Benedict replaced the floor in the vault

The Bellagio vault robbed by Danny Ocean and crew is presented to Terry via a faked video. Terry realizes the fake later on when he realizes that the vault floor in the tape does not have the word "Bellagio" on it. He says

"Does it say 'Bellagio' on the vault floor?"
...
We had it installed Tuesday. The images we saw of those men robbing us was a tape.

If the crew had been staking out the casino, wouldn't they have seen workmen coming in and out? Replacing a floor is not a simple thing. There doesn't seem to be any mention of their awareness that the vault floor was changed, though one might think that that would scuttle their plans as it would be an obvious tip-off to someone paying attention to the taped version -- and they expected Terry to watch.

Did they know the floor would betray them? Were they counting on that, or did they just get lucky that Terry didn't notice the difference sooner? Did they account for the presence of workmen when scoping out the date and the access to the vault?

plot-explanation oceans-eleven

Best Answer

There is a lot of maintenance involved in running a casino, especially with an attached hotel. Workmen would be constantly doing jobs hotel-wide, and it would likely be impossible to monitor all that traffic.

The crew was focused primarily on the money, using a fake vault (based off blueprints they had received earlier) to trick Terry, who was watching the false feed, into thinking they were actively stealing from the vault.

Additionally, the line "it was installed on Tuesday" implies very recently i.e. within the past 7 days, meaning it would be fresh on the mind and easily missed in a high-stakes situation, where attention to detail was not the primary focus.

So if the crew was aware of the change in the vault, they would have to re-do the whole plan in order to accommodate for the change, meaning the plan would be delayed further, and allow for further chance of failure and discovery.