I lived in Vegas when this happened and, for such a brilliantly simple robbery plan, this kid was an IDIOT. As mentioned, the majority of the chips were $25,000 "cranberries" (so named because of their design), and he couldn't liquidate them. He even went as far as to create a twoplustwo forum account (a poker strategy site) under the name "OceanSpray" (get it? cranberries!) and asked in the least subtle ways possible how one would "hypothetically" turn those chips to cash. Seriously. I'm paraphrasing here, but his posts were along the lines of:
"Say that someone 'happened' to come across a bunch of high-denomination ($25,000) chips. How would they be able to cash them in?" Again, under the name "OceanSpray".
So he decided to try and launder them by buying into high-stakes poker games, except he was getting CRUSHED. I was never a super-high-roller or anything, but even some of the guys at MY stakes knew who he was before he got arrested. Lots of high-stakes guys knew, but nobody said anything because he was hemorrhaging chips every time he bought in. Cops knew who he was for weeks beforehand, but since he was so diligently building a case against himself, they just accrued more and more evidence until it became a slam dunk.
After all that, he tried playing the, "you can't do this to me, my dad's a judge!" card. Said dad was just up for re-election though, and couldn't afford the bad PR, so he threw him under the bus in every interview he took.
Edit: Actually read the article. So my post isn't really adding much. Lesson learned, lol.