I enjoy a good heist movie. The characters coming together to form an unlikely team, a bunch of scenarios that could go wrong that you know will go wrong, a super tight window of time until the opportunity runs out, and the chance of a lifetime to hang up those boots and enjoy unlimited Martini O’Clock. I especially enjoy casino heist movies like Ocean’s 11. I’ve been to Vegas twice, and I can just imagine the amount of money flowing through the casino floors on any given day.
In Ocean’s 11, a motley crew of 11 team up to rob The Bellagio of $160,000,000 from its vault. To date, it’s still one of my favourite heist films. But what’s even better than a casino heist film, is a casino heist film filled with zombies. Because if you know me, then you know I love a zombie film even more than a heist film.
Army of the Dead
Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead premieres today on Netflix, and I can’t wait to watch it. If you only know of Zack after his DC involvement, you may not know that his big screen directorial debut was actually George Romero’s remake of Dawn of the Dead, which in my opinion is still one of the best zombie films, and I think revolutionalised the fast zombie that’s now prevalent everywhere.
The synopsis of Army of the Dead is that a zombie outbreak has completely engulfed Vegas, and is currently being locked down from the rest of America. Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) is given a mission to form a team, infiltrate Vegas and make off with $200,000,000 from a casino vault.
Oh, and he has 32 hours to execute this mission before a nuclear strike on Vegas. Throw in a father-daughter redemption side plot, and you have all the right ingredients for a friday night movie. (Go the fuck to bed now, kids! Daddy has a movie to watch!)
So, how much cash does a casino have on any given day?
So, with movies like Ocean’s Eleven and Army of the Dead touting casinos with hundreds of millions of dollars in cold hard untraceable cash… it makes me wonder.
Really?
Just how much cash does a casino have, on any given day?
It bugged me so much I even asked Twitter, but Twitter didn’t deliver on that one.
So, I went to Quora to do some digging. Across the various answers provided in the link, there seems to be a common understanding that the real amount in casino vaults is actually much, much less than what we’ve been told in movies.
The consensus seems to be hovering between $1m to $8m on any given day. Given that you probably need a team of experts to pull this off, say 6 or 7 at the very least… you’re now looking at a payday of $1M or much less. In a Singaporean context, congratulations, you have gotten yourself a starter condominium unit.
Not exactly sipping martinis on a beach kind of payoff huh.
Real world casino heists
In researching this, there’s nothing better than to rely on real life case studies. So here are a few real life heist attempts made around the world.
Bellagio, Vegas, 2010
Sometimes, the most elegant plan is also the most straight forward one. Anthony Carleo waltzed into The Bellagio, scooped up chips from a craps table, walked out, waved a handgun at a valet, stole a motorbike and sped off. No shots were fired. A simple in and out, as they say.
He eventually made of with $1.5M worth of chips! Not bad for a half-baked plan. But he had trouble cashing out, and was eventually caught trying to sell off the high value chips at a lower price.
Crown Casino, Perth, 2013
For a more sophisticated heist, we turn to good ol Australia. With a combination of insider coordination and a distraction ruse (a purchase of the world’s most expensive cocktail at $12,500 publicized as a Guinness World Record event), James Manning got pretty close to netting $32M!
But casino staff got suspicious when he got into a winning streak, even when the odds were highly stacked against him. So they went to review footage and eventually concluded that he had insider help who passed him information on the hands.
They eventually banned him from entry, and since the winnings haven’t been transferred to him, there was actually no loss. On James’s part, he has denied any wrongdoing.
Various casinos, MIT Blackjack Team
Perhaps the most successful case is not a heist per se, but one of hard work and actual skills. You might have seen this movie. It’s called 21, based on the book, Bringing Down the House, which is based on the true story of the MIT Blackjack Team, a crack team of card counters who applied their math skills to beat casinos worldwide spanning more than a decade from 1979.
It was professionally conducted, even with a prospectus printed to seek for investors to build up capital. As card counting is not exactly illegal but highly frowned upon, the team went to many different casinos over the decade, and based on different sources, made off with a total of over a few million in profits across the team and their investors.
Extract from Wikipedia:
Per the terms of the investment offering, players and investors split the profits with players paid in proportion to their playing hours and computer simulated win rates. Over the ten-week period of this first bank, players, mostly undergraduates, earned an average of over $80/hour while investors achieved an annualized return in excess of 250%.
So, at the end of the day, it seems like heists are better appreciated as movies, than a good, executional plan for early retirement. (dammit!)
We’re better off honing our side hustles, such as working on print-on-demand sites like redbubble, or exploring alternative investments like Art, Wine or Crypto investments.