If you spend any time on social media, you’ve probably seen him. Tattoos everywhere, stacks of cash on the table, a McLaren in the driveway, beautiful women in every frame that he posts, and a story that sounds almost too good to be true. He calls himself the king of baccarat. He says he cracked the code that casinos don’t want you to know about.
He claims to have won over $32 million from Las Vegas casinos and to have been banned from over 150 of them for it. His name is Micky Mace, and today we’re going to tear apart every single one of those claims, one by one, because what’s actually going on is a lot darker and a lot more dangerous than a guy who just got too good at baccarat.
First, let’s understand who we’re actually talking about. Micky Mace’s real name is Michael David Miterman. He was born in New Jersey in 1991, got hooked on drugs by age 11, and by 21 had done multiple stints in jail. After prison, Mace claims that he rebuilt his life by building a network of over 300 pharmacies and rehab facilities.
A story, by the way, that appears to have been quietly walked back over time, with reports suggesting that his family simply owned casinos. Then, around 2018, he walked into his first high-stakes baccarat table in Las Vegas, according to him, immediately started winning consistently, massively. Up $4.5 million session here and $11.
5 million session at the Venetian there. He claims a net win of over $32 million, all from baccarat and sports betting. Now, those numbers are genuinely staggering, and if any of it were true or reproducible, it would be the most important discovery in the history of casino gambling. Baccarat, mathematically, can’t be beaten in the long run.
It has one of the lowest house edges in the casino, sitting at around 1.06% on the safest bet possible, but that edge is still to the casino. I mean, do you really think that the casinos are going to have a game there where they know that they can lose money? The more hands you play, the more it grinds you down.
No one, not one person in the documented history of gambling, has ever produced a verified, repeatable method for beating baccarat over a sustained period of time. So, either he’s the greatest statistical anomaly in human history, or something else is going on. Every single time that someone asks Mickey Mayes how he wins, he does something very specific.
He gets very vague. Watch any of his podcast appearances, and there are dozens of them, and you will hear the same exact non-answer over and over again. He says things like, “I noticed I had an edge, and the casinos noticed that I had an edge. I figured out that the casinos cheat in ways that most people are unaware of, and I reversed their cheats.
” When pressed harder on one podcast, he said this. And I want you to really listen to this quote. I do have a plan that could bring every casino to their knees, and I may pull the trigger on this and watch these casinos burn. And on another occasion, when asked point-blank about a strategy, he said it was for sale for $50 million.
$50 million. Let’s think about what is actually Let’s think about what is actually happening here. If you had genuinely cracked the code of beating baccarat, the second most popular table game in the world, you probably wouldn’t be doing podcast tours. You would be quietly extracting money from casinos until they stopped letting you win, and then training someone else to go in and do it when they did.
Which conveniently is also the story that he tells. Except the story keeps changing, the numbers keep growing, and the actual explanation never seems to come. The $50 algorithm is a myth designed to do one thing, make you believe that Mickey Mayes has something that you don’t. And once you believe that, you’re right where he wants you to be.
So, if it’s not a legitimate algorithm, how did Mickey Mayes actually win? The most credible explanation from gambling experts and investigators points to a technique called edge sorting. I’m all for pulling one over on the casinos. I’m not the biggest fan of casinos. But what Mayes was allegedly doing is far from a perfect algorithm.
Casinos consider it flat-out cheating, and the courts actually agree. Edge sorting is a method where a player exploits tiny imperfections on the back of playing cards. High-value cards get rotated a certain way during play, and over time a skilled observer can identify which cards are coming before they’re actually flipped. It’s not card counting, it’s closer to marking cards without actually touching the ink.
And legally, courts have already ruled that it is cheating. Courts usually side with the casinos. Mickey wasn’t the only person to do this. In 2012, poker legend Phil Ivey used edge sorting at Crockfords Casino in London and won around $10 million. Then he used the same method at the Borgata in Atlantic City for another 9.6 million.
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Both casinos refused to pay out, which they do a lot. And the case went all the way to the UK Supreme Court. The ruling was clear. Edge sorting was cheating. Borgata successfully sued to get its money back from Ivey, and multiple gambling analysts have attributed Mayes’ supposed baccarat success to this exact technique. It would explain everything.
Why he wins at baccarat, specifically why casinos ban him after reviewing their footage, and what he describes reverse engineering how casinos cheat is a perfect description of exactly how edge sorting actually works. And it’s not just claims that he is cheating, there also separate allegations around money laundering.
A Las Vegas Advisor investigation noted that analysts have raised questions about why Mayes consistently demands cash payouts rather than casino checks for his winnings. As one expert explained, if you’re truly winning tens of millions legitimately, a casino check is far safer and simpler. If you’re moving money through the casino for other reasons, the only reason you would want 10 million in cash is because you want to look really cool holding it.
Or because you didn’t want a paper trail. A 2023 Wall Street Journal investigation confirmed Mase’s name appears on multiple casino watch lists, though the specific details remain confidential. These are allegations and not convictions. But when you combine them mathematically impossibility of beating Baccarat legitimately, the suspicious patterns in how he handles his winnings, and his own refusal to explain a literal single thing about how he does it, the picture starts to look a lot less like a genius and a lot more like a man who has been running a very
sophisticated con from the very beginning. In May 2023, Mase was set to appear in the Hustler Casino Live Million-Dollar Cash Game, one of the most high-profile poker streams in the world. To prove that he had the funds to play, he posted a photo of a cashier’s check. Within hours, a money laundering analyst on the Reddit poker forum had torn the check apart.
The signature belonged to a Chase Bank officer who hadn’t held that position since before 2021. The signatory had changed, the format didn’t match, the check was either a fake or years out of date. And with millions of dollars on the line, neither of those is a good answer. The day before the million-dollar game, Mase withdrew from the event, citing a breach of contract by the producer.
No game, no verification, no million-dollar moment, just a guy who disappeared the second that anyone looked too closely at his money. If you’ve genuinely won $32 million from a casinos, producing a legitimate cashier’s check is one of the easiest things in the world to do. The fact that the one he produced raised immediate red flags from financial professionals tells you a lot about what’s actually backing up all of those claims.
I want to talk about the part of this that I think is the most dangerous. And that’s what Mickey Mayes is selling to the regular people who follow him online. The whole point of why we’re making this video today. His Instagram is a constant reel of excess. Designer clothes, private jets, stacks of chips, sports cars, and woven through all of this is the message that gambling is a legitimate path to this lifestyle if you’re smart enough, disciplined enough, and can just figure out how to beat the house like he did.
And now, he’s monetizing that message directly. His team sells what they’re calling the Mickey Mayes Masterclass. It’s a gambling strategy course with 10 modules and over 30 lessons, starting at $27. I mean, the think about that. The man who claims $32 million in winnings is charging you $27 for the secret? If the system is that good, why does he need your $27? Is what you should be asking.
If his advantage over the casinos came from edge sorting, that’s not teachable in 30 lessons. That’s something that apparently requires years of practice and conditions, and of course courts have already ruled that it’s cheating. What he actually is selling is just hope. False hope. The dream that there’s a secret that the casinos are hiding from you.
I know exactly how that feels. I spent 6 years chasing systems and strategies and inside edges because I desperately wanted to believe that there was a way to win. I want to take a second here to tell you about one of the latest projects that I’ve been working on. It’s called The Gambling Truth Project.
For way too long, the gambling industry has controlled the conversation around gambling in America. The Gambling Truth Project was created to put honest information back at the center of the conversation. Our mission is really simple. We want to raise awareness about the realities of modern gambling industry practices, educate people about the risks and harms that are tied to gambling today, and push for better access to treatment and research funding before millions more lives are destroyed by gambling addiction.
We are proudly independent and accept literally no funding from the gambling industry in any capacity, which is unfortunately a rarity nowadays. Our focus is public health, lived experience, education, and creating real change. If you want to learn more about the project or support the mission, check out the Gambling Truth Project linked in the description below. The edge doesn’t exist.
And the people selling you access to that supposed edge are making the real money off your hope, not off of the house. Mickey’s also built what he calls a funding fans program where followers gamble at local casinos using money from his team and split any profits with him. He claims that this has grown into a $15 million empire.
What he conveniently leaves out is that he only publicizes the wins. The losses are covered quietly and the losers are discarded. It is a perfectly engineered PR machine designed to look like a winning system while functioning as a publicity operation. And he never stops talking about his casino bans. He claims to have been banned from 150 casinos worldwide.
His whole brand is built on the idea that the casinos are so afraid of him that they won’t let him in the door. And his aud.i.ence eats it up because if the casino is scared of you, you must be a genuine threat to them, right? Well, here’s what’s actually true. Casinos do ban advantage players, but Global Gaming Business editor Roger Gros, who spent decades covering the casino industry, has literally stated on the record that the bans at the scale that Maze claims are rare and almost certainly exaggerated. Casinos, especially high
roller rooms, are generally very eager for high stakes baccarat play. They don’t scare easily. What they do act on quickly is suspected cheating. The most likely explanation for his bans is that the casinos reviewed the footage, identified the technique being used, whether edge sorting or something else all entirely, and kicked him out just to be safe.
That is not the story of a genius who beat the house. That is the story of someone who was caught doing something that the courts have already ruled is not okay. Let’s be direct about this. Even if we accept every one of Mickey Maze’s gambling claims at face value, which I don’t, his income today has almost nothing to do with his own gambling.
He is literally banned from the casinos. He cannot walk into a baccarat table and bet $250,000 a hand anymore. What he’s built instead is a media empire built on the story of that supposed gambling career. Podcast appearances, a Discovery Channel documentary, an Instagram following, the Masterclass, the Funding Fans program, a luxury cannabis brand called the Pot of Gold.
I mean, this guy even has an IMDb page. One analysis can be that his true genius is not what he was doing at the baccarat table, but in his understanding of the creator economy. Mickey Maze has figured out that you don’t have to be a great gambler to make money from gambling culture. You just have to be a great storyteller. And he is.
The problem is that his story is being consumed by real people, young people especially, who are walking into casinos believing that the house can be beaten if you’re just smart enough. During the worst years of my gambling addiction, I would have genuinely believed every word of Mickey Maze’s story. I might have even bought the Masterclass.
I could have even signed up for the Funding Fans program. And I would have sat in front of a baccarat table trying to spot patterns that don’t exist. Convinced that I was very close to finding the edge that was going to change my life. Because that’s what gambling addiction does to you. It makes you desperate for a system.
Desperate for a reason to keep playing. And when someone with tattoos and McLaren gets on a podcast and they tell you that casinos are cheating and he figured out how to identify it and make a bunch of money back, it sounds exactly like the permission slip that you might have been looking for.
The reality is that Mickey May’s himself in his more candid moments has said directly, “Do not gamble. Don’t gamble more than you can spend happily. Don’t play casino games with expectations to win.” He knows the truth. He just buries it under 50 Instagram posts of stacked chips and private jets before he gets around to saying it.
That is a man who knows exactly what he’s doing and chooses to keep doing it because the clicks and the course sales and the media deals keep coming in. Here’s something that his supporters love to point out. Unlike most gambling personalities, Mickey May’s does acknowledge some of his losses. He’s admitted to a net loss of 1.
5 million at the Wynn. He’s transparent about losing nearly 940,000 on Hustler Casino’s live poker tables. He acknowledges losses in documented, publicly visible settings, places where denying them would instantly be provable as a lie. But what we don’t know is what happened in all of the sessions with no cameras, no witnesses, and no paper trail.
And his net worth? Estimates range from 8 million to over 150 million depending on who you ask. A spread so enormous that it tells you that nobody actually knows, including him probably. What we do know is that a man who claims $32 million in gambling winnings mysteriously struggled to produce a clean cashier’s check before a poker game.
Mickey May’s is not the king of baccarat. He’s the king of the story about baccarat. His wins, to whatever extent they actually happened, most likely came from edge sorting, not from some genius algorithm. His bans were not a badge of honor from terrified casinos. They were the consequence of getting caught.
He’s not the person who cracked the casino’s code, but he does offer one. As he is now an investor, most likely, in a new casino called Kurgo, which he’s pushing with the same exact technique as the funding the fans method, telling people that they can gamble and he’ll pay for it in a bunch of videos that he’s put out. So, I started teaching a lot of people how to play and beat the casinos.
And then that became a bit of an issue, too. What I do now is I gamble under the guise of unknown gamblers. I fund 100% of their betting, so they have no exposure or liability to a loss, and I give them a piece of all the earnings. We split all the profit. He’s the newest version of a very old con.
The guy who convinces you that there’s a secret and then charges you for access to it. The only difference is that he has a bigger Instagram account and better lighting. And the worst part of all of this is that somewhere right now, someone who can’t afford to lose money is buying the $27 masterclass. Someone is walking into a baccarat table convinced that they’ve seen a pattern that’s going to make them rich, and Mickey Mayes is going to profit from every single one of them.
If you’ve ever fallen for the dream that a professional gambler was selling, whether it was Mickey Mayes, a pick capper, a slot streamer, or anyone else in this broken industry, I want you to know that you are not stupid. These people are professionals at manufacturing hope. They know exactly which buttons to push, and they have spent years getting better at pushing them.
You are not the problem. The lie is the problem. If you’ve fallen victim to the casinos, the scammers, the streamers, or anyone else in this industry, please subscribe to this channel. I’m here to help you avoid making the same mistakes with your life that I made with mine. And it exists to pull back the curtain on every single one of these scams, because you deserve to know the truth.
And if you’re in a place right now where gambling has become something bigger than entertainment, if it’s costing you money that you can’t afford to lose, relationships that you can’t afford to damage, or sleep that you can’t afford to miss, then check out this playlist that we put together on how to quit gambling and live a better life in recovery.
The people who tell you that you can make money gambling are usually winning off of you in a completely different way. Let’s keep getting better together.
