What time of day do these usually happen? I'm assuming from 8pm-4am would be prime time robbery time. For morning players would it be safe to say they are at a much lower risk of a follow home or parking lot incident?

I've sometimes wondered about these things. I'm curious if you hit a very large slot jackpot or a bad beat jackpot for over like $100K, do they make you walk out with the cash or do they cut you a check? Is it up to the person winning the money or is there a hard fast rule here?

Can you get security to walk you to your car? Can security sell you his gun, you know, just in case?

Every casino I've been to (and even some underground games) gladly will provide you with a security escort to your vehicle if you request it.

Regarding hitting a jackpot, I've read that you can receive the money via a wire, a check, cash, or chips.

yeah but it's done on the dl

One pay option is always all cash at any real casino. But normally any option you want of any mix, cash check chips credit whatever.

Never heard of casino that would not provide escort.

Most guards won't have a gun they could sell you.

I used to work surveillance at a casino and we had some follow home robberies with one of them resulting in a murder. People would wait for a jackpot to hit then walk out behind the winner even with a security escort. They see what car the winner gets in as they sit in their own car. Once the winner leaves, they tail him all the way home.

The murder happened when two guys followed a $10,000 jackpot winner out and tailed him home. Once he got out of the car, one guy tried robbing him but he resisted so the other guy ran him over with his car. They robbed him as he was dying. We had video of them at the cashier cage that gave us pristine close ups of their faces and we had the video of them following him out. They got caught and are doing life in prison.

Most of our robberies involved baseball bats or knives once you get home. All of the ones I can remember happened at night. I used to be a private investigator and tailing people at night is a lot easier than in the day because most headlights look pretty similar so people don't notice they're being followed. If you suspect you are being followed or if you won a jackpot or large sum of money, make some unusual turns and u-turns to see if you are being followed. If so, find a cop or pull into the nearest police station and honk your horn repeatedly.

Yeah,played poker with a guy who was followed home and killed after winning 10k.

One humorous story a guy told me is he won 28k ,got a check for 20k and asked for security.

He says,"Don't pay attention to me as you escort me out"

He proceeded to act like he was getting thrown out, nobody paid too much attention cause a big loud black guy getting tossed wasn't that big of a deal.

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It wouldn't surprise me if more people got followed home over smaller amounts of money than large.

Over a certain amount, your win is officially on the books, and if you get robbed, you will go to the police. If your win is something that you're trying to hide from the government or your wife or your ex-wife, you're more likely to just accept a $5,000 loss.

I would be willing to bet that the #1 predictor of whether you're gonna get robbed is not time of day or the amount of win or where you play or whether you have a gun, but rather whether you look like the kind of guy who would notice people following him home.

Getting paid jackpots and large sums isn't a very quick process. Notice who notices you walking to the cage. Notice who's still there when you're stuffing bricks into your pockets.

So, playing in a fairly large game here (10-25-50 PLO) with no max buy-in, there's often $200k on the table at the high point any night. Many of the players don't cash out at the end of the night, they just color up chips to high denominations and put them in their bag. Maybe cash out a bit here and there, but hardly ever see guys cashing out $30k at the cage. That being said, we still had two regular players followed home on the same night (to two different suburbs) when the game ended around 4 AM.

In both cases, the guys were smart enough to realize someone was following them home (not many cars on the road at 4 AM) and they both called each other on the way, drove past their homes to see what was happening, and kept driving right to their local police station and the cars following them kept going when they pulled into the police.

It slowed down the game a bit. Guys decided not to play for a while and eventually the casino worked with us to play the game in a private area instead of the main poker room so casual people walking in and out of the poker room didn't see all the money on the table.

Personally, I hit the bad beat jackpot at my casino for $70k and immediately asked for a check when they paid me in cash. It's much easier to justify getting a check from the casino when it's a jackpot with an automatic tax form. When it's wins in a big poker game, depending upon how you're handling the taxes with your poker winnings, it's hard to deposit a check for $30,000 in the bank without it causing red flags if you're not properly paying taxes on your income. That being said, I'm never walking out of a casino with $30k cash.

fyp

There are games like that at the place I used to play, but they had boxes. The high limit guys all have boxes.

But lets keep things in perspective .... these sorts of things are not every day occurrences. They are pretty rare.

And lets face it most robbers would probably do better robbing people before they get to the casino.

Here in Detroit, I'd say it's 50/50 on the guys having boxes at the MGM property. Some guys just don't jump through the hoops that MGM puts them through to keep a box (I think that's a Detroit issue...most MGM properties don't cause as much trouble to get a box, but MGM Detroit is a huge pain)

Yes, but you have to give him a couple of minutes to remove the serial number.

Why don't people just get the winnings paid out to their bank account???

If the casino is reporting the numbers to the IRS, they will often do so. However, if you are playing 10/25 PLO and have a great night, the odds are higher that you're not reporting all of the money. If you're not reporting the money, a bank transfer becomes hard to explain.

Being robbed is an occupational hazard of being a high stakes poker player. TJ Cloutier tells a good story of a game he was going to that was going to have a lot of money on the table. He was worried about one guy in particular that was going to rob the winner. His solution was to hire the guy as a bodyguard. In the ethos of the time, once you were hired you were bound to protect the person who hired you. He felt completely safe since nobody wanted to mess with the bodyguard.

There are just a ton of poker players who, for one shady reason or another, don't want large verifiable transactions to occur.

But yes, you should definitely not be like this. The largest sum I ever took out of a casino, a jackpot, I took in the form of a check. The casino people looked at me like I was crazy (everyone takes cash or chips, they said) and it actually took a day for them to cut the check.

At a place like Commerce they're more likely to go after a player from the plaza side (5/10 and less) than the games on the hotel side (the bigger games). Players on the hotel side are more likely to use a box or player bank, and more likely to be vigilant. Also, there are less places for a robber to sit and watch inconspicuously. On the plaza side, the lowest-limit games are right in front of the cage, where someone can sit and play and scope out anyone from the 5/10 games cashing in. This is the exact scenario that occurred when a player I knew got robbed in his driveway.

Anyway- valet your car, be vigilant of people around you in and out of the casino, be even more vigilant when getting near your home and do not pull into to your house unless you're absolutely sure you're not being followed.

Any real honest data on how often this has happened? I know it has happened certainly , but I wonder just how at risk folks with moderate to large wins really are? Folks need to act wisely and take precautions, but is it really that common an occurance?

These are rare yes, but another reason to be 'pleasant' at the table too. One story has a real @#%^ playing a home game some 40 miles away and he had a couple big nights in a row and found 3 masked guys waiting for him when he got out of his car in his garage!! They didn't need to follow him since most of the game all knew each other.

Found out it was an inside job via the Dealer 'to teach him a lesson' .. not really clear what the message was however. GL

I personally know someone robbed for high 5 figures on the way home from foxwoods. This was several years ago.

They chose to take slot winnings in cash. There are reasons for the cash take choice which I wont go into...

She was apparently followed from foxwoods despite taking car from valet pick-up. Robbed in a bathroom on a stop on I-95 on way back to NY. Wasnt a random robbery. Robber knew of the casino cash on her. Robber man in drag for disguise

No idea what time of day. She usually plays for weekend and leaves sometime sunday, not late...Perp never caught.

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When I hear a story like this it just raises a bunch of questions.

If the robber was never caught, how do you know what he knew and when he knew it. I mean I suppose its possible that he followed her from the casino because he knew about her winnings. But how do you know? (Unless you were the robber) Even if he said something that indicated he knew she had casino winnings perhaps he overheard her talking on her phone as she entered the rest stop? Why was he in drag? That sounds to me like a guy targeting the women's restroom not a guy following people home from a casino.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm just saying a fair amount of skepticism is warranted. Sometimes it might just be a robbery that coincidentally occurred against a casino winner. And sometimes tt may be a made up story to explain why the winnings never are gone.

As psandman alluded to, a person who takes cash for a jackpot has motive to stage a robbery. If she's willing to make a false report to police, she gets a nice break on her taxes.

That is a completely baseless amd false assertion. This was not staged. Sandmans questioned how she knew as oppossed to it being a random. There were things said...

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No it is not. Try reading it again, perhaps slower this time around.

??? The dog really did eat your homework? GL