The Diamond Casino Heist: the complete guide

The Diamond Casino Heist arrived in December 2019 and it is still the best crew heist Rockstar has ever built: you choose your own way in, your own way out and your own disguise, and the vault at the bottom changes week to week. Since July 2026 its finale also carries a boosted first-completion payout every Thursday, which put it firmly back on the weekly rota.

This guide is the full run, start to finish: eight steps from buying the arcade to selling to the right buyer, then the reference layer underneath it, the vault values, the crew maths and the rules that protect your take. Figures are checked against the live game and tracked community values as of early August 2026.

Step 1: get set up

• Buy a Retro Arcade from Maze Bank Foreclosures. Pixel Pete in Paleto Bay does the job from around GTA$1.24 million; a city arcade just saves driving
• Head into the arcade basement: that is the planning board for the whole heist
• Start the heist from the board. You are working for Georgina Cheng, taking orders from Lester, and each attempt costs a GTA$25,000 setup fee
• Know the two ground rules going in: the finale needs two to four players, no solo, and your first-ever vault always holds cash

Step 2: scope the casino

• Walk in through the front of the casino as a guest and photograph every point of interest you can find inside: keypads, keycards on staff, cameras, guards
• Circle the building outside and log the access points: doors, gates, the security tunnel entrance
• Get a helicopter over the roof to photograph the rooftop access points, because the best escapes in this heist start or end up there
• Do not rush this. Every door you log now is an option when a run goes sideways later, and the plan always goes sideways eventually

Step 3: scope the vault, and reroll it

• Run the Vault Contents prep and read the result: cash, artwork, gold, or, on selected event weeks only, diamonds
• If it shows cash and you wanted better, walk outside the arcade, call Lester, and cancel the heist. There is no penalty
• Run Vault Contents again and check the new draw. Repeat until the vault is worth your evening. Serious earners treat this loop as part of the heist

Step 4: pick the approach

Three exist, and one of them is the cheat code. The Big Con with the Gruppe Sechs disguise walks you to the vault unchallenged, and it is the approach to teach every new crew. Silent and Sneaky is the full stealth fantasy for crews who already know the building. Aggressive is a shotgun through the front door, and every hit you take on it bleeds value out of the bag. This walkthrough runs Big Con; the other two reuse everything below except the entry.

Step 5: hire the crew

• Gunman: Karl Abolaji at 5%. On Big Con the guns barely matter
• Driver: Karim Denz at 5%. Confident crews barely touch the getaway cars
• Hacker, the one that matters: Avi Schwartzman, 10% for about 3 minutes 30 seconds of undetected vault time, unlocked by destroying all fifty signal jammers. No Avi? Paige Harris, 9% for about 3:25, unlocked by owning a Terrorbyte. The extra seconds repay the cut many times over on gold or diamonds

Step 6: run the preps

• Clear every required prep the board lists for Big Con: the Gruppe Sechs kit with its armoured Stockade van and uniforms, the vault keycards, and your exit disguise
• Going anywhere near loud, now or ever? Run Duggan Shipments: ten shipments around the map, destroy the lot, and the guards you might meet lose their heavy armour. Cheap insurance
• Prep in invite-only sessions so nobody griefs your evening away

Step 7: the finale, Gruppe Sechs, step by step

• Suit up in the Gruppe Sechs uniforms and drive the Stockade to the casino security tunnel
• Roll up to the checkpoint and let the guards wave you through. They are expecting a security van, and you are a security van
• Park in the tunnel and walk down to the vault level. Nobody challenges you on the way in
• At the double-swipe doors, both players swipe the keycards together
• Let the hacker open the vault door, and the clock starts the moment it does
• Loot in priority order: the target first, and if time remains, the side lockboxes. Know your grab order before the door opens, because looting animations eat the clock
• Leave when the hacker calls time, not after. Seconds outside the door are worth nothing
• Swap into your exit disguise at the swap point on the way up and walk out calmly. You have not been made until the game says you have
• The moment the disguise breaks or the exit spits you outside, sprint to the getaway cars, lose the cops through side streets, and drive to the buyer

Step 8: sell to the right buyer, then set up the Hard trick

• Always take the highest-level buyer at the exit choice. The lower buyers exist purely to shortchange people in a hurry
• Then remember what you just ran, because running the same approach again back to back puts it into Hard mode: ten percent more take and the GTA$100,000 Elite bonus
• Veterans alternate two approaches deliberately so every single run lands on Hard. Build the habit from run two

The reference layer: what is in the vault

• Cash: GTA$1,480,500 on a Normal repeat run, the most common draw
• Artwork: GTA$1,645,000, and the fastest to grab per second of vault time
• Gold: GTA$2,585,000, worth more and slowing you down while you haul it
• Diamonds: GTA$3,619,000, event weeks only, and the reason the reroll loop exists
• Hard mode adds 10% to all of it, and since July 2026 the first finale after each Thursday reset pays substantially boosted values, with tracked first-of-week diamonds runs around GTA$4.28 million Normal and GTA$4.71 million Hard before cuts

The cuts maths, worked

Gross is not what you keep. On a Hard diamonds run at GTA$3,619,000, Lester removes his 5%, GTA$180,950, leaving about GTA$3.44 million; your three support crew take their percentages, damage taken subtracts directly, and the players split the rest by the board percentages with nobody below the guaranteed 15% minimum. Tracked two-player runs commonly land between GTA$400,000 and GTA$800,000 each on ordinary targets and considerably more on a clean first-of-week gold or diamonds run. The Elite Challenge adds GTA$50,000 on Normal and GTA$100,000 on Hard.

Finding a crew

The finale will not start without a second player, so crew-finding is part of this heist, and GTA Online has no crossplay, so that crew shares your platform. That is exactly what the SixCentral Heist Finder is for: pick the Diamond Casino Heist on the board, one tap to join, and the host gets every gamertag. It runs in our Discord, which opens from your account page, and the online desk lives at sixcentral.co.uk/online.

Reroll until the vault deserves you, take Avi, drive the Stockade like you belong there, and alternate approaches for permanent Hard. Six and a half years on, the Diamond still has not been beaten for a night out.