My new book, "The World's Greatest Gambling Scams," is now available on Amazon and will be in the bookstores shortly. You can link to it on my home page. This is the book that details all those great gambling scams you've seen on the History Channel's/Discovery Channel's Breaking Vegas series as well as those you've seen in Europe on Challenge TV and the Crime Information Network. In the book you will read exactly how the scams went down as well as the colorful histories of those who devised them and carried them out. Most of this detail had been omitted on the TV series. I also ironed out many of the inaccuracies on these shows. I promise you're in for some real entertainment, and quite a learning experience as well!
CASINO LEAGUES
Did you know that professional cheating teams rate and assign casinos much like legitimate corporations do in their marketing strategies? For instance, my teams always used certain casinos for definite functions. Some casinos served as training grounds. That's where I trained mechanics, claimers and check-bettors (refer to American Roulette if not familiar with these terms) before bringing them to the big leagues in the major casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, Monte Carlo and the rest of the world's glamour spots. I assigned casinos varioius levels of importance. For example, an AAA casino was the cream of the crop: the Bellagio in Vegas; Le Grande Casino in Monte Carlo; or one of the new gaming palaces in Macau. These casinos have high action and, more importantly, high denomination chips. In my business, the bigger the chips, the bigger the profits!
Smaller casinos with less action, those where $500 and $1,000 chips do not readily circulate, served as boot camp for my cheating trainees. By practicing little moves for a few hundred bucks a pop, they gained experience while we slowly fattened up the bankroll in the process. Even my famed Savannah move was fashioned at the Fremont Casino in Vegas, a downtown gambling joint with very moderate action. But after ironing out her kinks, (and believe me, there weren't many!), we took her right to Caesar's Palace, an AAAA casino if ever there was one, and danced her to the tune of ten grand a pop!