EDITOR’S NOTE: “Vegas Myths Busted” publishes every Monday, with a fillip Flashback Friday edition. Today’s ledger entry inward our ongoing serial originally ran on Aug. 14, 2023.


In the Oscar-nominated 2003 film “The Cooler,” William H. Macy portrays a downtown Las Vegas cassino employee whose job is to setback winning streaks. Bernie Lootz — receive it, lose? — has such sinful big luck, all he needs to make out is sit next to a guest experiencing unspoilt hazard and it stops.

“No task similar this can survive today inwards Las Vegas,” Susan Anthony F. Lucas, a professor of cassino management at UNLV and former gaming industry trading operations analyst, told Casino.org. “Many in-house procedures and outside regulations are inwards shoes to ensure haphazardness is lay out in the production of the outcomes on all games.”

Employing someone to spay the random outgrowth of statistics would restrict as cheating.

Players would non keep going a cassino that is known, or regular rumored, to cheat,” Lucas said. “And if caught, consequences such as leaden fines, possible red of the gaming license, and ruinous PR fallout would all live likely.”

In addition, Lucas said, casinos want prominent winners, because “they ply worthful marketing.”

Most importantly, though, there’s no more such thing as good chance or big luck.

“What many people don’t read almost haphazardness is that it includes both hot and stale streaks,” Lucas said. “Therefore, in that location is no demand to fetch inwards someone to touch the gamey — regular if someone could — since it testament recuperate on its own.”

Were Coolers Ever a Real Thing?

“The Cooler” didn’t occupy set inwards modern font Las Vegas, though. It appears to have got been lot inward the past, sometime before its 2003 vent date. (Reno subbed for Las Vegas to devote it a littler feel.)

William H. Macy, as Bernie Lootz, does his thing at a downtown Las Vegas blackjack tabulate inwards “The Cooler.” (Image: Lion’s Gate)

Before casinos completely understood and placed their trust inward the mathematics of the house advantage, some of their operators were as superstitious as their customers. For example, it wasn’t unheard of for stone pit bosses to convey rabbit’s feet, traverse their fingers during tense up craps rolls, or put on their lucky shirts to process to ensure a profitable put up run.

In this environment, the concept of a gambling casino tank certainly seems plausible.

However, an extensive lookup of newsprint articles and books well-nigh Las Vegas from the ’50s through and through the ’80s turned up not a bingle reference to anyone employed by a cassino to impose badness luck on a unrecorded gaming floor.

There was a conception called a “casino cooler,” however, which referred to a rigged adorn of cards (aka a cold-blooded deck) that cheaters would attempt to bring out into swordplay to turn of events a table game’s odds inward their favor.

Cooler Heads Prevail

The assumption of “The Cooler” was borrowed past screenwriters John Wayne Kramer and Frank Hannah from one of many untrue beliefs held past some of the heaviest casino gamblers of yesteryear.

While it certainly is possible for a casino employee with an unsettling look or use to get been sitting next to a winner to deflect their thought physical process and flip their gamy off, all such stories are extremely suspect, at best.

“Heavy gamblers are often very superstitious,” George Lucas explained. “So if they’re winning when someone else happens to bring together the table or a dealer switches out, they are tempted to interpret these random events as the casino trying to muss with their luck.”

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