Every player wishes to get away with more money than they brought to the casino. Better still, a lot of us dream of hitting the jackpot someday. However, the casino advantage has the odds stacked against players. Unless your luck and skill hold up, the house always wins. However, some bettors choose to take matters into their own hands and turn the tide in their favor.
For a moment, just forget the daring and dramatic casino heists that are shown in films like Hollow Triumph and Ocean’s 11. Granted, these fictitious masterminds pulled off some well-oiled robberies on film. However, some real-life casino cheats have used a variety of tools and techniques to rob casinos around the world of millions of dollars.
1. The Starter Advice
The proverb, not rocket science, applies in this instance. However, knowing what to do when the odds are stacked up against you, requires a strategic mind. Every gambler knows that casinos have some of the most airtight security systems and protocols in the world. But you don’t necessarily have to be a genius to take on the house and come out on top. However, while the possibilities are there, patience, time, and emotional control are essential. Most importantly is finding a casino on which to flex your iGaming strategy muscles.
Applying various strategies requires a platform. Comparison sites like ukcasino.xyz aren’t short on casino lists. Reviews are ample and so are some tips on how to bring your A-game, even if Lady Luck has turned the other way. It all depends on whether you prefer attempts on demo mode or low and high stakes tables. Most players tend to gravitate toward the live games, so as to have a real-time application as opposed to RGN.
While heroic deeds were ample and the impossible become possible, the road was not always easy. Of course, things took a downward trend when they were caught, but we can still learn a thing or two from how they did it. In this article, we’ll look at some of the tools and strategies that the most famous casino cheats used to con the system.
2. The Light Wand
Tommy Glenn Carmichael was perhaps one of the most famous casino cheats who managed to move undetected for several years. As a television repairman, tinkering with electronics came naturally to him. Whenever he could pop up a slot machine’s hood, it didn’t take Carmichael long to develop the Light Wand, a tool that duped a slot machine to think that it’d hit a winning combination.
As technology and slot manufacturers improved the security features on new models, it didn’t take Tommy too long to get a hold of the new model and come up with a way to rig the system. Of course, his tools would have been no match for today’s online slot machines. As harsh as it may seem, these have been created with fairness in mind, but are also security conscious. They are also hacker-proof, as they employ a variety of cybersecurity tools that make them harder to rig, even with strategy-based software.
When Carmichael decided to sell his tool and collaborate with other cheats, one was caught and soon the jig was up. Tommy was arrested and released several times, before finally being jailed in 1996. The Light Wand is still one of the most iconic slot machine rigging tools of all time.
3. Sleight of Hand
Tommy Carmichael may have been a master with electronics, but Richard Marcus used a simple illusion to dupe casinos for over two decades. He came up with an idea that he could place a roulette bet with potential winnings of up to $500,000 but limit his losses up to $10. How? Well, you can’t lose if you quickly move your betting chips away from sight, can you? It’s the artistry of magic hands.
If a croupier caught on to his antics, Marcus would pretend to be drunk and apologize while putting back the chip. But the ingenuity of his strategy was that, even then, he would replace the higher-valued chip with a $5 or $10 one that he’d have hidden in his hand all along. He was arrested several times, but no one ever had enough evidence to charge him. Las Vegas casinos just ended up resorting to blacklisting this master of sleight of hand. But, these days, casinos employ high-security cameras at each table, which is likely to counter this. With profits on the line, nobody can blame them, but experience inspires improvements.
4. Card Counting
The iconic movie 21 may be synonymous with card-counting, but the strategy was originally developed by a maths professor, Edward O. Thorp. The professor was determined to crunch up the numbers and come up with a system to transfer the blackjack winning advantage to himself. Thorp didn’t leave his methods in the books or peer review his findings with fellow math sages. Instead, he put them to the test in a real-life casino.
On a regular weekend, he and his wife would rake in over half a million dollars in today’s money. A couple that plays together, stays together. Not only did Thorp garner the title of casino beater, but he also applied his mind to the stock market through hedge funds.
Casinos were at sixes and sevens about how the professor kept on winning, so they would ask him to leave. Edward Thorp published a book in 1962 to finally let the cat out of the bag on how he’d pulled his exploits off. The MIT blackjack team, on the other hand, made card counting immortal in casino players’ memories. By the time these students and their professor were caught counting cards, they’d won over $5 million.
While these individuals prove that nothing is impossible, it all boils down to each person’s gusto. What drives you to succeed, is not following in other’s footsteps, but creating your own path by finding inspiration in their achievements.
