[HN Gopher] A Gambler Who Beat Roulette
___________________________________________________________________
A Gambler Who Beat Roulette
Author : cyanbane
Score : 150 points
Date : 2023-04-06 18:33 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| A couple of notes from my own experience in casino hacking fun:
|
| 1. if they spot you singularly winning way too hard, they will
| cut you off 2. if you can distribute the wins wide enough between
| enough individuals you might get away with it
|
| There ARE exploits and you can get away with them. People find
| them pretty regularly and the ones who get away with it are
| really organized.
|
| My favorites over the past years: Weak PRNG in the Buffalo slot
| machines [1], and people cleaning that, and the guy who figured
| out an exploit in the game king brand video poker machines [2] -
| One got away with it and the other didn't, it's worth being aware
| of how.
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/russians-engineer-brilliant-
| sl...
|
| [2] https://www.wired.com/2013/05/game-king/
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| "Got away with it" would imply they committed an elaborate
| scheme. It sounds like they played the game with a strategy and
| never broke any rules. Except the cardinal one that the House
| always wins.
| whichfawkes wrote:
| Getting away with it in this case just means "not being
| cheated by the casino".
|
| They're big enough to cheat you using violence or even the
| judicial system, so if you do this you're strategizing
| against that as much as you are strategizing to win the
| actual game.
| kraussvonespy wrote:
| The article mentioned the book The Eudaemonic Pie by Thomas Bass.
| This was recommended to me back in the late 80s by my favorite
| professor in undergrad. It is quite good, a rare book that I go
| back and read every year or two.
| oxfeed65261 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/7CmWl
| hkmaxpro wrote:
| Similar but different story:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30489022
|
| > Though roulette was considered by many to be purely a game of
| chance, Jarecki was convinced that it could be "beat."
|
| > He noticed that at the end of each night, casinos would replace
| cards and dice with fresh sets -- but the expensive roulette
| wheels went untouched and often stayed in service for decades
| before being replaced.
|
| > Like any other machine, these wheels acquired wear and tear.
| Jarecki began to suspect that tiny defects -- chips, dents,
| scratches, unlevel surfaces -- might cause certain wheels to land
| on certain numbers more frequently than randomocity prescribed.
| mhb wrote:
| randomocity :)
| MrMember wrote:
| >Tosa, Marjanovic and Pilisi returned to the Ritz at 10 that
| night, as promised. This time they were led to a private room
| where a squad from the London Metropolitan Police was waiting. An
| officer politely informed them they were under arrest on
| suspicion of "deception" and led them away to be interviewed at a
| nearby police station. Once the gamblers were out of earshot,
| Wootten urged the cops to check their shoes and clothes for
| hidden devices.
|
| I haven't finished the whole article yet but this part stood out
| to me. The casino had no real evidence they were cheating, just a
| vague suspicion that since they were winning at roulette the only
| possible explanation was that they were using some electronic
| device to cheat. With that vague suspicion they had the gamblers
| arrested and all of their electronic devices searched. After
| nothing was found their winnings were seized and payouts from the
| casino frozen. Again, at this point there is no evidence that
| they cheated.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| This reminds me of the cheating scandal in chess. They don't
| actually have any proof of cheating beyond it being
| statistically near-impossible for Niemann to play such
| "perfect" games.
| mrandish wrote:
| You're assuming there's some basic aspect of "fairness" between
| the casino and the player. The innate unfairness of the
| statistical odds is obvious of course, but most people assume
| if someone _could_ somehow magically overcome the odds to win
| consistently without breaking any rules they 'd be allowed to
| do so. While that's a reasonable assumption, and one casinos
| encourage, it's not the reality. A friend of mine who worked at
| a high-level in casino management once told me, "There are many
| documented rules but they are all governed by one unwritten
| rule: the house must always win in the long-run."
|
| The net effect is that if you start to win meaningful amounts
| on a consistent basis, 'fairly' or not, the casino will simply
| ban you from playing. Players misunderstand the relationship
| between players and the house. Casinos however are under no
| illusions. The role of players, in the aggregate and over time,
| is _only_ to lose. If you don 't fulfill your role they won't
| let you play. Beating the house in the long-run isn't possible
| because casinos have no interest in losing.
|
| Hypothetically, if you were somehow able to consistently win
| meaningful amounts at casino gambling games through some kind
| of fictional magic or psychic ability which could not be
| countered, the only way you'd be able to monetize that ability
| would be to either: 1) Win such small amounts you remain
| unnoticed (probably less than a couple thousand dollars a
| week), or 2) Continually travel the world seeking out new
| casinos that haven't yet banned you. As the article shows,
| casinos work together and word spreads quickly so neither
| option is very appealing. If you had such magical powers it
| would be dumb to monetize playing gambling games against
| casinos. Much better to either play games against other players
| or to pursue large open markets like stocks and commodities.
| Even then you'd have to put up with constant investigations by
| the SEC suspecting insider trading. You'd also need to
| meticulously pay all taxes and comply with every regulation due
| to all the attention you'd attract. It would probably be a good
| idea to create your own 'explanation' by operating as a hedge
| fund, investing in creating a large research department and
| hire a bunch of quants to devise proprietary algorithms. Even
| then, it would be smart to never "win" too much more than the
| best legit hedge funds. If you're too much of an outlier for
| too long, some people will take increasingly extreme measures
| to determine your "secret."
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| The article says they generally bet "neighbors" bets which
| cover 5 out of 37 numbers. It also says they had win streaks of
| as many as 13 in a row. The odds of that happening randomly are
| (5/37)^13, or 5 in 1 trillion. Casino security was certainly
| correct that this was not normal play.
|
| I don't know why they made so many small bets. They should have
| come in, made like 3 huge bets, and walked out.
| GCA10 wrote:
| I think the article actually says something slightly
| different -- which changes the math a lot.
|
| Yes, they placed these "neighbors" bets, but it sounds as if
| they had several of them in motion on each spin. If they're
| covering an average of three clusters per spin, our random
| odds become (15/37)^13, which is approximately 1:125,000.
| Still plenty of grounds for suspicion, but if the casino is
| open for action all year and hosting 1000 or more roulette
| betting episodes a night (i.e. 13 spins/player), something
| this improbable SHOULD happen several times a year.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Fair play is for loosers. No gambling enterprise actually
| gambles. If you can grease the wheels to have police on speed
| dial when someone plays too well for your liking, you do.
| QIYGT wrote:
| Indeed the police and courts exist mostly to help rich people
| keep their money.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Casinos are pretty pathetic. They claim to run an honest game,
| and if you lose, they are totally fine with keeping your money.
| But, if you consistently win, and it looks even slightly
| statistically improbable, the casino turns into a crybaby
| health insurance adjuster, going over the rules/law with a
| magnifying glass to find something, anything that lets them
| avoid payment. At worst, the ones run by less savory
| organizations resort to threats and violence.
| eloisant wrote:
| More concerning is that the police and judges will follow on
| the casino's requests.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Sad because they know who pays their bills, however
| indirectly, yet it's the little people getting hurt who
| need protection of the courts the most.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Siding with capital is par for the course for LE and courts
| though.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Casinos have never claimed to run an honest game. It's common
| knowledge that the odds are always in favor of the house with
| the exception of maybe blackjack where the odds can
| theoretically be equal. I played roulette for hours at the
| Venetian with family a few weeks ago and we basically walked
| away with a ton of money, we got lucky, but they didn't say a
| word to us, in fact they were friendly to us and took care of
| us the entire time. Maybe play at a better Casino?
| reducesuffering wrote:
| > exception of maybe blackjack where the odds can
| theoretically be equal
|
| Better than equal. Most Blackjack is -0.6% EV playing basic
| strategy, but with counting, each true count is an extra
| ~0.5% of EV, leading to big betting on high count hands
| with EV of 1-3%. Of course, that's why casinos kick out
| counters. They're literally "too good" at the game, and
| they don't want that.
| joshyeetbox wrote:
| I thought casinsos started using multiple decks (like 6)
| and auto shuffled between games now so that counting was
| pretty much impossible?
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Multiple decks, like 6, is what I mean by "most
| blackjack." Yes, the 6-deck shoe is shuffled after about
| 75% of those decks are played. There are certain casinos
| that have "continuous shuffling machines" that shuffle
| every hand. Those are impossible to count, but rare.
|
| 6 decks, as opposed to 1 or 2, does make counting less
| accurate. But ultimately everything I said previously
| applies. Those stats are based on the current common game
| of 3-2 Blackjack, H17, 6-deck shoe, no continuous
| shuffle, and double after split.
| koolba wrote:
| They do it with online sports betting as well. If you
| consistently win, you get blacklisted or limited in wager
| size.
| javajosh wrote:
| The pillars of society are based on the ordinary. When
| something extraordinary happens, it shakes those pillars and
| there will be a reaction whether or not it is just. And yes,
| casino operators are known for a level of self-restraint,
| basic decency and fairness roughly equivalent to pawn brokers
| and payday loan operators. Business is predatory when
| satisfying "customer demand" damages the person, you end up
| doing business with a bunch of damaged people, which
| justifies treating them harshly. It's the circle of life,
| where life is suffering.
| willcipriano wrote:
| I oppose efforts to legalize gambling not because I dislike
| gambling but I oppose the theft that we call legalized
| gambling.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| Interesting fact: As far as I am aware, it's illegal to
| gamble at the casino in Monte Carlo unless you are a
| foreigner (I.e. it is not legal for citizens of Monaco to
| gamble there). Probably because the country isn't actually
| bringing in any new money if locals gamble.
|
| There really is no reason to legalize gambling casinos. It
| is just an inefficient way of moving money around. It
| doesn't actually create new value for society as a whole.
| (Friendly poker games amongst friends and family with small
| pots are probably fine).
| IncRnd wrote:
| > Probably because the country isn't actually bringing in
| any new money if locals gamble.
|
| That's almost certainly not the reason. They want the
| revenue but not the societal ills from gamblers.
| beardedetim wrote:
| > There really is no reason to legalize gambling casinos.
|
| Why should the government outlaw my ability to give my
| money away however I want to? If I want to go put all my
| money on black because it's fun to me, why should that be
| illegal?
| bagels wrote:
| There's an argument that the casino provides
| entertainment/thrill in exchange for money. I think your
| argument could be applied to most money spent on
| entertainment if you don't consider it to be creating
| "new value for society as a whole"
| [deleted]
| btilly wrote:
| Lots of places have such rules, either officially or
| unofficially.
|
| In Korea, by law you have to prove you're a foreigner. In
| the Bahamas it is legal for the locals to bet, but the
| casinos kick them out. They've had enough experiences of
| a guy coming in on payday, losing his money, then his
| wife coming in the next day with a baseball bat to
| destroy the machine that took the money. Don't want any
| more.
| schoen wrote:
| In Singapore, local residents have to pay an expensive
| annual fee to the government in order to be allowed to
| gamble in casinos, while foreigners may do so for free.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" There really is no reason to legalize gambling
| casinos."_
|
| When you make gambling illegal you just drive it
| underground and fund organized crime, with all the
| additional crime and corruption that brings with it.
|
| The arguments against making gambling illegal are similar
| to many of the arguments against making drugs and
| prostitution illegal, such as consenting adults should be
| free to do what they want as long as it doesn't harm
| anyone else.
| Arrath wrote:
| I'd like if we could find a middle ground between
| gambling prohibition and ads for gambling right from your
| phone in every break of sports broadcasts as the
| situation we're quickly finding ourselves in.
| GCA10 wrote:
| Slightly off topic, but the profusion of weird prop bets
| on sports is a path toward quiet match fixing that we may
| never be able to roll back. I'm seeing this in e-sports
| already, where players can still try hard to win but also
| "accommodate" gamblers who are betting on odd metrics
| like over/under on total kills, etc.
| JackFr wrote:
| > Consenting adults should be free to do what they want
| as long as it doesn't harm anyone else.
|
| So long minimum wage and workplace safety laws, welcome
| back indentured servitude.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The same theft is present in the lotteries and those are
| more often than not national affairs with the common pot as
| the beneficiary. Have you ever seen a wealthy person play
| the lottery?
| bombcar wrote:
| Lotteries don't even have the semblance of legitimacy
| that allowing church bingo parlors does; they're
| exclusively an optional tax on the poorest members of
| society. Then again, so many of our sin taxes are.
| IncRnd wrote:
| From "Who is buying Powerball and Mega Millions tickets?"
| [1]
|
| > The general belief is that poorer Americans buy lottery
| tickets more often than wealthier ones. But that's not
| quite true.
|
| > The survey showed the most frequent lottery players
| earn between $36,000 and $89,999. About 56% of that group
| bought tickets in the last year. Fewer of those making
| under $36,000 bought tickets, only 40%. About 53% who
| make above $90,000 bought a ticket.
|
| [1] https://money.cnn.com/2018/01/06/news/powerball-mega-
| million...
| bombcar wrote:
| Keep reading:
|
| >But other studies have shown that when lower income
| players do buy tickets, they spend far more money on
| lottery tickets than wealthier players. A study published
| in the Journal of Gambling Studies found that those in
| the bottom fifth of income spent the most on lottery
| tickets, and more than twice as much as the richest
| lottery players - $433 a year vs. $193 a year.
|
| Most everyone buys a Powerball ticket when it hits a cool
| billion or whatever it is; but that's not the vast
| majority of lottery enjoyers.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Keep reading:
|
| > The poorer lottery players also buy far more of the
| lower prize games, such as scratch-off instant games
| which account for the majority of lottery sales.
|
| > The richer buyers are buying the multi-state jackpot
| games such as Powerball and Mega Millions. And the
| wealthier players are likely to be drawn in by the big
| jackpot prizes like those being offered right now by both
| Powerball and Mega Millions.
|
| The lotteries are not exclusively taxing the poorest
| members of society, which is what you originally claimed.
| secabeen wrote:
| The most well-known wealthy lottery winner was Jack
| Whittaker. His life went downhill after winning, largely
| due to the winnings and the notoriety.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Whittaker_%28lottery_w
| inn...
| toast0 wrote:
| > Have you ever seen a wealthy person play the lottery?
|
| I am one. Although, I only enter once per drawing, and
| only when the pot is large enough that I can pretend it's
| +EV.
|
| There's a lot of games where I can't even pretend it's
| even close to reasonable odds, and I don't get much
| entertainment, so I'll leave those alone.
|
| I do think casinos tend to be regulated to pay back a way
| higher % than lotteries though.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That jumped out at me too. You could lose 500K in a casino and
| nobody would bat an eye but win 500K and suddenly the police is
| involved and the casino refuses to pay out. Personally I think
| if they can't prove that you are cheating that you should be
| allowed to continue to play _as long as you feel like_ and the
| casino stays afloat. What 's good for the goose should be good
| for the gander. The police automatically siding with the casino
| and _arresting_ people without any proof or even reasonable
| suspicion of wrongdoing other than the say so of a party that
| clearly isn 't impartial is ridiculous.
| jackmott wrote:
| [dead]
| lelanthran wrote:
| > That jumped out at me too. You could lose 500K in a casino
| and nobody would bat an eye but win 500K and suddenly the
| police is involved and the casino refuses to pay out.
|
| You have to win small. As another poster put it below, the
| role of the player is to lose.
|
| Anecdotally, I used to travel to a coastal city 650km away
| every two weeks for around 5 years. My Saturday afternoons
| during this time were usually free and I was bored. For two
| months I spent those Saturday afternoons (til around
| midnight) sitting in the casino noting the frequency of each
| pie slice of the wheel on as many different roulette tables
| that I could simultaneously view (between 6 and 8 at a time).
|
| Divide the wheel into 5 pie slices (one will be a different
| size from the rest) and make 5 columns on a small page - one
| for each pie slice. Each time that slice "wins" (no matter
| what the number is) simply make a checkmark in that column.
| Over time this forms a histogram. If any one of those columns
| is an outlier, then that wheel is biased.
|
| I found _one_ biased wheel (casino had maybe 14 tables in
| total?), which remained unfixed and remained biased for the
| next 13 months or so, and I repeatedly just placed small bets
| on all numbers in that slice that was biased.
|
| I made a respectable amount of money (about 40k ZAR) over 13
| months.
|
| I have no illusions that had I been placing maximum bets on
| each spin, I'd have been escorted out of the casino after the
| first visit.
| mhb wrote:
| FYI: 40K ZAR = ~$2,000
| grecy wrote:
| > _You could lose 500K in a casino and nobody would bat an
| eye but win 500K and suddenly the police is involved_
|
| Yes, the Police exist as the private military of the rich.
|
| Their job is literally to protect the assets of the rich, and
| that's exactly what they will do whenever you "get one over"
| the rich.
| elihu wrote:
| > Personally I think if they can't prove that you are
| cheating that you should be allowed to continue to play as
| long as you feel like and the casino stays afloat.
|
| I think it should be within the casinos rights to decline to
| continue to take bets when something is happening that they
| don't understand and is far outside of their expectations of
| statistical probability.
|
| To quote Buster Scruggs: "Can't no one compel another man to
| engage in recreation."
|
| I do think they should be obligated to honor the bets they
| actually made, though.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I'm sure if you did the maths you'd find that the casino
| winning >$500k from a particular set of games has a high
| chance of occuring whereas the probability that the punter
| wins 500k legitimately is almost zero.
|
| It's like those Minecraft speedruns; you can't necessarily
| prove it's false (at that point), but if there's a
| 1/10,000,000,000 chance that an outcome is achieved
| legitimately, what would you expect them to do?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Except of course that in this case it _was_ legitimately,
| and the chance was substantially better than that.
| aklein wrote:
| It wasn't that they won; the article explains that plenty of
| people walk out with designer bags full of money. It's that
| these folks won in a statistically hugely unlikely way, and
| that alone is pretty damning evidence that something is off.
| It's usually just a matter of finding the smoking gun.
| Although it's unpleasant that the casino and police assumed
| it was cheating and not a defect in the game itself (in what
| turns out to be a naive and self-delusional assumption), is
| that really that surprising or ridiculous a position to take?
| The catch 22 is the accused cannot defend themselves without
| divulging their secrets.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > It wasn't that they won;
|
| Of course it was! If they had lost using the same method
| there would have been no issue.
|
| > It's that these folks won in a statistically hugely
| unlikely way, and that alone is pretty damning evidence
| that something is off.
|
| That's the casino's problem though, not law enforcement.
| Statistically unlikely equates 'we haven't seen this
| before' and that should not be enough reason to arrest
| people. The police should not be in the business of
| protecting the revenue streams of gambling installation
| operators. There should be some symmetry here, if the
| casino is a-ok with making money on gamblers then they
| should take their lumps when the situation is - temporarily
| - reversed. LE has no business here, tough luck they should
| have run a business where the flow is one way by design
| instead of one with a pretend two way flow.
|
| > The catch 22 is the accused cannot defend themselves
| without divulging their secrets.
|
| Which is precisely why the police has no business doing
| this. The burden of proof with respect to cheating is on
| the casino, and until they have something solid nobody
| should be arrested. That's the police acting unilaterally
| on behalf of one party. A more balanced response would have
| been to help the players cash their checks, after all the
| casino did not object to the reverse when the funds were
| deposited. It's fraud by the casino until proven otherwise.
| Nevermark wrote:
| This isn't subjective.
|
| If I gamble once, and only once, with a lot of money at
| very high odds, I might get very lucky and win a fortune.
|
| But despite small odds of a massive pay out, the odds
| would have been very low, but not infinitesimal.
|
| Whereas, if I consistently win much more than I lose over
| many bets, across seversl visits, and a group of people
| can do this, the odds of that happening rapidly become
| virtually zero.
|
| Or in mathematical or scientific terms, confidence that
| pure chance is being broken far, far, far exceeds a
| 6-sigma threshold. It's proven.
|
| But legal proofs, for making judicial decisions of guilt
| or culpability, usually require an explanation of how it
| was done.
| majormajor wrote:
| Six standard deviations is 1 in 2 billion per Wikipedia
| here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%
| 9399.7_rul....
|
| Ok that's pretty crazy, let's lower it a notch, throw out
| the sigmas, just talk about 1-in-hundreds-of-millions
| odds.
|
| The article doesn't actually list the odds of their
| winning streak, but I'd wager a casino is gonna be
| suspicious well before the "one in a hundred million"
| level of streak.
|
| Powerball can get there, e.g. 1-in-292M per here
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2022/nov/08/powerball-dr...
|
| So how many bets across how many visits does it actually
| take for it to be "proven"? Like, people can win
| powerball, someone may have had that 1-in-300-million
| casino run too. If they're independent events, you expect
| it to happen randomly _eventually_! Some poor lucky
| bastard will probably face a lot of questions one day.
|
| I dunno, I guess if you want to win a fortune gambling,
| do it all in one bet, since getting lucky all at once vs
| getting less-lucky-but-for-a-longer-time is gonna attract
| a lot of scrutiny. ;)
|
| (I kinda suspect, though, that a lot of people who were
| down the path of that 1-in-300M luck playing roulette
| would stop while they're ahead at some point. If you hit
| on 00 in roulette three times in a row do you go for a
| fourth?)
| compiler-guy wrote:
| > That's the casino's problem though, not law
| enforcement.
|
| In most jurisdictions where gambling is legal, it is
| carefully regulated and those regulations include not
| cheating.
|
| Which does make it a law enforcement issue.
|
| In places where cheating is not a law enforcement issue,
| it is a mafia-enforcement issue, which is even worse.
| lancesells wrote:
| > The police should not be in the business of protecting
| the revenue streams of gambling installation operators.
|
| What about in something like betting on a boxing match
| and having the fighter throw the fight? Is that the
| casino's problem too?
|
| If you're ok with someone cheating then it all makes
| complete sense what you're saying. If you're not then
| someone has to investigate. Do you really want the casino
| being law enforcement for anyone they find suspicious?
| I'm not on the casino's side at all but there's a big
| grey area here.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's the casino here that's cheating, and the casino that
| doesn't know its own business well enough to spot the
| flaws that are exposed. Winners have no obligation to
| explain how they won just as the casino isn't going to
| tell the losers to stop losing.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| Google Phil Ivey Crockfords. This case isn't that bad because
| the casino let them have the winnings. Ivey didn't get his
| winnings, sued them and still lost because the court
| concluded he was "dishonest". Iirc, all that happened was
| that there was an imperfection in how certain cards were
| printed, and Ivey was a stooge for a Chinese woman (Ivey is a
| poker player who is known to gamble huge) who had worked out
| this edge.
|
| The same is also true with sports betting in the UK. Because
| sportsbooks are so bad at managing risk in the UK, they will
| shut down winning accounts (unlike in Asia where the huge
| books actually winning accounts to improve their line and
| make more money) and use the whole range of AML/consumer
| protection rules to tilt the odds in their favour.
|
| The reality is that casinos can't beat that minority of
| customers that are smarter than them...so they cheat.
| japoco wrote:
| >unlike in Asia where the huge books actually winning
| accounts to improve their line and make more money
|
| This is true but it should have a big footnote.
| Disregarding Asian bookmakers that like to void winning
| bets from time to time for no apparent reason, Pinnacle,
| which is the book you're referring to, lets winning players
| bet at such low limits that making money off them is an
| excruciating process.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| I was more thinking of SBO. They do have low limits on
| unpopular events, but syndicates are doing $1m/match with
| them on soccer...they are prepared to take risk.
|
| You have to understand that the limit is a function of
| the volume they take after you set their line. That is
| how the economy works. Your profit is paid out of their
| profit from squares after the line is set. So if they
| aren't doing volume after the line moves, then they are
| just going to leave the limit.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Normally they just ask you leave and/or ban you. But they
| should still be paying out any winnings if they cant prove
| any wrongdoing.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Wait until you read about the Native American casinos. They'll
| straight up not pay if you win without cheating.
| rdtsc wrote:
| Just think of the casino as the mafia who also own or are
| friends with the law enforcement. Many really do have that
| connection. Then it makes sense. It's pointless to seek
| fairness or point out unfairness. It's naive to assume there is
| any.
| tzs wrote:
| The "Roulette Assault" episode of the old History Channel series
| "Breaking Vegas" covers another way to beat roulette but without
| requiring computers or communications devices in the casino or
| timing anything. Archive.org has a copy of that episode [1].
|
| A family went to casinos around Europe and observed the roulette
| wheels, keeping extensive records on where the ball landed. They
| were not covert about it. They'd just openly write down the
| results.
|
| You might think casinos would not allow that, but actually they
| love people who do things like that. A person taking notes is a
| person who thinks they can invent a system to beat the casino,
| and those people often lose a lot of money before giving up.
|
| The family took all that data and analyzed it to find wheels that
| had slight consistent biases that were big enough that bets based
| on them would come out ahead long term. They then went around
| making those bets and won long term.
|
| The family members had spent so much time looking at wheels that
| they could recognize individual wheels by things like scratches
| and discolorations and other ordinary visible wear and tear, so
| even if a casino moved a wheel the family would recognize it and
| know which bets to place.
|
| There are a couple other "Breaking Vegas" episodes I remember as
| standing out.
|
| "Ultimate Cheat" [2] is about another way to win at roulette, but
| this one involved a team cheating on the bets using a twist on an
| old cheating method.
|
| There's an old way to cheat on bets where you place small bets
| that consist of a stack of minimal value chips. You adjust the
| stack so that the croupier cannot actually see the bottom chip.
| You and your teammates all do this.
|
| If one the bets wins you try to use sleight of hand to replace
| the stack with a stack that consists of minimal value chips
| except for a high value bottom chip, still arranged so the bottom
| chip is not visible to the croupier. Your teammates can help by
| trying to distract the croupier so your sleight of hand won't be
| spotted.
|
| When the croupier goes to your winning bet you point out the
| amount is wrong and point out the high value chip in the stack
| that the croupier missed.
|
| Casinos are on to that, and if they suspect at all that you are
| doing it before paying out they will go to the security tapes to
| make sure no one tried any sleight of hand on the winning stack.
|
| The team in this episode realized they could work this the other
| way. Instead of trying to retroactively raise the value of
| winning bets they could retroactively lower the value of losing
| bets.
|
| So now the first stack is a stack of low value chips with a high
| value chip on the bottom with the stack askew to hide the high
| value chip. If the bet wins no sleight of hand is needed. The
| high value chip is already in place. If the bet loses that's when
| they try sleight of hand to switch it for a stack with all low
| chips. That's easier than switching a winning stack because the
| croupier is paying attention to the winners.
|
| If the casino goes to the tape after a win no problem. The tape
| will show no tampering because there was none.
|
| The casino security people knew the team was up to something for
| quite a while and were scrutinizing every one of their wins and
| getting really annoyed and frustrated that they couldn't figure
| out what the heck was going on.
|
| "Counterfeit King" [3] was about counterfeit casino tokens.
| Manufacturers incorporate a variety of anti-counterfeiting
| measures in their token designs, but Louis Colavecchio was able
| to match them all. The only reason anyone knew there was
| counterfeiting going on was casinos were finding themselves
| gaining token. No one, including the token manufacturers, were
| able to figure out which tokens were genuine and which were
| Colavecchio's.
|
| [1] https://archive.org/details/breaking-
| vegas-s-1-e-10-roulette...
|
| [2] https://archive.org/details/breaking-
| vegas-s-1-e-01-ultimate...
|
| [3] https://archive.org/details/breaking-
| vegas-s-1-e-06-counterf...
| reducesuffering wrote:
| That story may be true, but it sounds very suspect. Advantage
| on a casino like that takes a lot of hands. And if you need to
| swap chips for many losing hands, that's going to require
| sleight of hand swaps like hundreds of times. I'd be very
| surprised a dealer doesn't catch any of those. And _then_ for
| the security team to watch footage of them playing for just 30
| minutes and not see any?
| mathgeek wrote:
| If you read the article to its conclusion, the biased wheel
| method is covered in some depth.
| tzs wrote:
| That seems to still be talking about making predictions after
| the ball is released. The biases remove enough randomness
| that an experienced human can predict sufficiently to get a
| slight advantage where the ball will end up the same way the
| earlier computers did.
|
| My recollection of the family in the "Breaking Vegas" episode
| is that they were not looking at the ball release and making
| predictions. They were taking their records of a large number
| of observed outcomes and then could come up with a list of
| bets to make when they later returned to the wheel.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Another interesting aspect I remember from the "Counterfeit
| King" story is that Rhode Island actually had no laws against
| this counterfeiting, so the way they ended up getting him was
| interesting too, they were only able to arrest him once he
| crossed state lines with the counterfeit chips, IIRC
| emdeedee wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230406203734/https://www.bloom...
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Article starts out lame but then gets very good. Worth reading
| all the way through. In the 1980s some nerds figured out how to
| use hidden computers to beat roulette, by placing bets after the
| ball is already spinning and the computer can time its movement
| to predict (nowhere near perfectly, but well enough to have a
| statistical edge over the house) where it will land. There is a
| fantastic book about the adventure, called "The Eudaemonic Pie".
| The guys in the article managed to do the same thing without
| computers, and it drove the casino detective nuts.
|
| If you like the article, the book is also great.
| staringback wrote:
| I'm not expert on casinos, but placing a bet after the ball
| starts spinning just sounds wrong? Why would casinos ever allow
| that?
| nsxwolf wrote:
| The game would seem really boring if that's how it worked.
| There's an energy when the ball starts going that makes you
| want to bet.
| qup wrote:
| Because it wins them more money, until wearable PCs come on
| the scene.
| rrobukef wrote:
| It's probably because people would believe the dealer is
| cheater and throwing harder or softer in exactly the same
| way.
|
| Or it is so the casino can argue roulette is a game of skill
| instead of chance. But this would be paradoxical.
| davidktr wrote:
| from the article
|
| > There's one surefire way casinos could stop prediction:
| calling "no more bets" before the ball is in motion. But they
| won't. That would cut into profits by limiting the amount of
| play and deterring casual gamblers. Instead, the industry
| seems willing to pay a toll to a select few who know the
| secret, while trying to design out the flaws that make the
| game vulnerable.
| jfk13 wrote:
| To encourage more betting, in the excitement of the moment
| when the wheel is spinning one way, the ball is circling the
| other way, and the outcome is mere seconds away...
|
| Slow things down, require all bets to be placed before the
| croupier spins the wheel and throws the ball, and you'll have
| taken away some of the mystique and the adrenaline of betting
| on this bouncing, glittering thing that's happening _right
| now_ in front of your eyes, and some of the casual gamblers
| will get bored and walk off.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| How can customers be assured the casino isn't using a
| magnet or some other cheating device?
| vuln wrote:
| Gambling regulations and board certify / audit these
| machines / tables, etc?
| pmoriarty wrote:
| How can the consumer have confidence in any of those?
| vuln wrote:
| How do consumers have any confidence in the FAA, EPA,
| FDA, or any other entity that performs checks and
| balances?
| pmoriarty wrote:
| At least with the FDA I'm eating food and taking
| medicines that doesn't make me or the people around me
| sick all the time (as they did before the founding of the
| FDA).
|
| With casinos it's the opposite. Their customers regularly
| lose their shirts. Maybe the games aren't rigged, maybe
| they are, as someone who regularly loses (as most
| gamblers do), they might as well be rigged and I would
| not be surprised if there was regulatory capture and the
| consumer would have no way to know.
| vkou wrote:
| By not gambling.
| QIYGT wrote:
| Why would the casino need that, when they can have
| anybody who wins arrested?
| mrandish wrote:
| Having to wait for all bets to be placed before starting
| the spin would also reduce the average number of spins per
| hour which would reduce the casino's profit per table-hour.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The article confirms this:
|
| > There's one surefire way casinos could stop prediction:
| calling "no more bets" before the ball is in motion. But
| they won't. That would cut into profits by limiting the
| amount of play and deterring casual gamblers.
| gtoubassi wrote:
| +1 the book is entertaining (esp for engineers). Also was
| released under the title "The Newtonian Casino".
| bradreaves2 wrote:
| Claude Shannon[1] claims he did something similar in the early
| 60's, proving it worked in Vegas. He and his collaborator Ed
| Thorpe quit playing well before the legitimate businessmen who
| ran the casinos could realize they were winning too much and
| have a friendly chat with them about it.
|
| For more, see: https://boingboing.net/2017/07/27/wearable-
| computing.html
|
| [1] If the name doesn't ring a bell, he discovered that Boolean
| logic could be used to analyze and design electric switching
| circuits -- as a Master's thesis. He went on to a storied
| career at Bell Labs where he invented Information Theory.
| ackbar03 wrote:
| The story was about Claude Shannon. And Ed Thorpe was the
| father of modern day hedge funds or something
| deeel wrote:
| There is a good interview with Thorp around his quantitive
| strategy he developed after beating Las Vegas:
| https://thunderclapresearch.com/a-conversaation-with-ed-
| thor...
| llamataboot wrote:
| In a previous life as an advantage gambler (there are always
| edges somewhere, but you better know you actually have one and
| know why you know and your risk of ruin etc), I would say that
| "how can we keep exploiting this below the radar" is as common of
| a discussion topic as "what is there to exploit"
|
| Card counting is a perfect example - you absolutely _can_ count
| cards in the right type of blackjack, and you absolutely _can_
| get an edge and casinos absolutely know this and can ban you no
| questions asked if you are tagged as an advantage gambler.
|
| Always rubs me a bit the wrong way actually, given that by its
| very nature the casino is advantage gambling 99% of the time
| whether you know it or not...
| marktangotango wrote:
| I'll post this here if anyone has noticed something similar.
| There's a state lotto game that I'm convinced uses at least two
| different sets of balls, and one set has a distinct weight
| imbalance such that draws using the set have a bias. A bias
| such that picking numbers with a 15-20 number gap would have
| significantly better odds of winning.
|
| I'm not a statistician though and analyzing historic draws is
| beyond my ability.
| urs wrote:
| This was neat. It reminded me of a similar story in poker history
| - Stu Ungar. Stu was a phenomenal player who won the World Series
| of Poker (WSOP) Main Event three times, in 1980, 1981, and 1997.
| Like Tosa, Stu had an uncanny ability to read his opponents and
| seemingly predict their moves.
|
| Similar to Tosa, people questioned Ungar's poker prowess as to
| whether he was cheating or not (it's a pretty deep conspiracy
| rabbit hole that you can go down if you'd like). People wondered
| if he had some secret method for reading his opponents -- like
| whether his blue glasses were letting him read marked cards, but
| it turned out to be like Tosa, he was a product of pretty
| deliberate and intense practice.
|
| In both cases, it's a weird example of humans being exceptional
| at pattern matching in ways you almost can't imagine after
| deliberate practice.
|
| Ungar is most famous for his WSOP win calling down with a ten
| high to win.
|
| I think a fascinating aspect to all of this is the other idea in
| any edge based game where nearly all great players will start on
| a winning streak and how incredibly difficult it is to discern
| whether you are lucky or good (there's a small chapter in "The
| Signal and the Noise" about that specifically with poker
| players).
| j0hnyl wrote:
| There are also people that spend hours every day practicing
| throwing dice on replica craps tables to gain a slight edge.
| nessus42 wrote:
| My uncle was a professional gambler and did well at it. At first
| he counted cards playing Blackjack, but eventually was banned
| from most casinos where it was actually possible to win at
| Blackjack. (Casinos in Atlantic City aren't allowed to ban card
| counters, so they use huge decks and shuffle frequently to make
| winning via card counting infeasible.)
|
| He mostly switched at some point to betting on sports. He
| arbitraged the odds that the bookies used compared to odds that
| were apparently more accurate, probabilistically.
|
| I asked him how he could possibly have a better sense of the
| probabilities than the bookies, whose job it is to get this
| right. He replied that the bookies don't set the odds based on
| probabilities, but rather just so that they have an equal amount
| of money on both possible outcomes, and therefore they would
| always make money no matter what.
|
| So the odds that the bookies used were often not good measures of
| the actually probabilities, but rather often more a measure of
| public sentiment. And he could take advantage of this difference.
| htrp wrote:
| if these are the people i think they are, they practiced a ton to
| train themselves to be able to identify the underlying physical
| aspects, in effect memorizing how to do everything the computer
| would nominally do.
|
| if you know wheel rpm plus an estimate of the speed the croupier
| throws the ball, you can get a pretty good physics sim of where
| the ball lands.
| zamnos wrote:
| There's a similar urban legend about craps. That with enough
| practice, you can get good enough at throwing the dice at the
| exact right place to get, again, not a visible advantage, but a
| just _ever_ so slightly higher statistical advantage. Sounds
| impossible, but looking at the level of skill a world class
| athlete has encourages me to believe in this urban legend.
| nestorD wrote:
| There are trick shot with dices that will get you what you
| want. I have seen retired cheaters (real ones, not magicians
| pretending to be ones) use them and consistently get the
| number they want (requirement to bounce on surfaces make
| things harder but not impossible).
| j0hnyl wrote:
| it's not about getting the number you want, it's about not
| getting just two numbers.
| spaceguillotine wrote:
| this is why the dice have to hit the back wall and bounce
| back, to help edge it back in the house's favor with skilled
| throws. House always finds a way to get back their advantage
| but once you figure something out, you get cut off.
| bombcar wrote:
| Like many urban legends, there's probably some truth -
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/bn3j44/dice-control-
| dominic-... digs into it.
|
| Card counting is well known and casinos encourage it, because
| MOST people can't do it well enough, and they shuffle often
| enough.
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