Bill Benter

[mickeycrimm]

The story above has ramifications and connections to other people and events. Do you remember what I asked you regarding one of the Sports Gambling Hall of Fame entrants when you posted regarding the Circa pre-season conference?

He had been MIA from Las Vegas for a decade...working on "stuff." Guess what stuff.

To lazy to give the person's name?

That must be it. Typing fatigue. I notice you missed an "o" in "Too." We both should rest up.

You should remember what I said last week? It checked out.

[Garnabby]

You don't believe I barely read your posts?

I primarily meant what "turns you on". Posters spend decades on the forums without ever giving a reason for living. I live for a working TOE, one that fits in with the real data. However wacky it seems, and, which I at least mentioned a few times on long-defunct forums.

LOL. And I live to get laid like Bond, turn green like Banner, and dance like Baryshnikov.

I have the better shot, of course.

Red, you're a confirmed deadbeat who prostrates himself to the gambling gods, by stunts like pictures of you having a coffee with Munchkin, which was, very likely, arranged, however, by Mickey.

[jdog]

Hustlers Gamblers and Crooks.

Oh yea and that Micky guy with the face tats. What a crock of shit that dude is but lol he has sold his bullshit as good as anyone.

The wife and I watched this, not bad at all. Thanks for the recommendation.

I agree, this Mikki dude seemed the most full of shit... he beat baccarat out of millions but can't tell you how... typical. Strikes me as a rich kid whose parents let him do whatever he wanted and wants to brag about his hedonistic excesses. I wonder if he's an attorney too??

My favorite was the two college kids who lived at a casino on comps while they were too broke to pay the water bill... great story... but possible.

[accountinquestion]

Hustlers Gamblers and Crooks.

Oh yea and that Micky guy with the face tats. What a crock of shit that dude is but lol he has sold his bullshit as good as anyone.

The wife and I watched this, not bad at all. Thanks for the recommendation.

I agree, this Mikki dude seemed the most full of shit... he beat baccarat out of millions but can't tell you how... typical. Strikes me as a rich kid whose parents let him do whatever he wanted and wants to brag about his hedonistic excesses. I wonder if he's an attorney too??

My favorite was the two college kids who lived at a casino on comps while they were too broke to pay the water bill... great story... but possible.

Mikki is well known on poker streams and there are whole threads about him. Just deep family money. He gets to go around looking super cool to idiots acting like an AP. (Sound familar). Maybe hustle people a bit here and there. At one point he tries to claim he was in the online pharmacy game. Nothing suggests successful business guy. Tats or not.

[MisterV]

Another Las Vegas cheat...

[Garnabby]

I didn't watch the video, but, that guy sort of looks like the first one, from the first video, about Benter. Ha. Seriously, no time.

Sort of like the internet music, more and more, comes with a lot of fakes to sing the songs.

[mickeycrimm]

Another Las Vegas cheat...

This is an old famous story. American Coin was a slot route operator for Las Vegas dive bars with video pokers in the bar tops. Larry Volk was paid to gaff chips so that the royal flush never hit. That would be about an extra 2% profit on the machine the wager. Which is pretty big considering the games were around 97 to 98% to start with.

When they got busted Volk agreed to testify against the owners of AC. So they paid someone to kill him. The killer was found not guilty. But years later, having become a Christian, he confessed to killing Volk. But because of double jeopardy he was not charged. The owners were never tried.

Ron Harris was a Gaming Control Board agent that went bad. He was in charge of keeping machines gaff proof but wound up gaffing them himself.

[smurgerburger]

Another Las Vegas cheat...

This is an old famous story. American Coin was a slot route operator for Las Vegas dive bars with video pokers in the bar tops. Larry Volk was paid to gaff chips so that the royal flush never hit. That would be about an extra 2% profit on the machine the wager. Which is pretty big considering the games were around 97 to 98% to start with.

When they got busted Volk agreed to testify against the owners of AC. So they paid someone to kill him. The killer was found not guilty. But years later, having become a Christian, he confessed to killing Volk. But because of double jeopardy he was not charged. The owners were never tried.

Ron Harris was a Gaming Control Board agent that went bad. He was in charge of keeping machines gaff proof but wound up gaffing them himself.

I'd heard of the second but not the first. Thanks for the story, going to look it up.

[MisterV]

Sure sounds like American Coin was mobbed up.

What a brazen contract hit...plus incompetent (or crooked?) follow up by law enforcement.

Glad sin city is run by corporations now and not gangsters: now they sue rather than shoot people in the back of the head.

[redietz]

This is an old, classic, and under-publicized story. It undercuts the argument that discovery of cheating would lead to any kind of death knell in terms of income for the properties directly benefiting or for properties offering video poker in general. None of that happens.

The story gets sewn up and characterized as some rare event with specific individuals being the evil-doers. Of course, what the story actually demonstrates is how easy it is to pull this off. If caught, negligible blowback occurs, as long as the evil doers are offered up as sacrifice. The funny thing is, those evil doers can go hire on with Native American casinos the next day, either officially or as silent consultants.

The problem, as was expounded on in an old edition of American Casino Guide by a former Control Board investigator, is that machine inspections in Las Vegas are always months, and sometimes years, behind schedule.

All that's required to compromise the entire Control Board "authority" is a leaked schedule of what's being inspected when. The entire process makes swiss cheese look impermeable.

[jdog]

Interesting... I knew the Harris story but not much about Volk. A couple of the commentors said only 30% of the chips were gaffed, so somewhere between 30-50%. They were smart enough not to modify all of the machines (and only max bet Royals) so this means they only brought in probably 1% at most. Seems pretty stupid and they didn't get away with it for very long. Mickey, do you think there are still gaffed VP machines around?

From LVA:

On October 1, 1990, Larry Volk, a 49-year-old former computer programmer for the American Coin Company, was gunned down in his backyard. Volk, the quintessential "man who knew too much," was dead long before paramedics reached the scene.
At the behest of American Coin’s owners, Volk gaffed the computer chips on 500 or more of the company’s video poker and video keno machines. Volk's rigged programs prevented royal flushes from being hit when players bet the maximum number of coins, so the slot route operator wouldn't have to pay off the big jackpots. The cheating "resulted in $17 million in fraud," according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and ran undiscovered from 1986 until 1989, with upwards of 500 of the company's 1,000 video poker machines affected.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board was already running a sting on American Coin for illegal interstate sales of slot machines when the gaffed chips were brought to its attention in June 1989. After chips were pulled from American Coin machines in a half-dozen Las Vegas bars, regulators discovered that they didn’t match the "master" chips on file with the state. Still, they probably couldn’t have nailed American Coin, but then Volk rolled on his employers, Rudolph LaVecchia and his son Rudy, and paid the ultimate price.
In a 1999 interview, an anonymous Metro detective called the American Coin case "a frustrating situation. We thought the LaVeccchias were involved, but we could never build a case against them."
The LaVecchias weren’t completely out of the woods. Rudolph and Rudy neglected to pay the million-dollar fine imposed by the Gaming Control Board over the scandal. On Jan. 15, 2001, a District Court judge handed down a $1.24 million judgment against the twosome, effective closing the book on the American Coin case.
No casinos were involved, as American Coin serviced only Las Vegas bars.
As for it happening today, we'd say that the Enforcement Division of the Gaming Control Board is 30-plus years more experienced than it was in 1989, with more agents providing more oversight. Also, American Coin seems to have been an anomaly, at least as far as history is concerned; why risk a good business, huge fines, and jail time when running gambling games is so profitable to begin with? But in gambling, as in life, anything can, and does, happen.

[smurgerburger]

This is an old, classic, and under-publicized story. It undercuts the argument that discovery of cheating would lead to any kind of death knell in terms of income for the properties directly benefiting or for properties offering video poker in general. None of that happens.

The story gets sewn up and characterized as some rare event with specific individuals being the evil-doers. Of course, what the story actually demonstrates is how easy it is to pull this off. If caught, negligible blowback occurs, as long as the evil doers are offered up as sacrifice. The funny thing is, those evil doers can go hire on with Native American casinos the next day, either officially or as silent consultants.

The problem, as was expounded on in an old edition of American Casino Guide by a former Control Board investigator, is that machine inspections in Las Vegas are always months, and sometimes years, behind schedule.

All that's required to compromise the entire Control Board "authority" is a leaked schedule of what's being inspected when. The entire process makes swiss cheese look impermeable.

According to google American Coin Company was "seized and closed by the Gaming Control Board for rigging programs". And presumably they were facing criminal charges because they took the risk of having the cooperating witness assassinated.

So what would non-negligible consequences be?

[redietz]

The royal rig is the obvious path of optimal gain. No individual, unless he camps there for years, is going to accumulate enough hands to be able to say anything definitive about whether the games are rigged. Bob Dancer couldn't make a definitive call.

You have two ways of looking at this: American Coin and these guys were anomalies, or they were anomalous only in the sense that they had a rat in their midst. Glass half full or half empty. Your choice.

The problem is, without a rat somewhere, the Gambling Control Board schedules checks every 18 months or so at best, and if those schedules for checking are leaked, the entire process is potentially bullshit.

By the way, there is a famous LV casino that, when royal frequencies were checked after the first couple months of operation, the results were mind-blowingly different from machine to machine. But that never became public knowledge because, hell, no crime had been committed. Or there was no rat.

[redietz]

This is an old, classic, and under-publicized story. It undercuts the argument that discovery of cheating would lead to any kind of death knell in terms of income for the properties directly benefiting or for properties offering video poker in general. None of that happens.

The story gets sewn up and characterized as some rare event with specific individuals being the evil-doers. Of course, what the story actually demonstrates is how easy it is to pull this off. If caught, negligible blowback occurs, as long as the evil doers are offered up as sacrifice. The funny thing is, those evil doers can go hire on with Native American casinos the next day, either officially or as silent consultants.

The problem, as was expounded on in an old edition of American Casino Guide by a former Control Board investigator, is that machine inspections in Las Vegas are always months, and sometimes years, behind schedule.

All that's required to compromise the entire Control Board "authority" is a leaked schedule of what's being inspected when. The entire process makes swiss cheese look impermeable.

According to google American Coin Company was "seized and closed by the Gaming Control Board for rigging programs". And presumably they were facing criminal charges because they took the risk of having the cooperating witness assassinated.

So what would non-negligible consequences be?

Oh, say for someone like MGM caught rigging drawings, I'd say half a million fine and a couple of firings would be acceptable. Especially if those firings didn't preclude future employment with Native American casinos.

[Garnabby]

...w hen royal frequencies were checked after the first couple months of operation, the results were mind-blowingly different from machine to machine.

That how statistics works. There's even a name for that mathematical phenomenon. Ha.


Garnabby
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[redietz]

Here's a fun thought experiment. Try to figure out how many people are capable of doing what was done in this case. We'll say just in the U.S.

Would you say 500? A thousand? Maybe 10,000?

[redietz]

...w hen royal frequencies were checked after the first couple months of operation, the results were mind-blowingly different from machine to machine.

That how statistics works. There's even a name for that mathematical phenomenon. Ha.


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Garnabby, the person who told me this was a casino administrator who worked with an administrator of the property involved. I think they all understood likely distributions of outcomes.

Why do you insist on commenting as if you know what you're talking about? Oh right, you're The Theory of Everything dude. Carry on.

[smurgerburger]

This is an old, classic, and under-publicized story. It undercuts the argument that discovery of cheating would lead to any kind of death knell in terms of income for the properties directly benefiting or for properties offering video poker in general. None of that happens.

The story gets sewn up and characterized as some rare event with specific individuals being the evil-doers. Of course, what the story actually demonstrates is how easy it is to pull this off. If caught, negligible blowback occurs, as long as the evil doers are offered up as sacrifice. The funny thing is, those evil doers can go hire on with Native American casinos the next day, either officially or as silent consultants.

The problem, as was expounded on in an old edition of American Casino Guide by a former Control Board investigator, is that machine inspections in Las Vegas are always months, and sometimes years, behind schedule.

All that's required to compromise the entire Control Board "authority" is a leaked schedule of what's being inspected when. The entire process makes swiss cheese look impermeable.

According to google American Coin Company was "seized and closed by the Gaming Control Board for rigging programs". And presumably they were facing criminal charges because they took the risk of having the cooperating witness assassinated.

So what would non-negligible consequences be?

Oh, say for someone like MGM caught rigging drawings, I'd say half a million fine and a couple of firings would be acceptable. Especially if those firings didn't preclude future employment with Native American casinos.

But you said this story demonstrates "negligible blowback" occurs if caught. How does it demonstrate that?

[jdog]

One of Lemons' co-conspirators only got probation... how the hell do you get probation for conspiracy to commit murder??
https://lasvegassun.com/news/1999/se...or-hire-case//

Apparently they wanted this Bruno instead, he got 10 years:
https://lasvegassun.com/news/1999/de...mer-gets-10-y/

I mean yeah the owners lost their business, gaming license and got a big fine. But seems pretty light considering they murdered someone over it and only one guy, out of everyone involved, got significant prison time.

[jdog]

If you read the second story I linked: Apparently Volk wasn't too bright and didn't get the message when his home was bombed a couple weeks before Lemons shot him.