Michael Kaplan's Advantage Players: Casino Backoffs, I've Had A FewPoker Writer Explores What Happens When A Gambler Wins Too Much |
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If you beat casinos at the games they put up, expect to get ‘backed off’ eventually. That is, you will be asked to stop playing the game that you figured out how to beat.
I know about getting backed off from experience. I’ve been asked to cease playing blackjack from one end of the Las Vegas Strip to the other.
Bill Benter, an advantage player supreme who started out card counting and ended up helping to win at least nine-figures via Hong Kong horse racing, put it best.
“If they’re not chasing you out, you’re doing something wrong.”
Do you know this guy?
Probably not, but you should… especially if you gamble
His name is Bill Benter & he profited over $1 billion sports betting
In 2001, he won a $16 million bet & didn't collect the winnings because he felt bad
Anyways… here's how he did it pic.twitter.com/o8zFtpln29— Alex Monahan (@AlexMonahan100) March 26, 2024
Chased out, most of us can live with. Being held back, that is something else entirely.
And that is the circumstance that has allegedly been faced by Jordan Kerr, an admitted AP (advantage player). He had been plying his trade at the Horseshoe Baltimore’s blackjack table when a shift supervisor asked for ID. Kerr opted not to show it and rose from his seat.
In that situation, every AP knows, you either give up your identity or give up the game. Kerr chose the latter. But, before he could exit, according to the lawsuit, casino security threatened to arrest him if he did not accompany them to a back room.
He did as told and was held there for 15 minutes before being released. In the lawsuit, Kerr claims that the experience caused him emotional distress.
The irony? Kerr claims that he was losing at the time of the confrontation.
At any rate, it may prove to be a very expensive 15 minutes for Horseshoe Baltimore and its parent company Caesars Entertainment. Kerr filed a $3 million lawsuit, alleging that he had been illegally detained. Horseshoe and Caesars maintain that there is no legal basis for the suit, and they want Kerr to pay their legal expenses.
Of course, this can go any number of ways in terms who wins, who pays, who winds up with what.
Uncontestable is that the gambling world has come a long way from the days when Ted Binion, late son of the feared Benny Binion, founder of Binion’s Horseshoe in downtown Vegas, threatened advantage players with bodily harm (and sometimes had it delivered).
While I’ve been booted off tables without violence visited upon me, such doings are hardly unheard of. And it’s not unusual for advantage players to have financially positive outcomes for their troubles.
APs have been handcuffed, roughed up, threatened, thrown onto parking lot pavement, even tossed into jail. This stuff has happened not for cheating, but simply for out-housing the house, for winning with the kind of strategy that anyone at the table could legally deploy.
Only one of these things is actually illegal, and it’s not just the high-stakes card games where blow ups take place. There is an AP who got into a tussle over playing slot machines advantageously. He is said to have launched a suit of his own.
Nobody wants to get manhandled or to be held under duress. But, if it does happen, the AP often hopes to yield the biggest win of his gambling career. Such was the ambition of top-notch AP James Grosjean after he claimed to have suffered false arrest at Caesars and Imperial Palace. Grosjean sued the casinos and Griffin Investigations.
The latter maintained a notorious black book that contained pictures of APs and cheaters. They were all described as “undesirables."
At one point, Grosjean said he was offered $10,000 to settle. He found that amusing. “Ten thousand dollars?” he said with a laugh. “I have $10,000 in my pocket right now. If I want another $10,000, I’ll go into the casino and win it.”
In the end, Grosjean settled for an undisclosed amount of money in one portion of the case, $400,000 in another, and his actions contributed to Griffin shutting down.
The latter outcome made him a hero among advantage players. Court proceedings, associated with the incident, gave him something more valuable than money: a title for his book. Grosjean’s highly coveted and difficult to obtain Exhibit CAA: Beyond Counting is named for the exhibit number assigned to an earlier edition of the game-beating tutorial, which was entitled Beyond Counting.
Piqued advantage players can be as cheeky as they are brainy. And if the joke is on the casino, well, from their POV, all the better.
Michael Kaplan is a journalist based in New York City. He is the author of five books (“The Advantage Players” comes out in 2024) and has worked for publications that include Wired, GQ and the New York Post. He has written extensively on technology, gambling, and business — with a particular interest in spots where all three intersect. His article on Kelly “Baccarat Machine” Sun and Phil Ivey is currently in development as a feature film.
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