Winners And Losers: Wreckage At Grand Casino After Slot AttackGambler Injures Himself After Jackpot Denial |
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Grand Casino - Shawnee, Oklahoma
Most recently, it’s the place where a man by the name of George Smith landed in trouble for attacking a slot machine.
By ‘attack,’ I don’t mean that he went after it with a device or a strategy for taking down cash. I mean that this man literally attacked the one-armed bandit with his body.
In this case of man vs machine, machine won… and it’s true on multiple levels.
For starters, the guy says he hit a $600,000 jackpot, but claims the game malfunctioned and shut down. When it rebooted, the slot machine jackpot was supposedly gone.
That’s when the casino delivered the inevitable news. The man was told he’s “not getting paid.” That is one way in which the machine won.
As you might expect, the tilted gambler was frustrated as hell. So, he lunged at the machine, body-first.
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George Smith Recovers - News 9
To add insult to literal injury, he faces also “an open criminal investigation,” as per the company spokesperson, and is banned from the Grand Casino for life.
My experience there – which generated that soft-spot for the place – transpired when I was reporting a story for the New York Times magazine and wound up at the Grand, alongside the game killer James Grosjean, a fellow author and gambling expert.
When Grosjean attacks a game, he is applying a strategy designed to beat the thing into submission, financially but not physically.
At the Grand, his quarry was cards craps, which amounts to playing craps with a dozen cards. Half red-backed and half blue-backed, they simulate dice. The cards get mixed in a shuffling machine and, Grosjean knows how the machine works. By seeing three cards that got inserted, he was able to guess, with decent accuracy, which cards would be excluded from the round.
Ever cagey, Grosjean discreetly ran the play, betting small and signaling correct moves to a compadre who made max bets and ended up crushing the Grand.
Following Grosjean’s instructions, the big player racked up stacks of chips in a manner that hapless George Smith could have only hoped for.
A female working the game seemed to have a crush on Grosjean, but a colleague of hers was so suspicious of the enterprise that he looked up at the ceiling, maybe hoping to catch the eye of a surveillance worker, and mouthed the words, “Card counter.”
After a big player (BP in advantage player lingo) known as Bullet won enough for the heat from casino personnel to intensify, Grosjean moved his act to another gambling spot with the same game. He and his crew made enough money there (and played so consistently) that one of them bought a house near the joint, purely for the sake of convenience.
Meantime, as reported last week, Smith bemoaned the fact that after seeing the jackpot, he exclaimed, “We gonna be straight.”
Sadly, he is not. Bent up, doubled over in pain.
As a guy who was eventually brought into BP for Grosjean, and had a move named after him called a ‘Kappy,’ I can assure you that playing with James Grosjean is a far surer thing than attacking slot machines.
And, less likely to leave one strapped to a hospital bed.
Michael Kaplan is a journalist based in New York City. He is the author of five books (“The Advantage Players” out soon) 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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