system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Ocean's Eleven(2001)]What was the point of the Lyman Zerga gag?

The overt purpose of Saul Bloom playing the character of Lyman Zerga was to get the door explosives (disguised as jewels) into the vault. In order to do this, he had to stay at Benedict's hotel, play a high roller long enough to get noticed, and con Benedict himself personally to get the man to allow a briefcase into his vault. And then he pulls a fake heart attack to distract people in the control room and get extracted. This is a tall order, and Saul performs it beautifully. 

HOWEVER, the reason to get the explosives into the vault is so that Yen can use them to blow the door... but he can do this because **he** gets smuggled into the vault in the money cart delivered by the Malloy brothers. Now, granted, there isn't all that much room in the money cart, but there's enough for Yen, and his air supply. Surely there is enough for four jewel-sized lumps of shaped explosives.  

If they can smuggle Yen in, why can't they smuggle the explosives in in the exact same cart? Why bother to go through the difficulty of convincing Benedict to allow Zerga's briefcase into the vault? Why allow mission-critical items to be completely out of the team's control? What if Benedict had said a flat "no" to Zerga's request? What if he'd said yes, but then put the briefcase in a locked cabinet in the vault, unaccessible without a key, etc? Was distracting the guards during Zerga's "heart attack" really the only way to get Linus into the elevator shaft (note how easily Ocean managed the same trick)? 

Could not the job have gone exactly the same, with fewer potential failure points, had they simply put the explosives in Yen's belt (exactly where he puts them when he retrieves them) and skipped Saul's role entirely?
gpt
Possible yes, but they took the risk for a couple reasons:

* Guard distraction when the video ticked over is vital.  There are a lot of things that could go wrong with the transfer, and they don't want anyone to notice while they're running troubleshooting.

* It got them a giant room at the hotel to stage out of without drawing attention.  A high roller with a big room and a bunch of people going in and out all day is less concerning to the hotel than pretending to be something like a bachelor party.

* They got Rusty into the control room as a backup plan.  If something went wrong, they now had two experienced con men in the center of it all ready to think on their feet.

* It gave them a chance to distract Benedict from his strict schedule right before the heist goes off.  The more frustrated Benedict is at an imposition from a demanding high roller, the less he's looking at possible people that may be trying to rob him.

* More moving parts and pieces.  While this raises the risk of not getting the explosives in, it provides more opportunities for 'fixing the script' as they go if they run into issues.  If the cart doesn't make it into the vault then they now lack a grease-man in the vault AND the explosives in the vault.  If one or the other make it in they can start improvising.