Star Poker Player Antonio Esfandiari, winner of the $1 million buy-in Big One for One Drop Tournament in 2012 for more than $18 million, was the victim of a million-dollar pot himself, but not a poker pot. A forty-six-year-old woman by the name of Svitlana Silva, whose glittery last name fits quite nicely into her first name, which perhaps gave the cops a clue to the crime, and who was also the on and off girlfriend of Esfandiari's father, Bejan, made off with a million in cash, casino poker chips and tournament gold bracelets (including the Big One bracelet), which she then proceeded to blow and win back in several high-stakes Las Vegas poker games, most of them private.
She allegedly knew or figured out the code for the safe, which contained the same numbers of Bejan's cellphone password, which she did know. But instead of getting out of dodge with the loot, or should I say "getting out of Sin City," she instead hung around town and used the cash and chips to buy into huge-stakes poker games, losing all the cash quite quickly, then using the stolen chips, most of them worth $25 grand each, to win back the money she lost. The problem was that another player received those chips upon cashing out.
Using those very high denomination chips is what did her in. Knowing that casinos keep track of their large denomination chips, she had to get those chips back from that player so they would not show up again in any casino and lead the cops to her. She contacted the man who had them, telling him that the chips were marked in casinos' computers and could be confiscated when presented again for use or cashout if they're reported stolen.
Thus she offered to buy them back. But before she could, Las Vegas police caught up with her after learning of her huge cash and chip-buy-ins and coupling that with the fact she had lived in Estandiari's Las Vegas apartment with him and his father and still had access to it.
This bizarre incident brings back memories of the Bellagio "Biker Bandit" (Tony Carleo), who held-up the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas back in 2010 and escaped with a million dollars in similar $25,000 chips. He, too, knew that casinos kept track of these chips, so he figured out a way to get rid of them. Unfortunately for the Biker Bandit, his idea was even worse than Silva's.
He put an ad on the Two Plus Two poker forum offering to sell them at a huge discount.
Need I say more?
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