The Biggest Casino Cheaters in History

Tommy Glenn Carmichael's adventures in cheating casinos spanned more than four decades starting in the 1960s. After he was introduced to the "top-bottom joint" by a friend, Carmichael went from operating a television repair shop to scoring money on the Las Vegas Strip by scamming coins out of slot machines.

His first arrest for cheating followed in 1985 when he was stopped by police and eventually sentenced to five years in prison. Using a plan devised while he was locked up, Carmichael continued his scam after his release. Carmichael developed a new tool, the monkey paw, to alter and hack into slot machines.

As slot machine technology evolved, Carmichael's tricks did as well with the invention of the light wand in 1991, which worked on newer electronic slot machines in the same manner. He went on to sell this device to other cheaters, with some banking over $10,000 per day using the tool.

Carmichael continued to operate, under the radar, scamming casino boat cruises out of their money. He was again arrested in 1996 and charged with possession of and manufacturing a cheating device, however the charges were later dropped. Carmichael was lucky that time, but not so lucky in subsequent arrests in 1998 and 1999.

After failing at earning a living with legal gambling, Richard Marcus found himself homeless in Las Vegas and took a job as a blackjack and baccarat dealer. This gave Marcus a second perspective and allowed him to see both sides of how casinos operate.

That information was enough for Marcus to discover a way to scam casinos out of money, and in his case, that money became millions over his career. His scam was pretty simple using basic slight of hand.

He place a simple bet, two red $5 chips on top of one $500 brown chip. However, Marcus placed the bet so that through the eyes of the dealer, it appeared to be only a $15 bet with three red chips.

If the bet won, Marcus would inform the dealer of the size of the bet and pocket over $1,000. If the bet lost, he's wait until the dealer looked away and replace the $510 in chips with $15 in chips.

The simple scam worked for years, that is until Marcus was caught, prosecuted and banned from casinos. That didn't really stop Marcus though as to this day he continues to serve as a mentor to other cheats. Operating a website, blog and as the author of two books, Marcus, the self-proclaimed "World's #1 Casino and Poker Cheating Expert" continues to help others through "education."

Easily the most famous to cheat casinos in roulette, Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo cleaned out many casinos after he cracked the code behind the spinning wheel. The one-time Spanish record producer went from the simple family life to earning well over $1.5 million playing roulette in Las Vegas over his career.

His roulette career began in Madrid with the simple theory that roulette wheels were not perfectly random. He spent hours recording roulette results and with the help of a computer, analyzing the results to discover the probabilities of the game.

Learning that die to imperfections in each wheel, Garcia-Pelayo learned that certain numbers fall more often than others. He used this knowledge to earn more than 600,000 Euros in one of his first nights in Madrid.

Clearly this discovery could not be wasted and Garcia-Pelayo came to Las Vegas where he operated in the early 1990s. Almost $2 million later, Garcia-Pelayo was banned from casinos after his method was deemed unethical. He didn't stand down, taking his fight to the Supreme Court, which ruled that he did nothing illegal.

The damage however was done and Garcia-Pelayo's gambling career ended there in 1992. Still, Garcia-Pelayo is known as a pioneer of roulette cheating and is the reason to this day that casinos constantly test and monitor the performance of their roulette wheels.

They didn't break the law and they did not discover anything new in the world of casino cheating, but the MIT blackjack team perhaps perfected the skill of card counting to scam an estimated $5 million in blackjack. Who better to profit from the completely legal, but frowned upon, practice of card counting than some of the finest minds in the country?

In the late 1970s, a group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a card counting team with the intent of cheating casinos in blackjack. It took a great deal of work, but it was successful.

The MIT team trained in basements, underground games and dorm rooms to be ready for a variety of situations, both in terms of the game and dealing with casinos, who at this point were well versed on how to spot counters. After hours of practice, they took their talents to the casinos and earned a whopping $400,000 in their first weekend of play.

This continued until the early 1990s, with the team both growing by recruiting fine minds from other top colleges like Harvard University and the team becoming more well known, which led to them working more abroad than in the states.