Harry Milas stars in “The Unfair Advantage” running at Steppenwolf Theatre.
Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
When Harry Milas was 17, he tried to cheat in a professional backroom card game in his hometown of Sydney, Australia.
“Trying it was terrifying, and then being found out was terrifying,” says Milas, 33.
But unlike in the 1995 Martin Scorsese movie “Casino,” no one hauled him in to a private room and smashed his fingers with a hammer.
“It was a warning,” he says. “They said, ‘You need to be careful.’ They threw me a bone.”
Milas never cheated again. Instead, he went to work in casinos and private poker rooms — as a lookout for other cheats.
Milas has taken what he learned there and offers it up in an hour-long show called “The Unfair Advantage,” — a combination of magic and card-playing prowess — running at Steppenwolf Theatre’s Merle Reskin Garage Space through May 5.
Audience members must sign a “confidentiality agreement” in which they promise to neither use nor disclose the secrets they learn during the show.
At this point, you might wonder: Then, why go at all? Well, it’s also a magic show.
“With magic and what I’m doing with magic, I want to get past this idea that secrets are the whole point of it, that secrets can be as interesting as the effects, if you find a way to talk about it it right,” says Milas, who bears more than a passing resemblance to the fictional wand-waving Harry Potter. “That contract just gives me leeway to be more vulnerable, more open.”
The contract feels a bit gimmicky — like when a blindfolded knife-thrower tells the audience, “Don’t try this at home.”
Milas says few people actually come to the show with the intention of learning how to cheat at cards and then to put those skills to use.
“I’d be lying if I said I haven’t had people come to the show and come up with a wad of cash afterward and say, ‘Let’s go to the casino,’ ” he says.
He was never tempted, he says, to take his “unfair advantage” back to the casino.
“One of the X factors of my journey is that it turns out that I don’t really enjoy gambling,” he says.
And those who cheat, he says, tend to be more needy than greedy.
“Sometimes, there is kind of a grandiose sense of self, but most of the time, it was from a place of desperation,” he says.
It’s important to note that according to the Illinois Gaming Act, cheating at a professional gambling table is a felony in Illinois and can get you barred from casinos for life. It’s also illegal to use a “device” to keep track of the cards played. What if the device happens to be a human brain? The act doesn’t appear to address that.
Even if you can’t use what you’ve learned while in Milas’ company, his sleight-of-hand techniques are dazzling enough for an hour of your time. Milas’ slender, pale fingers move with the speed and agility of a spider building a web — all done on a green felt-top table with an audience of about three dozen hovering and eager to spot any trick.
They almost never do.
Maybe most impressive is Milas’ ability to memorize the position of every card in a full deck after he’s let the audience mix them up. He insists this is neither a trick nor a talent but the result of hard work — four years of it. Each card and each suit has a particular word association, like a key for the numeral seven or an automobile for clubs. And that’s it, he says.
“I was proficient in two [years] but to be able to do it three shows in a night in front of a scrutinizing audience — that took longer,” he says.
Milas, who caught the magic bug when he was just 4 years old, says his show, conceived in 2018, has evolved into something more than being about magic and how to cheat at poker.
“It’s about what are you going to do with your time and what are you passionate about,” he says.
And he doesn’t worry that what he does so well is a young person’s game, involving razor-sharp skills that might whither.
“I know magicians in their 90s who still do beautiful sleight of hand and have very sharp minds,” he says.
Milas’ problem, he says, is slowing the gears whizzing in his head — the ones he needs night after night.
“My challenge is switching off; that’s what I need to work on,” he says. “I’’m naturally on. I’m naturally thinking and ruminating.”