In the alluring world of casinos, tales of unbelievable happenings abound. From jaw-dropping wins to astonishing outbursts, casino workers have front-row seats to an array of crazy moments that defy belief.
All stories have been edited for clarity.
Psych!
“I dated a woman who used to be a dealer at one of the smaller casinos on Freemont Street in Las Vegas.
One night she was dealing at a blackjack table. A guy was on a winning streak and was getting pretty excited. He was also pretty buzzed. At the table, players could place side bets on certain rare hand combinations to get a bonus jackpot.
Anyways, the guy hit and won thirty-five grand. This made the guy extremely happy and in his excitement he did something that he would quickly regret.
He grabbed his cards off the table to show his friends, a simple gesture, but not at a Las Vegas Casino. The Casino immediately invalidated the play. Obviously this upset the player, but none of his arguing saved him. He did not get his winnings and was escorted out of the building crying.
It honestly seemed unfair to me, but that’s Vegas I guess.”
This Isn’t You
I worked for a casino in Oklahoma.
One time a man brought a backpack full of loose money to my window. I couldn’t get a good count, but the bag contained an insane amount of money. He requested twenty-five thousand in twenties to be exchanged for hundred dollar bills. This happens quite a bit, but twenty-five thousand was way over the limit of what was acceptable to do without proper paperwork, so I requested his ID. I had to enter his info into the system to make sure he wasn’t evading taxes.
But the ID he gave me definitely wasn’t him. The guy in the ID was in his seventies at least but the guy in my window was maybe in his late twenties, early thirties.
This led to me calling my supervisor who then started the process of quietly alerting the authorities.
I had scanned the ID he gave me, and when my manager got there, she told him, ‘Obviously this isn’t you, sir.’
The man sheepishly apologized and said he had grabbed his ‘grandpa’s’ ID instead of his own. His ID was in his car apparently.
That’s when the man took his backpack, left, and never came back.
Later we learned that the guy had murdered the man in the ID, buried him in his own backyard, and robbed him.”
“Nobody Noticed”
“Many years ago I worked at a casino that was on the Idaho/Nevada border. New Year’s Eve was always the craziest day of the year. The owner threw a giant party for all his high rollers, so there were no rooms available at the hotel. Tons of people would show up and attempt all sorts of bribery, trickery, and outright threats to hotel staff to get a room. As a front desk employee, I always got the brunt of it.
The casino would be a tightly packed wall of bodies, and it would take forever to wade through it. I was grateful that I got to stand behind a desk away from everyone.
The one New Year’s Eve I worked, it started off as a pretty normal night. At some point, a random woman wanted to play on a slot machine, but an old man had been hogging it all evening. Now her story was that she lingered around on a nearby machine and waited, and waited, and waited, but the old man never got up.
Eventually, woman went over and tried to get him to move. That’s when she realized the startling truth.
He was dead.
Nobody noticed for a while. The old man simply slumped over in his chair with a bucket of quarters in his lap and gave up the ghost.
Of course, this led to the woman panicking. This kind of freakout is contagious, so other people around her started freaking out, but the place was so crowded that people couldn’t get away. It took hours for security to make it over to the body, figure out what was wrong, calm people down, and get the old man out of there. The EMTs and cops eventually had to strap him to a stretcher and lift him over their heads to carry him out over the throng of people.
Then the night proceeded as ‘normal'”.
It’s All On Me
“One time we had a couple come in and check into the hotel. The guy presented his credit card and paid for a single bed suite. We didn’t think anything was amiss. After they finished checking in, the couple happily made their way to the elevator.
A few hours later, a few cops came into our lobby. That’s when we learned that the credit card was stolen. They had me page the name on the card, which was female. When that didn’t bring anybody forward, they had me page a man’s name. A few minutes later, a woman came forward hesitantly. When she saw the cops, she dropped her tub of quarters and began wailing and crying in front of everyone in the lobby. The cops handcuffed her while she sobbed, and we stood behind the counter at the front desk watching everything unfold.
The cops then had us page the guy’s name again. When we didn’t see him come forward, we became painfully aware of what was happening. The dude had decided to make a run for it. He went tearing through the casino, leaping over tables and other guests, with detectives chasing him. He ran past the front desk and tried to get out of the casino but ended up slamming face-first into one the huge glass doors at the front entrance. It literally knocked him out cold. He slumped to the ground, leaving streaks of blood on the glass from his broken nose.
Later we found out the guy had broken into some old lady’s house, beat her up and terrorized her for a while before taking off with her purse. She had lain there all night before someone found her. Once he had her purse, he decided to take his girlfriend gambling. Definitely the craziest thing I saw during my time as a casino employee.”
