You're referring to Don Johnson (not the actor), who won $15 million in AC through basic strategy blackjack play.
However, this guy was just lucky. He wasn't playing a positive expectation game. Casinos kept promoting this story because it helped entice whales to their properties.
Here were Johnson's terms that he negotiated, according to a video he was in:
(If you want to see the full 46 minute video, it's here:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos...b-5fcc5eca65e4 )
I'll analyze these 1-by-1.
1) $50,000 freeplay sounds amazing, but if you're betting tens of thousands per hand, it means very little. It would only be meaningful if he ran the $50,000 freeplay, played very little more, and left. He played for a long time each session, so the $50k was relatively meaningless. That's why the casino agreed ot it.
2) 20% discount on losses doesn't mean much if you are paid after a long period of time. This is often wrongly assumed to mean he's getting himself a 20% edge or 20% bonus on all bets, but that's far from the truth. 20% of losses means 20% of OVERALL losses, not 20% back on each hand he loses. If you're playing a game like blackjack without counting cards, it is almost a mathematical certainty that you will lose after a certain number of hands. So if they give him 20% losses back only after a certain large number of hours played, it is meaningless, if those hours are likely to produce losses far greater than 20%. Believe it or not, if I could get someone to play a million hands of blackjack in my casino, and be guaranteed they weren't cheating or card counting, I would give them back 99% losses and still win!
3) The "change of rules" are not what they appear to be. These are very standard rules for high stakes games. Go into Bellagio and look at their high-limit shoe games, and you will see those exact rules already in place.
4) They agreed to the change in hand signals just to pacify a whale. So he thought he was clever because the casino had to pay him if they misunderstood him and made a mistake. However, this clearly happened very infrequently, again resulting in not much edge overall for Johnson. If a dealer had a chronic problem with misunderstanding the new signals, they would put a dealer in place who could do it better. It's not rocket science. Even if he gained a few hundred K in this overall (and that would be best-case), it wouldn't offset expected losses in the millions.
By his own admission, his "winnings" came from some monster win sessions that were clearly the result of an amazingly good run of cards. His explanations as to "edges" he got himself would only give him a small amount of additional winnings over time in the best case, rather than cause staggering wins in a short period of time.
Bottom line is that this guy is just a typical basic strategy whale who got lucky for a few big sessions, but no doubt is an overall loser in blackjack. He won't even disclose how big his losing sessions were, nor will he present proof that he's up overall.
The casinos are promoting this whale as a success story, and he is enjoying it because it makes him look like a genius.