Famed Magicians Join Forces With Adventura Gaming for Penn & Teller Casino Monte

By Scott Roeben, on February 24 2025
4 min read 3 comments
Gambling Las Vegas

Legendary Las Vegas comedy-magicians Penn and Teller have partnered with Adventura Gaming on a new table game: Penn & Teller Casino Monte.

The game will be unveiled at a media event at Rio Las Vegas, longtime home of Penn and Teller’s show, on March 3, 2025.

We’ve got all the details about the game you won’t find anywhere else!

Penn is the one who talks.

From what we can tell, Adventura Gaming is “a boutique gaming company pioneering branded casino games that blend world renowned celebrities and brands with cutting-edge gameplay.” We can tell this because that’s what the invitation to the Rio media event says.

We honestly can’t find anything on the Internet about Adventura Gaming (there are zero results in Google for the company, other than its official site), and the official Web site is sparse.

According to Adventura, Penn & Teller Casino Monte is the “first celebrity-branded casino table game of its kind.”

The sheer rarity of celebrity branding on table games makes this newsworthy. The fact it’s a Las Vegas-based duo involved makes it even more intriguing.

If the game takes off, we trust this will be a substantial amount of passive income for Penn Jillette and Raymond Joseph Teller, legally just Teller.

You can call them Teller & Penn, but they’ll give you the stink eye.

“Monte” could be a reference “three-card monte,” a game where con persons (typically men, though) show three cards, flip them face-down and move them around, then ask a sucker to find a card (often a queen). The game is popular on pedestrian walkways along Las Vegas Boulevard. It’s illegal due to the con part, and the fact anyone seen “winning” the game is in cahoots with the con artist.

Penn and Teller are known for their irreverence, so the game may be a wink to three-card monte, but any game on a casino floor is highly regulated, so there will be no shenanigans.

Here’s a peek, courtesy of the guys.

A lot of casino game variations are announced and field tested but ultimately fade into oblivion. Gamblers tend to stick to the games they know and newer games (or iterations of classic games) are rarely beneficial to players.

If a new game does catch on, it’s a windfall for the inventor, the company developing the game and, in this case, celebrities lending their names to the game.

Given how well known Penn and Teller are, having them involved ups the odds of casinos finding space for the game down the road. Rio may want to keep it exclusive, that will give the manufacturer time to make tweaks if needed.

We reached out to Adventura Gaming and got our hands on the “rack card” that explains the game to new players.

We would do the math, but we’ll leave that to someone who can, you know, do math.

The basic bet is one one of three spots, “P” (for Penn), “&” (for ampersand) and “T” (for Teller).

Dice determine which card is revealed (it’s unclear why the order of the cards being revealed would matter) so players can make an optional raise. Basically, highest card wins. It’s like flipping a coin, but with a three-sided coin.

There’s a side bet called the “Full Monte,” with results based upon poker hands. A suited three-of-a-kind pays 100-to-1. Side bets tend to be not great for players, but they add some additional flair to the game.

Again, we are not a math person, but it sounds like you have a one-in-three chance of making the right choice of which spot will have the highest card and the payout for being right is even money (1-to-1).

Look, if you’re playing this game sober, you aren’t doing it right, so just have fun. Such “carnival” games aren’t really for gamblers, they’re for tourists just out to have some fun. Like the Big Six wheel or live keno, a game invented by Satan himself during a weekend in Ibiza.

Our friend John Mehaffey shared a similar game that made a short appearance at Luxor in 2023.

The folks at Wizard of Odds did the math around that game, which looks identical to this one. Some fun facts: Six decks. Aces are high only.

The strategy, according to Wizard of Odds: “If the card at the player’s position is exposed, then he should raise 3x with a jack or higher. If the card at another position is exposed, then he should raise 3x if that card is a 5 or less. The player should always check or make the maximum 3x raise. Never a smaller raise.”

According to the site, the house edge is 4.17%. For the Full Monte side bet, the hold is 6.02%. On the bright side, it’s better than most slot machines at the airport.

We’ll let you know how it goes when we give it a try.

Update (2/24/25): In related, serendipitous, news, someone who adopted a dog at the Animal Foundation shelter in Las Vegas named their dog Moxie Crimefighter. Moxie Crimefighter the name of Penn Jillette’s child, a word we chose specifically to avoid being canceled for screwing up any pronouns. It’s not all the complicated, really. Moxie was born a female, but has since become a trans man.

The pup is female, but Moxie isn’t gender-specific, so everyone is happy and going about their lives.

If you enjoy our always and forever free content, please consider donating Pup-Peroni to the Animal Foundation. They made a wishlist just for us because we volunteer there.

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