Surely the most notorious card cons in the history of casino gaming, the MIT blackjack team fine tuned and went on to use card counting techniques that raked in millions for them over a period of decades. These brainboxes used their knowledge to tip a game of fine margins firmly in their direction , really pulling the rug from under the feet of casinos in the process.

The group of students and ex-students trained by Bill Kaplan trained close to 100 blackjack players and made $10,000,000 for himself in the process. Once casinos ascertained what was going on, bans were happening left, right and centre . Some players kept it up, but it became more and more difficult over time, to the point where it’s now mostly viewed as a success story of player over casino, rather than something that goes unnoticed anymore.

Tommy Glenn Carmichael was a slots supremo, but not in any legitimate sense of the word. He was in fact quite the pro at figuring out ways to rig slot machines to the players advantage. He did this over a period of decades. His first major slots con was known as the Monkey’s Paw and involved tripping the microswitch using a wire, in order to automatically pay out the jackpot.

Casinos got wise to his ways but he didn’t let this spot him, instead he found new ways to win. He advanced to using a light wand (a camera battery and a small light bulb) to blind the slots sensor and to once again pay out coins. This wasn’t a part time hobby. It’s thought that Carmichael was cashing in to the tune of thousands of dollars per day.

All good things of course must come to an end and in 2001 he was caught in the act by the FBI, serving almost a year in prison as result and banned from visiting casinos.