This is my job’.”
So good is Milas at his job that he now specialises in a unique line of work: he’s enlisted by casinos around the world, from Las Vegas to the Middle East, to catch people cheating. It is this work that inspired his latest show, The Unfair Advantage, in which he goes against convention and shows his audience how to cheat in any way they want – while also demonstrating all the ways they will be caught.
Milas calls the show “a pretty frank warning”, though many people still think they’ll be able to get away with it. He once had an entire gin rummy club book out the show, looking for tips – and he can always spot the young men who come along because they want to take on the casinos. “They usually dress up a little bit, they’ve fished out a collared shirt or a jacket – it’s the James Bond thing. But I tell them ‘there’s nothing in a casino that is built to work for you. The deck is stacked against you, in every sense of that phrase’.”
Milas is known as a “mechanical expert”, or someone who knows all the ways to get an unfair advantage in cards. When he offers to demonstrate dealing seconds for me, I try desperately not to look too excited – until he casually shuffles his deck in a spectacular way, which provokes an odd, happy noise out of me. Kindly, he doesn’t make fun of it. “Magic is a very optimistic art form,” he’ll tell me later. “It brings out the inner child. It’s a gentle reminder that you’re never going to know everything.”
He shows me the ace of spades on top of the deck then starts dealing, discreetly keeping the ace on top with his thumb as he fluidly deals out the cards underneath it. “This is probably the most prevalent card cheating move,” he explains. “It should look like nothing at all.” And it does. “There’s essentially an infinite amount of refinement that you can do,” he adds, drawing my attention to the angle of the deck in his palm. “You can see how staggered it is – I’ve been wanting to rein that in to more to like that.” He pushes the deck a smidge, to make it straighter. It looks an infinitesimal change to me, but it’s the difference between someone being caught cheating or getting away with it.
The way Milas puts it, “word got around” that there was a young man in Sydney with a talent for false dealing and “hops and shifts” – gambling terms for moving cards within a deck – and he was approached by a gaming body to help catch a suspected cheat. “Truth is, it’s incredibly common for people to try to cheat,” he says. “Most of my work in casinos is confirming suspicions. And most of the time, it’s the dealer. Sometimes, it is someone who is winning really well and consistently – it doesn’t matter how fair your play is, the casinos are going to be interested in you.”
A lot of the work involves studying video footage to see if he can spot a mechanic, watching the movement of their thumbs, the bevel of the deck in their hand. “Most people are really fucking bad at these moves and it’s very obvious,” he says. “You can only start even thinking about trying to cheat once there is no question about being able to deliver 100% of the time. If it’s any less than that, you are going to be caught.”
Rarely – and even more rarely now he’s a known face – Milas sits in on a game to catch a cheater in the act. “That’s usually only if it’s a really high stakes game and, to be honest, I really don’t like doing that. It’s a very high-pressure situation and usually there’s a lot of money involved,” he says. When he does catch someone – and he is careful about what he says, but confirms he has detected whole gambling rings – he feels a “rush”. “Most times it’s crystal clear, but every now and again you hit something where you are not 100% sure what’s going on and you have to really bite down on it. And that’s fun.”
Despite working in casinos around the world, Milas despises them. “I absolutely hate being inside a casino. It’s one of the most cursed places in the world. It’s ugly, it’s fluorescent, there’s no clocks, there’s no windows, the cocktails are all double shot so everyone’s drunk and the food’s weird.” You’re helping casinos by catching the cheats, in a way, I suggest. “That’s an interesting thought,” he muses. “My personal philosophy is, you’re never going to stop gambling but you’ve got to regulate it. And I would rather help regulate it than participate ... And the truth is, it’s also just something I’m good at. It’s nice to do something I’m good at.”
Milas has been performing sleight of hand since he was four; he would sit with magic books propped open for hours trying to master new tricks. “Most people – and I mean men – get into magic because it’s revenge of the nerd,” he says. “‘I know something you don’t.’ And for me, it was also a good excuse to be alone. I was very shy.”
He once thought he might become a professional poker player – but at 18, he sat down at a Texas hold ’em poker table, and the experience changed his life.
“I was watching people brag about how they won $3,000, but they had spent $5,000. That’s the gambler’s fallacy,” he says. “I understand. [Gambling is] sexy. But I just don’t see the point. Gambling has an interesting parallel with magic: once you know how the sausage is made, it’s very hard to go back. You don’t want to know. It is always disappointing.
“I think it’s a genuine disservice to reveal how magic tricks are done,” he adds. “I realise that that might sound hypocritical, but I personally see a distinction between revealing gambling techniques and magic secrets: one is something created for ulterior personal gain, and the other is used to elicit something really special and wonderful.”
He suddenly makes a coin disappear and reappear which, of course, makes me gasp. “Something I tell people is, I can’t do this for myself. I can’t do this in front of the mirror and be amazed. The only place that the magic is happening is inside your head,” he says. “That’s what makes it such an unusual art form. You’re the one that makes it magic.” He does it again.
It can be strange to meet people like Milas, who seem as if they were almost predestined to do what they do; to think of that four-year-old with his books and his cards, who perhaps knew even then that this would be his life. “This is going to sound corny, but it is true – magic switches on a sense of wonder that is hard to shake,” he says, smiling. “Which is why, when I wake up, I sit right here and I deal seconds, over and over. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I have figured out how to be happy.”
Harry Milas is performing the Unfair Advantage in the pylon lookout on Sydney Harbour Bridge two shows a day on 24 June and 21 July; new dates will be announced monthly.
