From the old days, maybe a hundred years ago, when biased roulette wheels still existed, there are verified stories of players taking casinos for staggering sums.
There are legitimate contemporary stories of Baccarat players who have put the lights out of Caribbean casinos.
In Europe, when a table was "busted" from a player's winning too much, they drew something like a table cloth over it - which is where the expression comes from en Francais.
Have you ever seen the movie "The Winner"? (1996) At the end Philip converts a suitcase of $250K in cash into one glowing surreal token that he puts on the Wheel of Fortune, and, presumably, wins, as the lights go out, at that casino, all the neighboring casinos, and all over Las Vegas. From the expression, "put the casino's lights out."
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