Las Vegas High Rollers

by Leah Bailly | Jul 18 2008

Feeling like a big shot at the casino? Letting loose on those $10 hands of Blackjack after a night of boozing? The penny tables have long attracted the more tentative tourists, but for casino owners, the serious money is with the high rollers. The Las Vegas resorts and casinos love and fear the big shots. Sin City regales its celebrity gamblers, most of whom are known for their lavish spending in fine dining establishments, peppered by extreme bouts of Baccarat. 

Fancy yourself a high roller? The class of gambler who can make or break a casino's bank roll is considered elite. You must have particularly trashy taste in fantasy suites, enjoy private jets on and off the Strip and you cannot leave home without your personal butler/chauffeur. Most importantly, you're someone who can lay down $100,000 per bet or $500,000 per hour. Las Vegans call you a "whale" and it's true. You like things a little large.

A $5 million credit line isn't easy to come by, and any high roller knows you can't play the big rooms (the really, really big rooms) unless you're willing to move through $20 million a weekend. The high rollers’ game of choice: Baccarat, or as the French say, the "Chemin de Fer." Some feel that Craps has the highest return and enjoy young beautiful women blowing on their dice. Real spenders won't spend much time on the casino floor, instead favoring private high stakes rooms or VIP areas of the resort. They develop elaborate taste in Blackjack dealers, are provided with 24 hour dining and hospitality services and usually leave Vegas with hella fierce hangovers.

Big Winners and Bigger Losers

But who were Las Vegas' big winners? Everybody wants to remember such relics as Kerry Packer, the richest man in Australia, known for his extreme stakes. Sixty-eight years old when he died, Packer was a media mogul, famous for his $33 million winning streak at the MGM Grand. Rumored to have won 20 hands of Baccarat in 20 minutes, Packer paid his waitress' mortgage after asking why she wasn't at home with her kids.

Other high rollers profited less conspicuously and leached millions from the casinos in high stakes. Most praised and feared of the "math-brain" big shots are members of the MIT Blackjack Team, Mike Aponte and John Chang. Individuals like these, trained in counting cards and "bringing down the house" were said to have strategically invested millions in No Limit tables, only to reap serious profits over the decades. However, casinos are less fond of card counters than real high rollers and aren’t likely to show these celebrities their fantasy suites.

The Godfather of High Rollers

Binion himself was a high roller. Raised in Texas, a bootlegger and gambler from birth, Binion was accused of murder in Dallas before moving to Las Vegas in 1951 to open his own joint, Binion's Horseshoe. He was the gun-slinging cowboy who invented the World Series of Poker at a time in Vegas when most casinos found poker difficult to manage and impossible to market. Binion managed to turn the WSOP from an eight person tournament in 1972 to a 6,844 player bonanza today. His final gift to high stakes cowpokes: the National Finals Rodeo hosted every December in Las Vegas. The rodeo is the last of the Binion legacy not squandered by his greedy, destructive children, another requisite feature of all true high rollers.

Do You Have What It Takes?

So next time you're in Vegas, go snap a shot of the $1 million behind glass. Raise your $1.50 cerveza to the video surveillance and toast the high rollers that make the Vegas casinos soar. And as you run your eyes across those stacks of Ben Franklins, consider dropping that sum on one roll of the dice. The high rollers can do it... Could you?

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