Greatest Gambling Cheats Part 1:The Savannah.

The Savana:

This was a scam that was orchestrated by a gang of professional casino cheats, from the mid-nineteen-nineties to the early 21^st century; the focus of the cheat was roulette. The Savana, it has been claimed, is one of the best casino cheats that has ever been undertaken. It is unclear how the name of the scam came about. But, the team who carried out the scam managed to get thousands of dollars out of the casinos over a period of six years, the only reason they were foiled in their bid was due to the fact that the casinos knew they were scamming them, they just did not realise the techniques involved, and as such simply banned the known cheats from their casinos. Later, during the mid 2000’s, the gang released the details of the technique; this is common with professional cheats, who often move on to consultation with casinos regarding their security, once they have given up their cheating ways, or they after they have eventually been caught.

The Savana was, in actual fact, a variation of an older, relatively well-known, roulette scam called the ‘bet-and-run-scam’. The earlier version entailed a player placing a propositional bet, one of the simplest bets that can be placed in roulette, and then if that player lost the bet, they would quickly remove their chips from the layout table before the croupier had the chance to sweep the table.

The Savana consists of placing two chips on one bet that has odds of 2:1, such as red or black, the bottom chip will be a high denomination chip, while the top chip will be a low denomination chip ($1000 and $5 respectively, for example), the top chip is slanted slightly forward so that the croupier cannot see its true value, when the bet is lost, the player quickly removes the bottom chip without the croupier noticing and replaces it with a chip worth the same denomination as the top chip, while the top chip remains, if the bet is won, the player does nothing. So, if the bet loses, the player loses $10, but if it wins, the player wins $2020.

More precisely, the swap must be made in the instance that the ball has fallen, or dropped. If ever a player was caught by the dealer, they simply acted drunk and irresponsible, but the dealer still would not suspect the player, because they had never noticed the higher denomination chip in the first place, given the slant of the top chip, it simply appeared as if the drunk punter was attempting to lift his chips of the table, not swap the value of the chips; the dealer would therefore believe that the chip set down to represent the original bet was the original chip, when this was not in fact the case.

Whenever a bet was won, the scammers would act extremely enthusiastically, to the confusion of the croupier, who naturally assumed there were 2 $5 chips, so the win would not be great. However, the player would then make a song and dance about the fact that there was also a $1000 chip on the bet, much to the shock of the dealer. Of course, this type of scam alerted the security staff because it was suspicious, however, roll-back of CCTV footage would show nothing amiss. The simplicity of the trick was its greatest asset, everything appeared legitimate.

Copyright © www.online-casinos.co.uk, 2009. All Rights Reserved.