Biggest Casino Cheaters in History

It’s pretty much common knowledge that you’re going to be at a slight disadvantage when going up against the house in casino games.  Sure you can beat some of the games like video poker and blackjack (through card counting), but the house has an edge in all of the other games. 

There have been plenty of two-bit slot machine thieves over the decades, and Tommy Glenn Carmichael was certainly one of them. During the 1980’s, Carmichael used a top-bottom joint to cheat Las Vegas slots games. Carmichael got away with cheating the slot machines for 5 years before he was apprehended and forced to serve five years in prison (with prior charges). 

After getting out of prison, Carmichael formed a slots cheating gang, and they milked Vegas casino slot machines dry. Using devices such as the light wand, monkey paw, and kick stand, Carmichael and his crew made thousands of dollars each day by beating slots machines in Atlantic City, Colorado, Connecticut, Nassau, Aruba, and San Juan. Eventually, he was caught again, and had to spend another year in prison along with being barred from casinos.

Before becoming one of gambling’s biggest all-time cheats, Richard Marcus had been on the other side of the fence. A professional gambling wannabe, Marcus’ aspirations had left him living under a bridge. Eventually, he got his life back in order and became a casino dealer. And it’s here where he started formulating ideas on how to beat the house edge in roulette.

Richard Marcus’ technique was to put three small chips on top of a large chip such as say $500. However, the large chip was placed in a way that the dealer wouldn’t see it under the stack. If Marcus won, he would jubilantly celebrate – much to the dealer’s surprise – only to reveal his winning chip underneath the smaller ones; if he lost, he would remove the big chip when the dealer’s back was turned. By the time Richard was finally caught, he had wom more than $5 million from casinos!

Many people think that dice control in craps is simply a myth, and there is no way to control how the dice land on the felt. But all of these naysayers should consult Dominic LoRiggio who made a fortune by using perfected dice control techniques.

Dubbed “The Man with the Golden Arm,” LoRiggio spent years perfecting practicing the art of controlled dice throwing. The years of practice certainly paid off too as he began winning massive amounts of cash through craps. Eventually, he formed a team called Rosebud and started winning even more money. And while using his skilled throwing method certainly isn’t illegal, casinos worldwide know LoRiggio and force him to throw dice in a different manner.

Although they are master in different games, Spanish roulette player Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo and craps player Dominic LoRiggio were quite similar in two ways:

1. They both believed in techniques that most people thought were myths.

2. They both spent hours honing their casino-beating skill.

Garcia-Pelayo’s method involved roulette wheel bias, or the belief that not all roulette wheels are totally random. He subscribed to the theory that some wheels could be slightly off, which would favor certain numbers. To find biased wheels, Garcia-Pelayo began studying roulette wheels throughout Spain and recording spin results over thousands of spins. He then analyzed the results to find the most biased wheels, and this gave him as much as a 15% edge in some cases. By the time casinos in Spain and the US barred Garcia-Pelayo from playing at their venues, he had made millions of dollars.

The MIT Blackjack Team are the best known casino “cheats” due to several books and a major movie – 21 – being released about the subject. This team of blackjack card counters started off as an after-school club at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The team used statistics, card counting systems, and disguises to beat the casino in blackjack; some weekends saw the MIT Blackjack Team rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

Unfortunately, success would be the team’s undoing as casinos began to identify the members. Sometimes the law would even get involved, which led to a lot of the students quitting. New students would take the old students places, but by this time, casinos had revamped their methods to catch card counters.

Some people are under the impression that the MIT Blackjack Team invented card counting. However, they merely perfected techniques that mathematics professor Edward Thorpe invented in the early 1960’s. What’s interesting about Thorpe is that he had no gambling aspirations until a friend, Claude Shannon, introduced Edward and his wife to blackjack. After Thorpe played it a few times, he became obsessed with finding out a way to beat the game of blackjack. 

Edward Thorpe poured hours into figuring a way in which the player could gain an advantage over the casino. Sparing you a lengthy tutorial on card counting, Thorpe eventually developed a system where he could gain between an advantage over the house. Thorpe and Shannon would take this system to live casinos where they earned thousands of dollars every weekend. Casinos had no idea how Thorpe beat the game so easily until Edward released his world-famous book entitled “How to Beat the Dealer.”

Unlike some of the other biggest casino cheaters in history, Reid Errol McNeal didn’t walk away with millions of dollars. However, he did overcome astronomical odds at Bally’s Park Place Casino in Atlantic City to win a $100,000 keno jackpot. And while this is rare enough, it was even rarer that he demanded to be paid in cash and didn’t get too excited after the win.

What ensued was an investigation where Bally’s, in conjunction with the police, found that McNeal was actually a Nevada state employee whose job was to examine slot machines and make sure that the proper chips were being used. As the investigation deepened, police found that McNeal accessed a Bally’s computer and found out their random number generator code for keno. Using special equipment, he was able to record all of this information, and use it to win the keno jackpot at Bally’s.