The Greatest Casino Heists

Dramatic casino heists are the subject of numerous films and novels.

Oceans Eleven
Oceans Eleven

There’s the whole Ocean’s Eleven franchise, and that’s just to start. Their popularity is certainly a good indicator of the level of wish-fulfillment, because while luck is all well and good, people often contemplate outsmarting the system and walking away with millions using a more direct approach.

But could you ever pull off your very own casino heist? That’s rather unlikely.

Those films are meant to be fun entertainment, and while the plans may seem high-tech and clever, there are too many factors that simply wouldn’t work in real life.  Besides, the tech would be incredibly difficult and expensive to get and let’s be honest – if you’re researching this, you probably don’t have millions to spend on gadgets.

On the other hand, you could be a tech wizard like the University of California students who built a mini-computer, hidden in a shoe, to affect Roulette spins. But even they got caught and burned their socks.

The simplest casino heists work much better in real life, like the casino employee who simply walked out with a bag of chips and was never caught. But modern surveillance is hard to evade, and all in all it’s safe to assume that most of us have to stick to skill and luck.