The Circle

Las Vegas and Macau. The gambling capitals of the West and the East.

Each serve their own clientele, and have their own specialties.

In Vegas, there are casinos targeting all types of gamblers. From ultra-ritzy private gambling tables and rooms for the super high rollers who may punt millions per bet, down to small casinos offering roulette bets at just 25 cents and generous perks for local residents. It is said that you can find any game you want at any bet size starting from a couple of dollars.

Craps for a dollar? Check.

Blackjack at $3 a hand? Check.

Rub shoulders with professional poker players with betting units in the thousands? Also check.

In Macau, the theme is slightly different. On the gaming floor, all you see are rows and rows of baccarat tables. Only occasionally would you find a blackjack table or a craps table, and poker is highly concentrated into three or four casinos.

Macau caters to the wealthy, daring, and serious. Minimum bets are much higher than in Vegas, and fortunes are often won and lost in a matter of minutes. If you go to Macau looking for a carnival table game, like Let it Ride or High Card Flush, you will not find it. Serious betters only.

However, one thing is constant between the two locations, and in many other casinos all around the world.

The Blacklist.

In every casino around the world, there is a list of gamblers that have been barred and are deemed "unwelcome".

It's easy to get on to the Blacklist. Try to cheat at a table game by trading cards with other players or adding a high value chip to your bet when you receive a good hand. Or be more bold and reach out to steal chips from the rack when the dealer is busy. You could even call a phone number and request to be barred from entering the casino because you simply cannot control yourself and have no more money or assets left to your name, no friends to borrow from, and no acquaintances to defraud.

Not everyone on the Blacklist gets on through shady means. There are legitimate gamblers, who obey and follow the letter of the law, that can find themselves on the Blacklist through the Griffin Book.

These are the professional players who use every legal means possible to fairly beat the casino.

Some of them are card counters, like the infamous MIT Blackjack team that you may have heard about. Groups of players team up to take on the casino, playing blackjack at flat bets to gain information about which cards have already been dealt, and which cards are left in the deck. When the cards left in the deck are favorable to the player, a teammate comes over and makes big bets to take advantage of the situation. Over the course of months and hundreds of thousands of hands, a skilled card counter or team can take the casino for millions of dollars, just like how Don Johnson took over $15 million from 3 casinos in Atlantic City in 2011.

Others are advantage players. The smallest advantage players look to take advantage of minor loopholes and mistakes that others leave behind. A slot machine that "must hit" the jackpot by a certain amount left open by a tourist. Credits left behind on a video poker machine. Marketing promotions run by the casinos that let players be paid two to one on a blackjack instead of three to two.

The larger advantage players come with entourages, private jets, and millions of dollars in appetite. If you are a player big enough to be considered a "whale" and able to hide how smart you are, casinos will roll out the red carpet for you. Rooms, suites, entire villas at your disposal. A companion of your choice to accompany you while gambling and to warm your sheets at night. Or two, or three or more. Also, discounts. The biggest gamblers get free chips just to show up at the casino, and if they lose, they don't have to pay the full amount. Lose a million, pay just eight hundred thousand. With savvy negotiation skills, and if you're able to structure the math correctly, it's not difficult for a savvy gambler to turn the tables on the casino while enjoying the perks that come with being a high roller.

The third group of players are the unusually lucky. Some are said to have been blessed by the goddess of luck herself. These are the gamblers that sit next to you at the slot machines, and win the jackpot within 5 minutes, and then do it again the next day. At a table, they take the seat on your right, and are immediately dealt a blackjack, or a royal flush, or four of a kind.

It doesn't matter if you're a skilled player, a cheater, an advantage player, or simply just dumb and lucky. If you win enough times, and win much more than you lose, you'll find yourself on the Blacklist.

However, beyond the Blacklist, lies another realm that is unknown to most people.

If you picture the Blacklist as a black book lying on the counter of a casino executive's desk, then, this next section would be more akin to "Wanted" posters plastered all over the walls of a casino's operations room.

An operations room filled with monitors and gadgetry, with teams and teams of professionals watching live videos of gamblers and picking up phones to command pit bosses and identify unwelcome miscreants. On the wall next to all the monitors would then be found six very large blown up pictures.

These six pictures tell a story of six very unique individuals. There are no names attached to these pictures, but across the industry, they are known as the Circle.

No one knows who they are, but every time they have appeared in a casino, or in a game of chance, fortunes are won and lost. Mostly lost. There are numerous tales of millionaires and billionaires going bankrupt in a single night, but not even a single rumor of the Circle losing.

Finally, above the six blown up, slightly pixelated images, is a single sheet of paper, with a single word.

Sanjay. He who is known as the God of Gamblers.

This is his story.