Casino Boss Breaks Down Gambling Scenes from Movies | GQ

they were knocking this place dead for years cheaters justice oh my gosh we do not use chainsaws in the back room uh anymore hey gq i'm dustin beaucheers director of casino operations at red rock casino and this is the breakdown [Music] first up casino royale with this chip exchange we enter the final phase of the game which means no more buy-ins the big blind is now one million dollars basically what they're saying is that you can't buy any more cash whatever's on that game right now in chips is it you got to keep playing the game until somebody wins four players so the game they're playing right now is no limit texas hold'em it is the elite of the elite they say that most players can't play it because there's too much stress this game basically you can bet all your money in one hand and a lot of other poker games you can't do that and so you really got to have some skill i think a high stakes game is different to everybody but in our world when we're talking about millions of dollars then that's pretty much a high stakes game these kind of games do happen they're going to be either in back rooms of a casino from a table games perspective not so much poker you would actually have salons or private rooms the average person is not going to usually just kind of stumble upon those most guests feel intimidated to go into a salon or into a room but here in nevada you're allowed to go in the room now there are some things called private salons the normal guests can't just walk into that room but uh that would be the only exclusion to that pond check check the term check means basically you're just saying i don't want to bet any money now ultimately if another player does decide to bet more money then you either have to make the choice to bet the same or more or fold your hand folding the hand means basically i'm throwing in i give up you're going to end up beating me check check or check four players let's pause it right here so i think they're doing this for cinematic reasons but the dealer's talking way too much especially on a high-end game like this these are all professional poker players you're not going to have a dealer sitting there going he checks he checks he checks no the player says check so this is way out of character and on those really high-end games the dealer's not going to say a word unless they have to because they know what kind of money is being played on the table that is 6 million those blue square looking rectangular things that you see on the table that they have those are actually called plaques they're usually used in really high-end salons where they'll use them as a 100 or even a million dollars representation but it's basically like a chip it's very very common in europe that they use those but we rarely see those and i don't know if i've ever seen them in a poker room here in the united states other than really obscure time race race 12 million heads up with this kind of high high end this is the kind of game you would expect is a no limit texas hold'em it's definitely one of the more difficult poker games the goal is to get the strongest hand or the best hand out of all the other players that are actually playing in that round you can end up winning with the worst hand because nobody else has a hand better than you or in this situation you're going to win with the most absurd set of hands you've ever seen james bond is trying to determine if he's bluffing meaning you're acting that you have a really strong hand that the other player can't beat like this long delay here where they're staring each other down the game is like set there's nothing else anybody can do there's no more action that anybody can do basically everybody on the table is all in at this point so the dealer would start having the players show their hand gentlemen show down please let's pause it right here this isn't accurate what would happen is the two biggest players right here james bond and the bad guy would show their cards because they have the most money in the pot in this situation you would also have what we call side pots because the first couple players on the game they're going for really small amounts so if that guy who only bet the five million dollars if he had the best hand out of all the players he would only win five million from each of the players because all he put in was five million he's not going to win the total 115 million because he didn't bet the equivalent to the other players and so how they're showing the scene is not the proper format of a normal poker game flash ace king queen this is also something you would not do would happen is the players would flip over their hands show what they would have all those players are professional poker players they would instantly see the other players hands and know who's the winner in this scene the dealer's like taking each guest's hand and adding it to the board which can also cause problems because ultimately a guest could say that wasn't my hand so this is not a normal procedure [Music] i hire full house this is full of sixes for all these players to have these super super strong hands on this massive pot is so unrealistic and i've never seen anything like this happen the chance of this happening is one in millions for this kind of event to occur then ultimately james bond wins with a straight flush i know they did it to be dramatic and make it seem like it's really big action but it's kind of just hilarious to me is your pawn wins thank you very much everybody has different ideas of how to tip a deal or when to tip a dealer but ultimately i think most dealers would say is when a guest is winning that hey share some of the wealth share some of the winnings with me i saw a player one time who won 30 000 like the dealer so much just handed it right into the dealer everybody you know tips in a different way but that's the dealer's livelihood they make basically minimum wage so make sure you tip your dealers very important i've seen not on poker games but on blackjack games and on roulette games i've seen people win millions of dollars i think the average player out there they don't know that there's players out there that exist like that but there are some definitely huge players that come in and bet millions of dollars i've seen players play half a million dollars a spin on roulette so people are betting my house every spin on the wheel next up casino you can spot these ass by watching the way they bet like this guy he's been lavender chips at 500 each with only one little problem he's always guessed right if you pause it right here you actually see that he doubles down on an eight and you would never double down on an eight versus a ten which is the dealer's up card that's a telltale sign for us that when we see that we go hold on okay this guy made a bad decision and it ended up paying off for him let's take a closer look at this guy there's this belief that we would be standing right on the table staring down the guests and back in the day you had to do that a little bit more because the technology wasn't there but nowadays with the surveillance technology i can be sitting in my office staring at a screen and making those determinations right there the camera technology is amazing so we can pick up on all the details of the game but at the end of the day it's still nice to be on the floor you get the vibe of what's going on they actually do a really good job in this movie of portraying our role in our job it shows that they definitely had somebody with some casino background helping them on setting this scene up i saw that the dealer was weak but he wasn't in on it he just wasn't protecting his hand we do similar things we'll try to play it off like hey i'm tying my shoe or i'm looking at something else but i'm actually paying attention to that suspect i will do things to make sure they're not paying attention to me if i see a guest looking at me and what i'm doing i become suspicious because at the end of the day people come to the casino to gamble the dealer was weak but he wasn't in on it he just wasn't protecting his hand he was lifting his whole card way too high this technique right here is a very old school we now have what we call the games are peakers it's a little mirror that you actually slide the card into so you never have to bend up the card anymore like this this is a traditional way actually how this dealer is doing it he's doing a very poor job anybody standing behind the game or slightly off to the side is going to be able to see that whole card and having that whole card changes the whole dynamics of the game and gives that player that huge edge the proper way of doing that would be basically taking the hands and bending this cupping it so that you couldn't see from any angle here's this guy reading the dealer's whole card the device he's using is sending electrical signal to another device that's tapping his leg telling him what the whole card is most likely what he's doing is he's tapping it six times it says hey that whole card is a six that player is going to take advantage of that eight because he knows the dealer has a 16 he's gonna double down on that eight normally a bad decision but when you know what the dealer has it's a great decision as soon as they started using that device they made it a crime now there's a difference between an advantage player and an actual cheat or criminal in my mind if the big player was just being able to see the whole card because the dealer was weak but they weren't using a device or anything else that would be more just a weak deal that's exposing the card and the guest is taking advantage of that currently there's not a law against that the technology that we're seeing in this is so old the new technology that we see today is so advanced from cell phones to miniature cameras we hear about all these new scams and new ways of people cheating us one of the ways that is common is marking or dobbing cards on the back side of the card or this part here you would end up either making indentations with your nails or you would use a substance that you would put on the card itself that isn't visible easily or it can't be seen with the normal naked eye nowadays they have actually contacts that people will put in their eye that see a specific color or ink there's also what we call player dealer collusion this is where a dealer and a player work together to cheat the game so what they're going to do is actually peak the car so they're going to just expose this very corner right here so that the guests can see is this a card i want or i don't want there's hundreds of ways people cheat but at the end of the day the one that scares me the most and scares the other operators is the scam we don't know about that new scam that somebody's come up with that we're waiting to discover and it's our job to try to uh prevent it at all times once i discover somebody's cheating it's very important that we actually have all the evidence that we need before we go and confront that suspect back in those days they didn't have to worry about that they just take the guests off the game pull them in a back room and those guests would talk real quick nowadays you have to take very soft approach to everything i like to always tell people when they hear about somebody cheating or somebody getting arrested at a casino that would be better for you to reach into the actual rack where we keep our chips take a hundred dollars and run out the door than it would be for you to cheat with one dollar cheating is so much more frowned upon and is ultimately in the courts is usually much harsher it is something you do not want to do basically using this as a distraction so that the two suspects won't go and run off or feel the heat when the security starts to surround the table we don't really do that these days what we do is we usually just kind of avoid the table that we're looking at or the suspects and then ultimately when we're ready to go in then it's a fast thing so that suspect didn't even know that we were coming in after them [Music] using a cattle prod to take the suspect into custody is not done nowadays back in the day there was all kinds of techniques used uh i didn't work during that era but i've heard a lot of stories about things that were done but currently we cannot use a catapro to take a suspect into custody for cheating or for any other reason they were knocking this place dead for years we do not use chainsaws in the back room uh anymore did this occur in the past i've heard stories of it people that accidentally fell down stairs and hammers were taken to the hands and other things but currently obviously in the environment we live in today we handle everybody in a professional manner but this is once again there's a great depiction of how things used to be here in town in fact the movie casino is based off of real life characters when i came up in the business a lot of the guys that taught me that had been in the business 30 plus years worked alongside those guys and knew those guys personally now everything's on the up and up and we're highly regulated with the gaming control board and were run by corporations but back in the day the mob did run things here in town next up the hangover hey guys did you find it nope but check this out all right let's pause it right here so this is comical the character here is attempting to count cards you can see him talking what the count is with his lips this is like the most amateur level of card counting you could be at where you would be like plus one minus one plus two with your lips this is something you just do in your head you don't actually voice it out card counting is the technique that has been around for a while but basically what it is is you're keeping track of the small cards in your mind when you have a two through six that's considered a plus one and when you have a ten or an ace that's minus one as the cards are played you're keeping track of that count and when the count gets real positive real high then you would increase your wagers because it's more favorable to you the player they're going to be more tens and aces coming out and then as the count goes negative or below zero those cards are going to be a lot of small cards and it's going to be less of an advantage for you to play card counting is completely legal in the state of nevada you can card count but i have the right as an operator to refuse service to anybody so that's ultimately what we do is we just ask the guest that we no longer want them to play blackjack yes you can learn the basics of card counting from a book but ultimately to become a professional and somebody who does it for a career it takes months upon months of training it is not something you can just read a book on your way into vegas and decide that you're going to be a card counter those books that people have written have actually made us millions of dollars because players think they're card counters after reading this book they come in and they lose all their money and ultimately they are not a card counter hey come on he can't lose he can't lose i think the pit boss is watching we don't take a clipboard and put it up against our face when we're talking to each other in the pit like that even if we're talking about a player that we're suspecting he's doing something or card counting we would just talk normal we'd probably not even be looking in your direction so that you wouldn't even suspect that we're talking about you but the noises in the casino really make it hard for anybody else to hear conversations that are a couple feet away we're not going to fall for that we see people acting crazy and doing all kinds of things to distract us just because you escaped from the table with the chips you still got to cash out those chips we can still meet you at the cage and tell you we don't want your play anymore or we can wait until you come back another day and ultimately ask that you don't play blackjack anymore next up 21. let's go make a killing all right [Music] this is an advantaged team basically and they're all drinking before they're gonna go play blackjack advantage players are not in this to go have fun get drunk and have a good time gambling they're in it to make money you would not see an advantage team drinking a bunch of drinks before they go out to count cards flak jackson games is several hundred years old the ultimate goal is to get closest to 21 without going over and have a better hand than the dealer the actual term 21 is basically a ace in a jack or blackjack guests always want to get blackjack that's the best hand you can get in that game and that's why it's named blackjack hangover was kind of a parody or a joke the movie 21 is much more accurate in describing how card counting works and what it was to be in an advantaged team [Music] hey you mind if i sit down you can see she folds her hands behind the table what she's been doing is she's been counting cards on that table betting very small and then she's basically signaling in the big players saying hey the count's really good you come over as the big player you really can't do this play anymore but what they were doing is camouflaging or preventing management me and the other supervisors from catching you as an advantage player or card counter in this scene you'll see that they're wearing disguises people will think that it's for the movies no this is really true to this day we catch advantage players coming in with all kinds of disguises longer hair beards they use these disguises to hope that we won't notice it's them and uh get in and play as much as they can before they get caught in this situation she's counting down the game and he comes in at the right time when she calls him in and bets big and wins big so the signaling they're using would be something that i may not pick up on the first time but after a couple of times watching this player it would be something we would definitely notice it's just like anything else repetition if you see it over and over again eventually you'll see it as something that you want to take a look at does he know this female do they walk out of the casino at the same time do we notice them anywhere else in the casino that's another way we catch people is they may act like they don't know each other on the table but then they walk out in the parking garage and get in the same car advantage players try to be sneaky and it's kind of a counter surveillance situation how do we catch card counters i am a card counter basically we learn to count cards just as good as they do we count the cards as they're counting them and then determine if their bets correlate with the count and that's ultimately how we back them off and i will also put this myth to bed the belief is that you can't count down a six deck shoe or an eight deck shoe a shoe is basically a device that holds the cards that we deal the cards out of we can count down 100 deck shoe if you wanted to so it doesn't matter the amount of decks in a shoe an advantage player can count down as many decks as you put out there next up swingers start with a 300. instantly the scene you can tell the two guys are amateurs and they're also playing with scared money it's money that they probably can't afford to gamble they're counting the money over and over again in the scene they don't know that they don't need to count the money they just put the money on the table the dealer will count out the money and tell them exactly how much money it is they're trying to act like they're high rollers but they don't even know the procedures on the game or how to play the game properly on the table excuse me you have to lay it on the table i don't want to bet at all not allowed to hand me money sir you have to lay it on the table if you want me to change it we can't take anything out of a guest hands and this goes back to game protection or possibility of cheating and so we make sure that there's no hand-to-hand touching of anything because d-look player could pass something off to each other that could be used for cheating do you uh have anything smaller yes as a matter of fact i do but this happens to be a 100 minimum bet table perhaps you'd be more comfortable at one of our lower stakes tables the dealers being a jerk right off the bat the dealers work on tips and so given the player an attitude like that is not going to work out well for it works out good for the movie for a little banter but at the end of the day a dealer should always act nice to a guest because you never know when they're going to be a big tipper cocktail the scotch on the rocks please any scotch will do as long as it's not a blend of course uh single malt glenolyvic plant fitting perhaps maybe glenn gow any glenn he's trying to act sophisticated and trying to order some kind of expensive scotch or something that's high end we know what high rollers look like and how they act big players are confident they know what they want they also don't have to ask for things they just expect things for themselves double down what about an 11 you always double down 11 i know but it's 200 he's giving him a good advice that's a common known fact you always double down on 11 for the most part doubling down is basically you get the ability to double the amount of money that's out on the table for your hand but you only get one more card ultimately why do you double down at 11 because the most common card in the deck is a 10 so the likelihood of you getting a 10 would be very common basic strategy after millions of hands has determined that if you have an 11 against basically any other card for the dealer that the right move is to double down i'm telling you baby you always double down on the left yeah well obviously not always always i'm just saying not in this particular case you always double that i lost okay how could you say i always give people the advice is just stick with whatever you do every time that way you're not beating yourself up later if you made a different decision so if you always double on 11 then always double on 11. the lady has 11 what would you like to do um [Music] 15. i don't know what to do here okay this is a typical low limit game where you probably have a player who hasn't played blackjack a lot doesn't know the proper basic strategy in this scene the dealer's showing a five as the up card so anything basically past 11 you're going gonna stand on that in this situation she keeps hitting until she gets to 21 with all these small cards normally that would piss off all the other players on the table because they would think that she's taking all the cards they would ultimately make the dealer bust but in this situation it ends up working out the belief that she's going to make your cards bad and ultimately you're going to lose money because she's playing bad it's a proven fact that just because other players on the game are making bad decisions those cards don't necessarily have an effect on the outcome of whether you win or lose per se next up rounders no limit texas hold'em is the cadillac of poker this movie is the ultimate poker movie it is the movie that every poker player has seen multiple times they do a really good job of describing the poker world the key to the game is playing the man not the cards there's more than just the cards like on blackjack it's just the cards you playing against the dealer it's the cards in poker you're reading the other players at the game to see do they really have a good set of cards the other thing that's really important in poker is knowing the statistics an example would be like if you have these two cards what are the chances of this occurring what are the chances of me winning with these two cards i quality so real quick let's pause it right here with a high-end game like this even though it's in an underground casino or underground poker room most likely a player would not be dealing his own cards especially with that kind of money they would have a dealer on the game that would just be dealing the cards to the players you would also not want the actual player dealing the cards because that player may be able to cheat underground casinos do exist i'm not aware of any but they do exist and every once in a while you hear something in the news about getting exposed in different uh jurisdictions here in the state of nevada if you want to open a casino there's a whole process you have to go through i would say to have your own little poker game at your house you're probably not going to get busted for that but if you have an underground casino like this in rounders those will get busted eventually i just got top two pair on the flop so the flop is the first three cards that are community cards that are dealt onto the board that means he has two pairs and they're the best pairs you can have based off of the three cards that come out against your average guy i'd set a bear trap hardly bet at all but kgb is too smart for that so what i've got to do is over bet the pot meaning he's betting more than what's in the pot like i said there's a strategy to how the players play on the game and each player you play differently too so he's saying how much he's gonna bet he can either act like he has a really strong hand where he would bet a lot or he can bet less and in this situation he's betting more than what the money is on the table right then my guess is teddy's on a flush draw flush draw means that he's on a draw that has the possibility of making a flush he has four of the cards to a flush and he needs one more or he has three cards and he needs two more so he's looking for another card of the same suit there's my money card nine of hearts i got a full house money card means that that's the card that's gonna make me win the hand so let's pause it right here this is what we would call as a tell they make it really obvious in the movie just so that an amateur could tell in this scene and as the movie plays you determine that his character anytime he has a good hand and he feels strong about it he ends up eating the oreo and when he has a weaker hand and he doesn't think he can win he ends up putting the oreo back into the little tray it's one of those ways that make you a better poker players being able to see those tells 15 000 time matt damon is acting like he has to really think about if he wants to play this hand or not he's already determined he's playing the hand but he's acting to throw off the other character poker is just like being an actor you got to act on the game sometimes you got to play it up a little bit yeah i'm going to go all in because i don't think you got the space you're right i don't have spades i know before the cards are even turned over this scene is done so much better than the scene from casino royale they both have competing hands one's stronger than the other um they're realistic hands i mean heads up it's a little harder set up than normal heads up is basically when it's player versus player there's only two players in the game and they're going against each other the chances of these two hands occurring it doesn't happen a lot but it's much more realistic than casino royale's outcome it makes you uh enjoy the movie and and see how much of a bad beat that is and a bad beat is basically where you thought you had the win you had it you were good to go and ultimately you get beat and every poker player will tell you about that bad beat they won't tell you about the time they want a bunch of money but they'll tell you about the time they lost a bunch of money on a bad beat next up vegas vacation teddy this place is great they don't have any of these games at the mirage pick a number i'm great at that this crazy casino off the beaten path offers all these weird games pick a number you can't offer that game in the casino there's so many different ways that it could be cheated and manipulated obviously what's comical is they've thrown the game war in which everybody's played as a kid thinking that oh this game doesn't exist this game actually does exist in some casinos and was popular for a period of time rock raper scissors on the other hand you cannot play in a casino on all these games except war it would be very easy for us to cheat the players and there's no way to really regulate where it would be a fair game we're regulated by a gaming control board that makes sure that the games that we offer on the floor gives the guest a certain percentage of a chance four seven betty what am i doing throughout the movie you can see him chasing the money chasing money means you're chasing your losses it means that if you lose a hundred dollars on a game you get frustrated and you're like i gotta win my hundred dollars back so you go take another hundred dollars out of the atm you try to win your hundred dollars back well then you lose that second hundred dollars now you're trying to win back two hundred dollars and so you're using more money to try to win back the money that you already lost the rumor that uh i'll put this to rest right now we do not pump oxygen into the casinos that's one i hear all the time casinos used to be built where there weren't a lot of windows and people to actually see out the doors did that help the guests stay longer yeah it did guests didn't realize what time it was and they may play for another hour or two because they didn't see that it was sunlight outside now with modern casinos you see that less and less there's glass doors and people can actually see the light coming in also you know the rumor is that we don't have any clocks no we don't usually have clocks in the casino or around the slot floor or around the table games there's always a clock in the sports book because you have to make bets by certain time by the time the game actually starts but nowadays everybody has cell phones everybody has watches so guests can find out what time it is anytime anyways there's a definitely a skill and a practice of how we set up our casino floors most of that is set up for the guests so they can find games easier we want to have our best games forward so that guests can find them so there is a lot of thought and work put into where we put slot machines where we put tables on the floor to optimize the guest experience if a player is willing to go to a casino and a casino like this actually existed the player doesn't deserve to have the money that's in their pocket they're going to get taken every time on these kind of games it's comical it's a great part for a movie but it's so far from the world i live in and the world i work in clark griswold on this scene should just quit gambling throughout the movie it's a telltale sign of somebody who has a gambling problem so clark griswold should stay out of casinos next up ocean's 13. [Applause] you get reception in here that's impossible not with this phone surveillance rooms don't look like the room in ocean's 13. the surveillance room is highly secure there's only very limited amount of employees that can go in there because it has access to basically all the information about the casino on the cameras so only my position casino shift managers and above usually have the authorization to even go in those rooms server one is going down now everyone in this room empty your pockets now what's going on this would not happen there's nothing that shuts down the room and locks down the room they can pick up a cell phone they can pick up another phone and make the phone call if there is something going on they would make a call to us if they were to lose surveillance coverage we're actually required by gaming control board to always have surveillance coverage so if we were to lose it we would ultimately have to contact gaming and most likely shut down the games snake guys [Music] it looks like he puts down 100 to 150 000 on snake eyes snake eyes is aces or 1-1 on the dice no casino that i know of would take that big of a wager and right away if you saw that you would go there's something super suspicious going on you would stop the game you wouldn't let it go forward [Music] there's several ways you could cheat with dice you can manipulate the dice themselves you could shave the edges do things like that you could also use loaded dice which you would get a hold of a set of dice and you would load them with a magnet and you could alter how the dice roll and end up landing they would have a switch was ultimately a little lighter in this scene a lot of times what they used to use is they would have to have a bag or a wheelchair that would have a device right underneath the crafts table or right where the player's standing they would use a switch of some sort to turn that on and then ultimately change how the dice would roll what's more common than using the loaded dice is what we call dice sliding the team or three or four people basically what they do is they make a distraction so that everybody on the table is looking at them so that this one player can take the dice slide them down the table where they don't tumble and they stay on the number that he slid down that table that's much more common than using loaded dice but we have a lot of procedures in place to prevent that every new stick of dice we mic them which means we check the balance of them and make sure that the dice are even on all the edges it's the same with when we go and open a deck of cards we make sure all the cards are there that there's no markings on the cards that there are cards we keep that stuff real close and under a lot of scrutiny because we know that if somebody gets a hold of one of those items at gaming equipment they could do a lot of damage to the casino with that the system's in lockdown all calls in and out of this room are secure unfortunately it's the system that secures them again sir it's in lockdown it wouldn't happen in real life where one person gets locked in a room and it prevents them from stopping all these people from cheating the games how often do people try to rob casinos nothing like ocean's 13 what they end up trying to do the most common one is which we call a snatch and grab a person will come up to a blackjack table or craps game jump over the top of the table grab the chips from the rack and then attempt to run out the door with the chips this happens and sometimes there's a group of people that do it for a period of time and the several casinos get hit and then eventually the police or the gaming agents catch them and put them in jail these big ones where they're going to knock over the whole casino and do this it's just too hard and too unrealistic to actually happen it'd be more realistic for you to rob the brinks armored truck that's picking up all the cash than it is for you to rob the casino if you're gonna go rob something go rob somewhere else don't rob a casino thanks everybody for hanging out and watching those clips with me hope to see in the casino soon [Music]

Channel: GQ

Views: 3,323,871

Rating: 4.9081383 out of 5

Keywords: celebrity, iconic characters, iconic, casino, casino movies, the breakdown, breakdown, casino scenes, casino scene breakdown, casino royale, casino royale breakdown, casino breakdown, dustin boshers, the hangover casino scene, gambling scene, gambling movie, gambling breakdown, gambling movies, gambling scenes, casino scene, oceans 13 breakdown, gambling scene breakdown, swingers breakdown, rounders breakdown, 21 movie breakdown, casino royale poker scene, gq, gq magazine

Id: NNWEWFWtJ1Q

Length: 32min 30sec (1950 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/nobollocks22]

Fascinating. Thanks.

[u/ThatITGuy1980]

This is a great watch, Really narrows down what "we" see on a daily at a casino, cept for the obvious hollywood reactions.