Breaking Vegas is a television series that premiered on The History Channel in the United States in the spring of 2004. The series covers the great lengths people have gone to make money, sometimes illegally, from casinos. It premiered in Pakistan on January 19, 2006 and was renamed Decoding Casinos in India on May 9, 2006. In the Spring of 2007, it aired on The History Channel and The Discovery Channel in Canada.
Many episodes have to do with cheats who illegally take money from the casino using sleight-of-hand tricks or some sort of gizmo. Namely, these scams include pastposting and card marking. Other episodes include famous examples of legal money-making techniques such as card counting. Some episodes are about legal strategies like winning at the craps table by throwing at certain angles using a certain grip with certain numbers at the top, or taking advantage of a worn-out ball bearing and a thus tilted roulette wheel.
The series was inspired by the two-hour History Channel documovie entitled Breaking Vegas: The True Story of the MIT Blackjack Team written and directed by Bruce David Klein and produced by Atlas Media Corp.
The episode "Professor Blackjack" is about MIT professor Edward O. Thorp's computer-based research on the Kelly criterion that was applied in real Vegas casinos in the form of computer aided card-counting schemes with very successful results. Manny Kimmell, a known mob associate, provided the venture capital for Dr. Thorp's real life experiment and his contribution is described in the same episode.
