Even if you are cheating, and they know you're cheating, they might leave you alone if you're not that good at cheating. Take card counting: While counting cards in one's head is not illegal, a good card-counter in blackjack gains a statistical advantage over the house, and if the casino decides the counter is making too much money, he or she will be escorted off the premises.

But card counters have to be really good: One mistake an hour could swing the advantage back to the house. And casinos don't mind that. "If you're not perfect at card counting, you can still lose money," Jonas said. "They'll watch you count cards and if you make any mistake they'll just let you play."

They might even let a good counter continue to play if he or she is part of the entourage of a high roller who's losing millions. If the counter makes US$20,000 off the casino while his buddy loses millions, for the casino it's just part of the cost of doing business.

Card counting teams from MIT made millions off Vegas and have since been immortalized in a book and film. The MIT team's innovation was to have separate roles for players: Some were there to count and place small bets, others acted as high rollers and made big bets when the decks were favorable. It's easy for Vegas to spot a counter working alone based on betting patterns -- lots of small bets followed by a few big ones. The MIT team survived longer than most because the separation of roles gave the appearance of legitimate betting patterns.

There are many other methods players use to shift the odds in their favor, with varying levels of legality. Jonas discussed a few, in some cases showing photos and video from his own collection. Here's a sampling:

• The infinite hundred-dollar bill: One team took US$1.2 million off a casino in two weeks when it discovered that a new hundred-dollar bill could be fed into a certain slot machine and, if you hit a button at just the right time, the machine would give the player US$100 worth of credit while spitting the actual US$100 bill right back into the player's hands.
• The chip cup: The chip cup looks just like a stack of $5 chips, but it's hollowed out and can hold a few $100 chips. Using the chip cup, a dealer and player working together can make a killing.
• The palm: A player palms a card and trades it with a neighbor to make a better blackjack hand. This trick is decidedly low-tech, but nearly undetectable when done with great skill.
• The specialty code: A programmer who worked on a video poker game snuck in some code that produced an automatic royal flush if a player followed a specific sequence of betting over the course of seven or eight hands.
• Cameraman: Jonas showed photos of one player who was wearing buttons that were actually infrared cameras, capable of capturing the identity of cards as they pass through a shuffle machine. One shuffle machine in particular had a tiny hole that revealed each card, but not to the naked eye. The infrared camera illuminated the card, and the video images were transmitted to a vehicle in the parking lot, where collaborators slowed the video down and could tell their player in the casino which card was coming next. Hitting on 17 is a smart move when you know a four is coming next.
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