Have you heard the fool-proof method to win at slots? Or about the real-life James Bond winning streak? You can’t have heard the one about the fish tank!

Crazy as they may sound, all of these stories are true, focusing on the highest rollers and the most outrageous cheats to ever try their luck in a jackpot casino. Let’s start with the most reasonable story, Ashley Revell:

1. Ashley Revell: The man who bet everything on one spin of Roulette

If you’ve heard any of these stories before, this is the one that you’re most likely to have come across.Because Ashley Revell televised the roulette spin he’d staked his entire life savings on for the whole world to see.

Like most good stories, this one begins in a pub; Revell and his friends had been drinking and saying what a thrill it would be to go to Las Vegas and bet everything they had on roulette. While most would take this as a fun conversation down the pub, Revell instead decided to pursue it and started selling off all his worldly possessions. From his car to his old school jumpers, everything had to go. It wasn’t long until he was sitting on a plane, in a rented tuxedo, with £76,840 worth of chips waiting for him. We won’t spoil what happened for you, but if you haven’t seen it before here’s a video.

2. Sean Connery makes the most James Bond bet imaginable

Smooth, suave and fearless at the casino, James Bond may be a cool customer but even his boldest move in Casino Royale can’t hold a candle to the actor who played him. Several years before he played 007, back in 1963, Sean Connery was sitting in an Italian casino in Saint-Vincent where he kept betting on the number 17. Single number bets are always high risk/high reward so this bet wasn’t all that likely to come up (1/37 chance).

The first spin was a miss.
So was the second.
But, incredibly, the third landed on 17 and saw Connery win! He got back his previous stakes and saw a tidy profit too. You would think he’d leave the table then but he didn’t.

He bet on 17 again. With everything he had just won.

Now, while anyone with a head for odds will know that the probability of the ball landing on 17 this time will be the same as last time (each spin is a distinct probability), this still looks like an incredibly dangerous move after getting lucky once.

That is, until the ball landed on 17 again. Winning twice in a row on the same number, time to leave right?

Sure.

Right after Connery put a bet on 17 again with everything he’d just won in two round of 17’s.

Obviously, he won that too.

The odds of this happening, incidentally, are about 50,653 to 1.

3. Russian hackers find a fool proof way to beat slot machines

Cheaters are always improving, it’s one of the biggest problems that faces the growing casino industry. The security staff need to keep one step ahead of criminals who are constantly finding new ways to exploit, trick and cheat their way to a fortune.

In June 2014, the Lumiere Place Casino in St. Louis noticed that a number of slot machines had paid out in a truly bizarre fashion. They had given out large amounts of cash but none had hit the jackpot, which in casino terms is called a ‘negative hold’ and is extraordinarily rare.

 Looking over security footage, they found a suspicious customer who would sit and spin a few reels with his phone held up to record the results before leaving the machine.

Was he just using the  Betfair Casino App to play two games at the same time? Doubtful.

When he came back, the machine would suddenly start paying out nearly every time he hit the button. But what stood out to the security staff was the odd timing he used each time he spun the reels.

Eventually, they caught him and a number of other conspirators (all working for the same company in Russia), and worked out what they were doing.

As Random Number Generators (RNG) are generally imperfect the phones would record footage and, by comparing it to data from their own units that they’d purchased, the hackers could calculate the perfect time to spin the reels so that the RNG would provide a pay-out. The worst part is that these cheats are all but impossible to put down as few casinos can afford to scrap all their old machines in favour of newer models. While this isn’t an issue for online casinos, all the land casino staff can do is keep an eye out for machines paying out oddly. Obviously, we don’t advise following in the hacker’s footsteps.

4. Hackers break into a casino’s network… via the fish tank

You didn’t think we’d forgotten about this one, had you? Last year a cyber-security firm, Darktrace, confirmed that hackers had attempted to breach a casino’s network via an internet connected fish tank. Using the fish tank as a breaching point, the hackers then transmitted data from other areas of the network before they were found out.

The sheer ingenuity of the method has to be admired. As said by Hemu Nigam, Chief Executive of cyber security company SSP Blue, ‘This one is the most entertaining and clever thinking by hackers I’ve seen’.

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What do you think? Have you heard a crazier story? Let us know in the comments below!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2018 at 7:46 pm and is filed under poker news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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