The secrets to walking away with the biggest payout haul from the Diamond Casino Heist.
The Diamond Casino Heist offers varying payouts based on the vault's contents, with diamonds being the rarest and most profitable. Factors like the chosen approach, crew member cuts, and damage taken during the heist impact the final take. Looting the maximum amount requires strategic planning and the best hacker to maximize time in the vault. Here's everything you need to know.
The value of your casino heist haul and maximum potential payout increases as the rarity of the vault content increases. In table below we show you the maximum potential payout and take that you can expect for each type of vault content. The amounts listed are before Lester's cut (which will be 5% of the total score), any take penalties (see [#Avoid_Damage 'Avoid Damage'] below), paying your crew and of course splitting the remaining take with your fellow players (the Casino Heist finale is a 2-4 person heist).
| Vault Contents | Maximum Potential Payout |
|---|---|
| Cash | $2,326,500 |
| Artwork | $2,585,000 |
| Gold | $2,843,500 |
| Diamonds | $3,619,000 |
Note that the first time you do the heist you will always get cash, and on subsequent attempts you might get artwork, gold or diamonds. It's preferable to get artwork over cash not only because you earn more, but the paintings themselves are actually easier / faster to loot. As you can see in the table above, gold and finally diamonds are easily the most profitable types of loot though.
| Vault Loot | Rarity / Probability |
|---|---|
| Cash | Very common |
| Artwork | Somewhat common |
| Gold | Rare |
| Diamonds | Very rare / event driven |
Which loot you will receive is completely random, but some loot will appear more often than others. In fact, it correlates to the maximum potential payout of the loot types. So cash is most common, followed by artwork and so on through to diamonds. Note, however, that it appears Rockstar has the ability to adjust the probability of getting a particular type of loot. For example, during the Valentines Day events of 2020, it was observed that obtaining diamonds (usually the rarest) became a lot more common/easy.
When doing the Casino Heist you cannot use the same approach twice in a row (it will be locked). However, you can return to a previous approach if you use a different approach in the meantime (like doing Aggressive, then Big Con, then back to Aggressive).
Plus, the approach you are repeating (Aggressive in our example) will now have a Red Skull icon on it (as seen above) indicating that hard mode / higher difficulty will be activated if you proceed with that approach again. This means that the guards will be stronger, there will be more of them and their detection rate will be higher. There will also be six locks to destroy on the vault instead of the normal four, and two fingerprint hacks to do (instead of the regular one).
You do get a monetary bonus for all this added effort though — a 10% increase on the actual potential take versus "regular" difficulty! You can check out a video of us doing Hard Mode and looting diamonds here.
=== Avoid Damage ===
There's also no guarantee that you will walk away with the exact amount stated in this guide because as you get into combat situations and take damage you will lose a small amount of money for every hit you take. The amount lost is between 0.12% — 0.26% of the total cash you are carrying at the time. In practice, this means about $2,000 lost per shot.
That's why we always recommend you choose either the Big Con approach or the Silent & Sneaky approach for maximum profit, even if they are bit daunting. The Aggressive approach is fun and quick, but you risk losing quite a bit of your take due to amount of damage you will inevitably suffer.
When calculating your final payout you also need to take your crew members' and Lester's cuts into consideration. Lester will take 5% of the total amount and your crew (hacker, driver, etc) payments will vary depending on who you have chosen.
After that it is time for you and your heist-mates (the finale heist is for between 2 to 4 players) to split the percentages amongst yourselves. If two players carry out the heist then you can walk away anywhere between GTA$400,000 to GTA$800,000 each.
The ability to loot diamonds from the Casino was actually locked when Rockstar first released the Diamond Casino Heist content. However, we then discovered that it was unlocked during the week of February 18, 2020 (i.e. for Valentine's Day).
It has now been confirmed that Rockstar has the ability to turn diamonds loot on and off, and that they will enable it for certain events, promotions or other significant dates.
Looting diamonds lets you take the maximum possible payout from the Diamond Casino Heist, which is $3.619 million. Once your support crew and Lester's cut are taken out, the amount left for players is $2,714,250.
Maximising the amount of time you get inside the vault is essential. Every second counts when it comes to looting it.
Whenever choosing the hacker for your heist we recommend that you always go for the best hackers available, which are Paige Harris and Avi Schwartzman. Paige is available by default and takes 9% of the cut. She gives you 3 minutes and 15 seconds in the vault. Avi takes 10% of the cut and gives you 3 minutes 30 seconds. We recommend Avi as 15 seconds extra can really make a difference in your end payout.
The time it takes for the animations to play out while you're looting must be considered when working out the time you'll have to work in the vault. On top of that, if you're carrying out the Casino Heist using either the Big Con approach or the Silent & Sneaky approach you must leave the vault before the timer runs out if you want to exit undetected. So adding those extra 15 seconds with Avi will allow you to loot the maximum possible content, increasing your final take.
During the heist you can also grab some extra cash from the secret vault, which is on the ground floor right next to the elevator. The switch to open up the secret vault door is in the CCTV room next to the elevator. You can expect somewhere between $50,000 to $100,000 to be in there. It will vary from heist to heist though.
If you grab the cash from this secret vault you also get an award for doing so called the "Daily Cash Grab", it gives you a 100 RP bonus too.
The cap on the maximum overall amount you can take in a single heist is GTA$3.619 million. This means that even if you somehow get more than that capped amount, it will be of no use since the maximum you will be able to walk away with is still just GTA$3.619 million. This max amount is possible when you loot diamonds only.
There was a glitch (now patched) which would let you respawn gold bars after you had collected all but the last one. Once you were left with just one gold bar on the tray, you could just back out of the grabbing animation and start taking them again. Then when you were in the grabbing position again, the gold would respawn. The glitch only worked once per gold cart/tray.
By using this glitch some players were reportedly able to "get" up to $4-$5 million. However, even so, due to the aforementioned GTA$3.6 million cap, they still only took away that lower amount. This also means that any other "glitches" that supposedly let you grab more than $3.6 million are useless.
