Players Who Beat The Casinos’ Odds Part 2

As you know, gambling is a game of chance. Usually, you can’t influence the game, you can only pray for luck. However, like every man-made thing, casino games also have loopholes. Players who beat the casinos’ odds are the gamblers who found these weaknesses and used them to their advantage. Let’s check out these badass players!

MIT Blackjack Team

Perhaps they are the most famous of the scammers. People wrote several books about them, and in 2008, they made a film about the story. It all started in the late seventies as an after-school club at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. The group started to become famous when these brilliant students decided to use a system to beat the house in blackjack. After a while, the students who initially participated in the group and the outsiders involved started a recruiting campaign.

They even left flyers around the campus. The applicants had to go through a series of tests, and only the most suitable were allowed to join the team. After this process, they were trained to use the methods. It was a card counting system, which, if done well, gave the player a small but decent advantage. The idea was not new since thousands of people had tried it before, but the MIT team took the method to a whole new level.

Players Who Beat the Casinos’ Odds 

They made casino models, analyzed the environment, and applied a group approach. This complex system minimized the chance of losing, maximized the opportunities, and disguised the betting patterns of the card counting method. By this time, the casinos were experienced in identifying those who tried counting the cards, but it was not easy to follow every move of a clever group and their activities. 

They spent long hours perfecting the system, and each team member had to pass a strict test before being allowed to play in a casino. When they grew confident in their skills, they obtained financial backing from anonymous investors and created their own company, Strategic Investments. They won millions of dollars this way. 

After years of success, the pressure became too much, and they broke up the team. However, some of them continued with this technique. One of the players who beat the casinos’ odds was Aponte, who later became the 2004 World Series of Blackjack champion. After a while, he became too famous for gambling in a traditional casino, so he sometimes still goes to online casinos like Ignition Casino. He also teaches blackjack and, you won’t believe this, works as a consultant to help casinos with scammers. What a surprise!

Louis – The Coin – Colavecchio

At the end of the nineties, the FBI and the Secret Service stormed the house of Louis Colavecchio. There and at his orthopedic device shop, they found thousands of slot machine ships from dozens of casinos across North America. What set Colavecchio apart from other scammers was that he could duplicate anything in metal or stone.

Though the slot machine chips found at him were fake but seemed the same as the originals in every way. In order for Colavecchio, nicknamed The Coin, to do this, he needed professional equipment. 

These hard-to-find items included copper, nickel, zinc, laser cutting tools, and a 150-ton press from Italy. He was so great in his profession that when the police took the chips to one of the casinos, the security experts didn’t even believe they were fakes. Colavecchio outwitted a few casinos in Las Vegas before the authorities even realized anything illegal had happened. He finally caught the security’s attention when the casinos had a large surplus of chips in their inventory, and Colavecchio exchanged a suspiciously large amount of chips for cash.

It took weeks to calculate how much The Coin stole from the dozens of casinos for which he produced chips. It was impossible to tell the exact amount, as the people in Las Vegas refused to admit that they had been defrauded. Estimates ranged from $100,000 to $500,000, and it was clear he had no intention of quitting.

The government had to rent a two-story warehouse to store the evidence seized from Colavecchio. Eventually, they struck a plea deal when Colavecchio agreed to show law enforcement exactly how he worked to help prevent similar incidents in the future. 

Richard Marcus – Players Who Beat the Casinos’ Odds

Marcus is probably the most professional cheater in the history of players who beat the casinos’ odds. In the beginning, he just wanted to make a living from gambling, but he soon found himself homeless. Then, Marcus pulled himself together and became a blackjack and baccarat dealer, but while standing on the other side of the table, he started having ideas. Eventually, he turned his ideas into reality. It was simple but risky to carry out the plan.

He called the method Savannah, and it was based on bets played at a roulette table with low-value chips like $5s, nothing that would attract anyone’s attention. When he won, he became very excited, yelling, shouting, raising his hands, and waving. In this case, the dealer was confused as to why the player was so enthusiastic when he only won a small amount. Marcus then indicated that there was a brown $500 chip under the $5s, and when the dealer raised the top three, they could see that there was indeed a $500 chip there.

However, if Marcus lost, he would wait for the dealer to turn to the wheel and then quickly remove the $500 chip from the bottom of the stack. It was all a silly plan but, at the same time, a bright idea. He shifted the chips so they would cover the larger ones, so the dealer didn’t see them until the player revealed it. However, according to online casino sites in the US, the idea of switching chips was not new.

Marcus’s Plan

In the past, chip-manipulating fraudsters would bet small, and if they won, they would add a few more chips to the original bet. In contrast, Marcus started big, then changed to small when he lost. It doesn’t seem like a drastic change, but the casinos have never seen this before and didn’t pay attention to it since the security people only paid attention to the winnings. 

Marcus’ winnings were perfectly legal, but his losses were not! There were times when Marcus hid $5,000 in chips under $100, but he eventually got caught and was charged. By that time, he had won nearly $5 million in casinos around the world. Marcus currently sells gambling books and, according to his website, still has an interest in casino fraud. He wouldn’t have been able to pull it off at online casinos like Ignition Casino, or would he? Check out the online gambling fraud myths!

Phil Ivey – The Poker Champion

Surprisingly Phil Ivey is on the list of players who beat the casinos’ odds! Why? Even today, Phil Ivey is still a famous professional poker player. He is 45 years old and has won the World Series of Poker bracelets ten times. He has earned more than $35 million from poker so far and has also tried the online poker scene, according to online casino sites in the US. 

So why did he strike an illegal deal with the croupier to win millions at baccarat? Whatever his motive was, he went through with the so-called edge sorting method. Phil noticed the pattern on the back of the cards produced by the company Gemaco gave away some cards. In baccarat, the house has a 1% advantage, but since Phil could identify a few cards in advance, he already had a 6% advantage.

 In 2012, he won $12 million at the Crockford Casino in England and $9.6 million at the Borgata Hotel Casino in Atlantic City. They didn’t pay him the Crockford prize, so he sued the casino. The same thing happened, only the other way around! He got the Borgata casino prize, but the casino sued Phil. The line is thin between fraud and just a strategy.

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