>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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
If a gambler consistently loses much more than they win, in a way that the odds of it happening are almost zero, will police show up and arrest someone from the casino?
There may be an investigation, but I'd be surprised if anyone is arrested before hard evidence of rigging a game is found.
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.
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?)
There was a lot suggestive about this group, but that includes a lot of subjective factors.
It's the pure math side I think is fun, because I find examples of people getting tricked by confidence intervals into developing blindspots to the randomness, and substituting "proof" for "very unlikely" fascinating. Comes from working in a lot of companies with ... sloppy ... methodology for their AB tests.
If you go to a casino and win 20 straight coin flips [or the equivalent in roulette or craps] don't you think they'd be pretty damn sure you cheated somehow?
> 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.
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.
And in this case, without proof, the winners did get paid. The police and internal investigation did not result in any definitive proof, thus the seizure of funds was unjustified and soon released.
As far as protecting casino revenue, casinos have a complicated arrangement with governments but in most jurisdictions the reason they are legal is to pay hefty taxes on gaming revenue (also normal income tax, separately). Thus the police are, when investigating similar claims, protecting government revenue. The casino is just the conduit to generating that revenue.
> 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.
A casino can ask you to leave for any reason or no reason at all. Fifteen years ago or thereabouts I was asked to leave the roulette table (actually, all casinos owned by the same company). I won 12 times in a row. Not big money at all. Still, they didn’t like that.
What they said was “You are done for the night at our casinos. You are welcome to return tomorrow.”
They were very nice about it and I had no issue with it at all. It’s their house.
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?
happens so much in many other types scenarios they like to think they are just interviewers and let the judges determine guilt they're power is beyond measure causing systemic effects in the entire system. i think the individual officer know this to an extent better then anyone.. so best not give off any body language avoid speaking at all costs because all are parasites feeding off the energy from all the pain and turmoil caused. then throw their hands up and be like not my problem double it pass to the next person.
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.
Is it "concerning" that police "follow up" investigating store robberies? And judges who convict the theives? How about passing bad checks? Eat-and-runs? A lot of criminal activity is perpetrated against corporations, they should be allowed recourse.
There might be a crime involved when someone wins at roulette, there might be negligence by the casino in maintaining their games. There might be luck. Some people do win hundreds of millions of dollars on a $2 lottery ticket.
The police where I live do not follow up investigating store robberies, they do not follow up on people who pass bad checks, and they definitely do not follow up on eat and runs. More often than not they will answer the phone when someone calls 911, but not much more often than not.
So yes, the idea that the police seem to be at the beck and call of the casinos to detain people with no hard evidence that any crime at all has actually been committed is concerning. At least let us know what phone number they are calling that the police actually pay attention to.
> There might be a crime involved when someone wins at roulette
Exactly. And so, the police investigated. When they determined there wasn't a crime (or at least had no proof or evidence of one), they released the accused and required the casino to pay them their full winnings.
Your "exactly" was wrong, because you're using a different meaning of "might be" than the person who wrote the quote, and given the childish "you said it" reply it seems like you did that on purpose.
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).
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.
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.
The money collected from exclusion fees is quite large, 100s of millions in some cases in a year. The very fact that the collections are so big points to a possible fact that exclusion fees are not a deterrent or stop/reduce locals from gambling.
"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.
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.
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.
I think banning of advertising on various things is entirely reasonable approach. Like in Europe prescription drugs can not be advertised to consumers. And I think that is sensible.
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"
> 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?
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?
Look, when the lump sum jackpot is greater than cost to play * number of possible selections, and I assume that only I will win, then it's a good move to play. The trick is not looking at the financially nonsense sum of payments advertised total. Anyone who was taken business finance knows you can't add a dollar today with a dollar in a year; they're not the same unit; but it makes a better advertised number, so there you go.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices” - Adam Smith
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?
> 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.
Counting works fine with 6 decks. And they don't shuffle after each hand - that would slow down the game so that not as many hands will get played.
Counting works but the way to profit from it is easily detected. You have to bet big when the count is favorable, and a casino will see that and stop you.
The MIT Blackjack Team beat this, with the strategy to have one player at the table who would bet small while counting cards, incurring the expected slight losses to the house edge, and signal a teammate to jump in and bet big (like $5k per hand) when the count was favorable. Casinos now know to stop this - if you walk up to a table and want to bet big, they will require you to wait for the next reshuffle (or just reshuffle immediately.)
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.
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."
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.
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.
You make small bets in a scheme like this to avoid the possibility of enough bad results wiping you out to zero so you have no capital to start again. Suppose you have $100 and can flip a coin to lose $1 on heads or win $2 on tails. The highest expected value per flip is to bet all $100. But you shouldn't do that since you have a 50-50 chance to go to zero and be unable to continue. You should bet something like 1/8 of your bankroll each time so you can survive a streak of bad luck.
I also wouldn't trust that "13 in a row" reporting from something like this. That's likely exaggerated or misreported or misremembered from an unreliable witness for the sake of the splashy story.
It seems like they had way better than even odds to win, but not perfect odds. Smaller bets smooth out your mistakes. Although when you are dialed in, maybe you can up the bet size? This is assuming the no outside assistance theory is valid.
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.
Was there any legal way to stop Tosa and the others from collecting their winnings? he asked. No, the officer said. There was no other option. The Ritz would have to pay up
Let's face it, lots of people get arrested because of suspicious activity, and that totally sucks and has real consequences, but this situation is not especially different than any other, because of influence from the casino. If a person is suspected of robbing a store, they'd likely be detained as well.
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.
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.
The report also contains lots of information on sudden skill jumps and other abnormalities in his logged chess history. It’s not a proof either, but at this level they make sure their decision is not based on a single set of coincidences.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
You can't, but, at least in Las Vegas, the machines are under fairly strict protocols. If a customer makes a complaint, things get sealed and impounded almost immediately.
And, besides, if it ever got out that a casino was doing that, it would basically fold up overnight.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
> Because Bliev and his cohorts had pulled their scam across state lines, federal authorities charged them with conspiracy to commit fraud.
> Bliev, Gudalov, and Larenov, all of whom are Russian citizens, eventually accepted plea bargains and were each sentenced to two years in federal prison, to be followed by deportation.
I don't quite follow here. What is fraudulent/illegal? Surely if you offer a pattern based game for money it should be legal to analyze and learn the pattern?
“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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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
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.
I found some roulette operators are so routined from the number of times they have spun the wheel and lauched the ball over the years that the movement of grabbing the ball, turning back and swinging the wheel, and launching the ball has become so engrained as to actually shift the odds.
It is not that you can predict the next number from the previous, but the next quadrant on the wheel given the previois outcome is not completely random.
The Eudaemonic Pie documents the true story of building wearable computers to input the initial ball speed and wheel speed in order to predict well better than average the final octant (one eight sector) of the ball on the wheel.
This took place in late 1970s | early 1980s.
It's much simpler with todays tech to do something similar with good camera feed and computer vision (rather than a spotter with clickers watching ball and wheel).
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.
That's something I should ask myself too when re-reading it. It has elements of: scientific heroism, science and technology ethics, the hacker mentality, and "science the shit out of it". The characters are quirky and interesting. It's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance in that it makes you think about some of the more interesting corners of technology ethics. The writing is gentle and affable with interesting tangents and rabbit holes. It's maybe more comfort than enlightenment after reading it so many times, but it's still thought provoking.
Since this is Hacker News and we have a lot of programmers here:
Imagine you wrote a checkout function that, because of some obscure bug, doesn't actually charge the person's credit card. Now, someone notices. Next thing, this person orders a half-million dollars of merchandise from your store before you notice the error on your end. Are you obligated to send it all to him?
In the article it is clear that he's been doing this for more than a decade. I think the main protagonist has probably profited tens of millions of dollars in direct winnings.
Why were they placing the bets after the wheel started spinning? The article does not provide any explanation for this. If the wheel is biased why couldn’t Tosa bet in advance?
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.