I'm not a gambling expert, but I've been getting out to Vegas quite a bit lately.
Then I guess the question is, "What's the table limit for a high stakes roulette table?"
I have the pit boss having to approve his last bet, a single number bet of 20K, which at 35 to one gets 700K.
I don't know, but I think it's probably really high. I've personally seen a bet larger than $20k on a single number. I don't recall the dealer getting approval or, indeed, seeming all that impressed. This was on the regular-schlub floor in the Venetian, not a special room or anything. A Chinese guy bet something like $40,000 (a BIG stack of $100 chips) on a single number on the roulette wheel. He lost it all. Probably stung a bit; he'd started out about 10 minutes earlier with something like $50.
The pit bosses know that if your guy isn't cheating somehow he will absolutely, positively lose sooner or later. I wouldn't expect them to start seriously thinking about cutting him off until he had maybe $1 million on a 36-to-1 bet. Probably not even then, unless they suspected cheating. I don't know much about the business, but I do know that a lot of their profits are made catering to 'whales' a.k.a. really high rollers. Sheikhs, dot-com zillionaires, oligarchs,... I can't imagine those guys would get real worked up about playing for $10,000 bets, or even $100,000 bets.
If he kept nailing these 36-to-1 bets they might well send the dealer home or something so that your guy had to move to another table. Or maybe not. Gamblers are weird about their hot streaks, and they wouldn't want to irk the guy.
Caesar's palace has a section where the minimum bets are (IIRC) in the $5,000-$10,000 range. It's roped off from the common people area and the dealers are a little dressier, but anybody who wants to can go in.
In case nobody mentioned it, in roulette you can also split your bet between 2 or 4 adjacent numbers, or bet red/black, odd/even, ...) You just lay your chips on the line separating two numbered boxes, or on the t shape where four boxes intersect. If your guy bet that way it might be a little less conspicuous than if he was routinely nailing all these single number bets.
It's pretty routine to see people accumulate big piles of chips--tens of thousands--and lose everything within the space of a few minutes.
BTW would it be 700K total, or 700 + the original bet of 20 = then 720 K handed back to the patron? The house then basically sends him to bed in a comped room and close the table so they can inspect it. They also credit his newly created tab with the winnings rather than cashing him out. I'm assuming that when he leaves the next day, he will only get half the money, the other half having been assigned to the IRS?
Just FYI, a lot of the money floating around in casinos these days is not in the form of chips but rather in the form of little printed slips with bar codes on them. If the pile 'o chips got really high they might offer to redeem in the form of one of the slips.
Do casinos have their own banks in the sense that he'd potentially get a checkbook rather than 350K cash? If he wants cash, would they have it?
They'd have it in cash if he wanted. They could also do a certified check or I bet even wire it somewhere. But cash would definitely be an option.
The reason I say that is that outside the casinos there are always a lot of high-end luxury goods places (Bulgari, Ferrari dealerships, ...) where the lucky winner can turn his cash into baubles. They don't miss a trick, these guys.
Vegas also has some really phenomenal restaurants. Afterward you should have your guy eat at a place called Cut. They have kobe and/or wagyu beef, and their starters are hands down the best I've had anywhere, ever. I recommend either the bone marrow flan or perhaps the maple glazed pork belly. <le sigh>
I do
so miss cholesterol.
