Riveting glimpse of cheaters in Vegas

[zengrifter]

Did anyone catch the first episode? zg

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Posted on Tue, Mar. 01, 2005

TELEVISION REVIEW

Good bet: Riveting glimpse of cheaters in Vegas

BY GLENN GARVIN
[email protected]

Breaking Vegas, 9-11 tonight, History Channel

With television debuting a new show on the glories of Las Vegas casinos approximately every four hours these days, it might be wise to consider the words of Richard Marcus in tonight's premiere of the History Channel's Breaking Vegas: 'The only `sure thing' in gambling is cheating.''

Marcus, like the other featured players in Breaking Vegas, is a career cheater. This fascinating documentary series uses interviews, old news footage and recreated scenes to tell the stories of gamblers who use everything from cutting-edge silicon chips to old-fashioned nimble fingers to gain an edge on the casinos.

High- and low-tech cheaters both get their props in tonight's special two-hour debut. (Future episodes of Breaking Vegas will be only an hour.) But champions of traditional values will note with satisfaction that it's the old-school guys who got away with millions of bucks, while the computer whiz kids went to jail.

To call the cheating ring led by Richard Marcus low-tech is a whopping understatement. As Marcus himself admits, his technique was ''so simple it's idiotic'' -- he just slipped chips onto or off of the table when blackjack dealers and roulette tourneurs weren't looking.

At first, Marcus and his crew added high-value chips to winning bets. But as casino surveillance teams caught on to that one, Marcus reversed his ploy: He bet high every time but replaced big chips with small ones when his bets lost. Touchingly, he named the technique ''Savannah,'' after his favorite Vegas topless dancer.

Marcus, never arrested in 24 years of cheating, now lives in retirement on the French Riviera. Less lucky, and more morally ambiguous, was Ron Harris, a rogue computer-security specialist for the Nevada Gaming Commission, the agency that regulates casinos.

His job was to detect rigged software in slot machines, but Harris became such an expert that he began unleashing viruses into the machines the gaming commission inspected, programming them to pay off jackpots after a certain sequence of coins was bet.

His slot-machine chicanery was never detected. But then Harris turned his attention to the lottery game keno. Carefully studying the patterns of the computers that generate the lottery numbers, he discovered that they weren't really random but could be predicted with the aid of his own computer.

The first time Harris played keno, he won $100,000 -- but got into trouble when casino officials discovered he worked for the gaming commission, whose employees are legally barred from playing in casinos. He eventually went to prison for two years.

Tampering with slot machines is cheating in anybody's book. But what about outsmarting the casino's keno computer? ''Is that cheating?'' asks Harris. ''If you can use your wits to be as smart as the machine you're betting against?'' It's questions like that that make Breaking Vegas well worth watching.

xxx

 

[zengrifter]

The History Channel Presents BREAKING VEGAS

The History Channel Presents BREAKING VEGAS

NEW YORK, Feb. 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Everyday, Las Vegas casinos attract hundreds of thousands of gamblers from around the world -- and more than their fair share of cheaters. The new series BREAKING VEGAS on The History Channel(R) looks at some of Las Vegas's most notorious high-stakes cheaters and the various tactics they've used to fleece casinos in the gambling capital of the world. BREAKING VEGAS premieres on Tuesday, March 1 at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT with new episodes airing on Tuesdays at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT.

Cheating in Las Vegas casinos has taken a wide variety of forms over the years. There have been inside jobs, the use of digital equipment to spy, the creation of gadgets to predict outcomes in roulette and blackjack -- plus: various legal -- but shady -- card-counting schemes involving entire teams of people. BREAKING VEGAS episodes combine recent and historical footage, dramatizations, factual background, and interviews with those involved, including some of the schemers themselves. Viewers get a behind-the-scenes look at the methods used and the casinos' constant efforts to counterbalance them.

Episodes Include:

THE ULTIMATE CHEAT (airing Tuesday, March 1st at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT) Imagine the ultimate cheating move of all time -- so outrageous, so audacious, so brilliantly simple that it takes the best of the casino's investigators to even come close to catching the genius behind it. This is the story of a daring, devious kid from New Jersey -- Richard Marcus -- and how he took the craft of past-posting to amazing new heights, vowing to cheat casinos out of $5 million and never be caught. As riveting as the bouncing ball on a roulette wheel itself, The Ultimate Cheat is the roller-coaster adventure of one brilliant cheat who managed to evade security at every move and ultimately discovered the move that could never be caught on tape.

SLOT BUSTER (airing Tuesday, March 1st at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT) Casino worker Ron Harris was a technology whiz employed by the Nevada Gaming Control Board to stop technology-related casino scams. Then, disillusioned by his employers' lax approach to stopping cheaters, he became one himself, using inside knowledge to reprogram computer chips, predict numerical patterns, and collect millions in cash. But how long could his act last?

PROFESSOR BLACKJACK (airing Tuesday, March 8th at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT) In 1961, when Las Vegas was under heavy mafia influence, a young MIT math professor devised a revolutionary and completely legal card-counting scheme that had the potential to make him a fortune. A mob slickster approached the young professor and the two forged a partnership that would change the casino industry forever.

THE GADGET GAMBLER (airing Tuesday, March 15th at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT) Keith Taft, a straight-laced family man with an affinity for electronic gadgetry, happened upon a casino one day and developed an obsession with beating blackjack. He used LED eyeglasses, laser beams, satellite dishes, TV monitors, and even his children to execute a variety of scams that earned him the label "mad scientist" ... and eventually brought about his demise.

CARD COUNT KING (airing Tuesday, March 22nd at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT) Tommy Hyland turned card-counting into a team effort that he considered legal -- but the casinos disagreed. His phenomenal success led to the arrest of members of his team in a Canadian casino, and a titanic court battle that provoked furious debate over the legality and fairness of card-counting.

BREAKING VEGAS is produced by Atlas Media Corp. for The History Channel. Executive Producer for The History Channel is Carl H. Lindahl. Executive Producer for Atlas Media is Bruce David Klein.

Now reaching more than 87 million Nielsen subscribers, The History Channel(R), "Where the Past Comes Alive(R)," brings history to life in a powerful manner and provides an inviting place where people experience history personally and connect their own lives to the great lives and events of the past. In 2004, The History Channel earned five News and Documentary Emmy(R) Awards and previously received the prestigious Governor's Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for the network's "Save Our History(R)" campaign dedicated to historic preservation and history education. The History Channel web site is located at http://www.history.com/.

CONTACT: Jenna Farkas, +1-212-210-9184, [email protected]

Web site: http://www.history.com/

Disclaimer: Information contained on this page is provided by companies featured through PR Newswire. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station cannot confirm the accuracy of this information and make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.

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[stainless steel rat]

yeah...

They are airing one tomorrow night about Edward Thorpe. I'm hoping it doesn't once again brand us all as "cheaters". So far we saw the episode you mentioned, then the episode about the "king of slots cheaters" that worked for the NGB and re-programmed slots to pay off on his command, and then wrecked the Keno game in AC by breaking the RNG algorithm and predicting the next set of winning keno numbers... So two episodes about cheaters, and now we get "Beat the Dealer" Edward Thorpe next.

I think I'll hide my head in shame now...

 

[Automatic Monkey]

I saw this one episode

It was narrated by Scoblete and had a lot of cheats and thieves in it. It mentioned AP only briefly as a legitimate way to make money in a casino.

 

[Sun runner]

Ron Harris

The police will tell you that if criminals didn't make mistakes it would be hard to catch and prosecute anyone.

But Ron Harris .. man .. of all the guys that it looked like had a bird's nest on the ground. Geeez. His deal could have gone on forever.

If he and his buddy were as unprepared for the Keno end game as they appeared to be, I suppose it is no wonder they did get caught.

They probably could have taken a grand a week each out of the Nevada slots for the rest of their life.

 

[bfbagain]

There's more to winning

and extracting money from casinos than even cheating can gurantee.

For the sake of assumption, assume Harris was not a cheater, but him and his partner won, nonetheless. The casino would have still acted in the very same manner as they did, as they didn't know at the time that cheating was the reason behind the win.

There was still the issues with ID, casino comportment, hotel roommates.

Granted, if the win was luck, they would have been paid and that would have been that. But there is a valuable lesson here (besides the, you're not supposed to cheat one), and that's how prepared you are as an AP to handle big wins.

What story do you have? Are there friends that are counters staying with you in the same room? What if you hit a royal on dollar VP machine, and you checked in under a different name? How will handle the ID issue for tax purposes?

There is a lot more to winning than knowing how to count, bet and playing your cards. Most people attempt to prepare themselves for LOSING, e.g., do I resize my bets, do I have a replenishable bankroll, etc. What you also need is to prepare yourself for WINNING.

Think about it. These guys, Harris and his partner, but mostly Harris, flew to AC, one by way of the Caribbean, and checked in to the same room, knowing they were attempting a cheating move? That's like a burgler posing for a store's video camera during a robbery. Duh. They were destined to fail and be caught. Not to mention that the name "Ron Harris" might just set off bells and whistles? Ya think?

There are many good counters that are constantly being backed off. Why? Because they play such a strong game that every moron critter and $10 an hour surveillance worker will identify them in seconds becasue they're so damn good?

Nonsense. Learn how to act when WINNING, and you will be far more successful in your quest to extract money.

cheers
bfb

 

[Sun runner]

An excellent post.

 

[Garo]

Historical discrepency in Ed Thorpe episode

In the show he teaches his investor to count with Hi-Lo but according to "Beat the Dealer" at the time he was workign with his investor he was using 5s count, and "[Hi-Lo] was not presented in the first edition because the needed calulations had not been completed" p75 1966 edition