Ultimate Casino Cheats: PART 1

Walk into a casino and point to any game you like – be it Roulette, Poker, Blackjack, Slots or craps - and there will be a story of how someone somewhere came up with an ingenious scheme to rob the house of its edge and, ultimately, its money.

Today we’re going to take a look at the most outrageous and audacious casino cheats the world has ever seen… so let’s start with our own favourite game, poker, a game where the house doesn’t have that ‘edge’ but which nevertheless suffers when dastardly deeds take place…

Poker – Pasqualini’s Partouche Party

Cheating at poker isn’t exactly new or unheard of, but doing it in a massive tournament, with cameras on you and $millions at stake is a bit out there to say the least – and French cheats Jean-Paul Pasqualini and Cedric Rossi pretty much got away with it.

It was the 2009 Partouche Poker Tour Main Event final table, and it was as old a method of cheating as can be imagined – the pair having had devised a code of signals which involved touching various parts of their bodies to signal their holding.

A series of videos compiled by the French poker-playing author Nordine Bouya, was produced to show exactly how they were supposedly doing it, and the one below offers up the code about 30 seconds in, although a knowledge of French is essential to follow the full commentary.

Banned for life? Years in prison? Not a bit of it - Pasqualini collected €1million ($1,429,796) for his eventual victory and Rossi walked off with €606,700 ($867,457) with Pasqualini still an active player to this very day.

Roulette –The Monique Laurent Story

As we saw above, casino cheats are rarely lone wolves in their efforts to bring down the house, and the most famous roulette scam of all time saw a team of three which included a radio signal expert, his drop-dead gorgeous sister and her husband – and here’s your chance to guess which one led to their downfall!

It was 1973 when the trio won more than $1million during a week-long run on the Deauville Casino in France, Monique’s brother having developed an ingenious way to stop the roulette ball using a radio signal – sophisticated enough to stop the ball within a set of six numbers with 90% accuracy.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that this could be incredibly +EV in modern parlance, but the plan required Monique to sit at a nearby table and ‘flip the switch’, her husband the person making the bets.

The fatal flaw? Monique’s beauty, which did not go unnoticed by the casino owner who was naturally perturbed at his house losing so much money. Always nearby and always holding a cigarette packet despite never smoking, Monique was eventually found to have the radio transmitter hidden inside the empty Marlboro packet.

With Monique almost literally carrying the can, the team escaped reprisals by agreeing to pay back their ill-gotten games and never showing their faces there again – Monique eventually moving to the USA, a 1984 French movie ‘Tricheurs’ – remade for TV in 2008 - chronicling their audacious scam for eternity.