14 ms·

How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

299 points by troydavis 10y ago

mmastrac 10y ago
> But when Sun was arrested in 2007 for a $93,000 gambling debt owed to MGM, she vowed revenge What? How is that legal?
- objclxt 10y ago
  As you might expect, laws around casino debt in Nevada heavily favour the casinos: https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2014/dec/3/debtors-prisons-prevail-las-vegas-thanks-prosecutors-and-casino-markers-law/ https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2014/dec/3/debtors-pris...
  - CyberDildonics 10y ago
    Loan someone money, arrest them when they can't pay. Workin' hard, makin' bucks.
- downandout 10y ago
  Under Nevada law, "markers" - the instrument one signs to draw against a casino credit line - are considered checks. They even imprint your checking account information on them. About a month after your trip, the casino will send you a bill for all outstanding markers. If you fail to pay it, they simply deposit the markers you signed into their bank (remember, they have your checking account information imprinted on them). If they bounce, they are treated and prosecuted as if you had simply written a bad check. Unsurprisingly, this is fraught with conflicts of interest, made worse by the fact that Nevada law entitles the DA's office to a percentage of anything it collects on behalf of the casinos. They are effectively a debt collector that can throw you in jail.
- Waterluvian 10y ago
  Not legal in Canada. Debt isn't a criminal offense. I don't think they can arrest you. But maybe I'm confusing it for: they can't throw you in jail for debts.
  - criddell 10y ago
    The way the loan is structured, it's essentially a cheque. If you can be arrested for bouncing cheques, then you can be arrested for not paying the casinos.
  - MOARDONGZPLZ 10y ago
    It's also illegal in the US to jail someone for debts. The way they get around this in Nevada is to jail you for writing bad checks, which is fraud. THat is to say: intentionally writing a check you know will bounce is fraud and a crime, but in the event that a check you wrote bounces, it's hard to prove that you didn't know the check would bounce when you wrote it. So it's not really debtor's prison, but almost a loophole to create a debtor's prison.
    - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      "Didn't know the check would bounce" implies you, what, don't know how to add up a list of numbers? Its fair to say a bounced check means bad faith.
      - MOARDONGZPLZ 10y ago
        Here are some examples where it wouldn't mean bad faith, and I'm pretty sure the majority of the time a bad check would NOT indicate bad faith: I wrote a check, but I was changing direct deposit accounts at my employer to a new account. I transposed my account number, my paycheck didn't get deposited, my check bounced. Oops! I completely forgot that I wrote a check earlier in the week. I write the second check after looking at my bank account balance which says I should be able to write the second check. The first check then comes through, the second check bounces. Oops! My landlord usually cashes my rent checks on the 3rd. This month he was out of town so didn't get around to cashing it until the 10th. I checked my balance on the 9th and assuming my rent check had been cashed as usual, that I had enough to write the second check. By the time the second check is cashed, there is no money in my account so it bounces. Oops! Didn't mean to write a check that would bounce in any of those (imaginary) situations. No intent to write a bad check means no crime of fraud, as fraud requires specific intent to defraud.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Gambling is a scummy business. One of the reasons why I always eye roll when some sports nerd is passionately arguing about how allowing sports books is some sort of expression of freedom.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Mikeb85 10y ago
Personally I love the fact that people try to beat the house. And to play devil's advocate for a second, the fact that consistently winning is even possible should just drive more business.
- TheCowboy 10y ago
  I feel that the idea, that consistently winning is possible, is partially a myth, but it persists among casino regulars. I know people who do this or have in the past, and the big problem is eventually getting banned from various casinos. It seems rather one-sided to me, but legally they're allowed to ban people for consistently winning.
  - jly 10y ago
    Yes, getting banned is the other obstacle. Any casino won't take long to ban anyone clearly playing with an advantage. This makes it even harder to do for the long haul, which is what you need to take advantage of the edge.
  - johnwatson11218 10y ago
    What about this issue that big winnings would be taxed but you would only be allowed to deduct a certain amount of your losses each year - otherwise people could claim unlimited losses. Even if you had a slight advantage over the house I don't see how you could beat the tax system.
    - TheCowboy 10y ago
      That's not how gambling taxes work. You can't claim unlimited losses. Filing as a professional gambler allows you to net your wins and losses, usually defined as a session of play. If winning is so volatile that you have frequent winning years and significant losing years, then yes it could be a problem since you can't report negative income. I've only heard of winning players having negative years when accepting risk beyond what their bankroll and access to games year-round can over (for example, high high stakes games are not that common).
  - 10y ago
the_watcher 10y ago
> “We killed most of the cards-based craps games, including one at Agua Caliente casino near Palm Springs. That’s where we won $335,000 I grew up a few miles east of this casino, I wondered where craps went when I ended up there during a bachelor party.
- moron4hire 10y ago
  I don't understand what "cards-based craps" is. I'm only familiar with the dice kind.
  - itp 10y ago
    It's explained pretty exhaustively in this article.
  - stonemetal 10y ago
    Take 12 cards, 2 sets of 1 through 6. Shuffle and deal one from each set to the player. This is identical to rolling the dice.
the_watcher 10y ago
Casino (and gambling in general) benefit from the perception that they can be beaten. It's why they sell card counting books in the gift shops. While they'll shut down anything like card based craps that advantage players can just clean up on, they're generally perfectly fine with professional gamblers who work their asses off to get a slight advantage.
- s_q_b 10y ago
  They will toss you out on your ass for any systemic card counting that actually works, especially the newer blinded player methods.
  - logicallee 10y ago
    I'm just generally curious, you seem to know about this area. What are the new "blinded player methods"? I googled that phrase but didn't come up with anything.
    - bluecalm 10y ago
      I am just guessing but from the name it seems that it's about using one "naive and careful" player to observe the game and count the cards while placing small bets. Once the deck becomes advantageous the "wild gambler" joins and starts blasting huge bets. Of course the first player signaled a good moment to join. This way it doesn't look suspicious as no one altered their behavior (one early method to detect card counters was to observer changes in bet sizings as the count changes).
      - sbov 10y ago
        This isn't new though, and is one of the most basic forms of team based card counting - it's how the MIT blackjack team did things. IIRC the "naive and careful" player is called the "spotter" and the "wild gambler" is called the "Gorilla".
        10y ago
downandout 10y ago
For those of you that don't know, the primary character in this piece, James Grosjean, isn't just any advantage player, he is the advantage player. He wrote what is often referred to as the Bible of advantage play - Beyond Counting - and its sequel, Exhibit CAA: Beyond Counting. Both of these books are incredibly hard to find, and when they do come up for sale, often sell for thousands of dollars. Here's a current listing for the original book, at the low price of $1600: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Beyond-Counting-Exploiting-Casino-Games-from-Blackjack-to-Video-Poker-James-G-/131848943010?hash=item1eb2cf35a2:i:131848943010 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Beyond-Counting-Exploiting-Casino-Ga... Here's a link to his Beyond Numbers blog: http://beyondnumbers.lvablog.com http://beyondnumbers.lvablog.com
- SonicSoul 10y ago
  I know it might be judgmental and possibly hypocritical, but I can't help but think that kind of intellect and education is wasted on trying to beat a casino. If money is the end goal, wouldn't there be a bigger opportunity in pursuing investment strategy ideas (i.e. market inefficiencies), or working on making some process more efficient that could disrupt some industry (i.e. spam/phishing detection, or deep learning) and have better chance of long term gains. I'd think casino strategies once discovered can be mitigated over time so all that hard work will payoff temporarily?
  - abduhl 10y ago
    People like this do what they do because they enjoy the challenge of a sophisticated adversary. The only other place this guy would be happy is crypto.
  - stronglikedan 10y ago
    I'm not familiar with James Grosjean, nor am I a gambler, but I would guess that James became addicted to gambling, and then used his intellect and education to make money doing what he loved.
    - jchendy 10y ago
olalonde 10y ago
> illegal for dice to determine financial outcomes in games of chance That's pretty odd, anyone knows why that is?
- downandout 10y ago
  It has to do with some quirks in the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, and its interaction with state law. Card Craps is sometimes referred to as "California Craps" because it was invented to sidestep restrictions on the use of dice to determine the outcome of any wager in California tribal casinos. The situation is similar in other states with Indian casinos, which is why this game has spread.
- cperciva 10y ago
  Weighted dice. Go back a century and it's much easier to ban gambling using dice than it is to ensure that the games are fair.
  - jonknee 10y ago
    Or it was a [poor] way to try and ban certain types of gambling while allowing others.
    - cperciva 10y ago
      Same thing, really. Dice games tended to erupt into violence amid accusations of dice being weighted; there was no practical way to sure that the dice weren't weighted, but the state had an interest in preventing violence; so the solution was to ban those games while allowing other forms of gambling which were less likely to become violent.
splonk 10y ago
I can expand a bit on how advantage play can work for the hold'em games against the house. I'm sure Grosjean and other professionals at this sort of thing have more sophisticated tactics. Fun fact - last I looked maybe 6-7 years ago, his book was selling for low 4 figures on the secondary market. That's how much advantage players can value an unknown tactic. About 10 years ago casinos started offering various hold'em variants played against the house, presumably to cash in on the poker boom that was going on. Most of them try to mimic the flow of a hold'em hand as much as possible. You'll always have to ante something (somewhat analogous to posting a blind, but also just required as a way to force action in a table game), and then generally there's a decision point after getting your hole cards where you can bet more or fold. The more complicated games include additional decision points after seeing the flop and sometimes the turn. There's a lot more details I'm glossing over here about how it works (dealer hand must qualify by being a minimum strength, different payouts for various final hand strengths, different allowable bet sizes, bonus bets, etc.), but that's the basic structure. I recall seeing 3 major variants at the time - from least complicated to most, WPT All-in Hold'em, Texas Hold'em Bonus (I think, whatever the WSOP branded one was that Harrah's had), and Ultimate Texas Hold'em. WPT seems dead, UTH I still see around a bit. Not sure if Harrah's and other places still run Bonus. The basic strategy for all these games generally involves a simple lookup table for the preflop action - for WPT, the correct play is to max bet for 90+% of your hands [1]- it's a very easy game to play perfectly. For UTH, it's probably closer to 25% [2]. (Aside - ignoring bankroll considerations, it's almost always correct to bet the max on any game that allows a range of bets. Either the bet is +EV or it isn't.) The easiest advantage you can take is to simply know more cards at the table. Most dealers in my experience will allow you to show cards to your friends, ask for advice, whatever. Knowing more cards lets you make better decisions. Simple example - in WPT 83 offsuit is a very borderline playable hand. If you see another 8 in a player's hand, that may make it unplayable (since you're less likely to make a pair of 8s). Alternatively, if you have a borderline unplayable hand, seeing a pair of high cards in another hand may make the dealer less likely to qualify, which is an advantage for you when you have any bad hand. In WPT at least, this is an extremely minor advantage - the "strategic frontier" where your decisions may be changed by this knowledge is extremely small. It's theoretically a much larger advantage in UTH, but there the strategy changes you can make with this knowledge encompass such a huge state space that you'll not be able to apply it consistently. A second advantage is touched on in the article, viewing the dealer's hole cards. This is much harder to do and usually involves finding a dealer with bad form - I believe they're trained to slide the cards right out of the machine along the felt to avoid this, but some dealers lift slightly, so you can catch glimpses if you're in the right seat. Hopefully the playing advantages of knowing the dealer's cards are obvious. I wouldn't be surprised if shuffle tracking is employed as well, but I'm not really sure what the state of the shuffle machines is these days. Surprisingly, the biggest advantage I ever saw was to simply understand how to evaluate a hold'em hand. I've played hundreds of thousands of hands (former pro), and I still get it wrong occasionally when I'm not paying attention. When all these games first came out, casinos had to train dealers to do this, many of whom had never played poker. I think I calculated that I'd need to see a mistake rate of something like 1/600 to make the game profitable right out of the gate, ignoring any other advantages, and I was seeing 2-3 mistakes/hr (out of maybe 30-100 hands/hr). Admittedly only about half of the mistakes will be in your favor. It's not quite as easy these days, but for the first year or so it was an absolute gold mine. Orthogonal to all this, some of these games are pretty easy to play at 98+%. Watching how people play these games, I wouldn't be surprised if the average table hold is upwards of 10%. I don't have any particular proof, but I'm pretty sure I've gotten grossly overcomped for play at these games. [1] Everything but 82o, 73o-, 63o-, 52o, 43o, 32o. I'm not sure why 53o is playable. [2] Something like Ax+, K5o+, K2s+, Q5s+, Q7o+, J8s+, JTo, 33+. You can find the full table at wizardofodds or similar sites.
llamataboot 10y ago
I used advantage gambling to help put myself through grad school during the first online casino boom. There were so many casinos vying for players, that many offered a bonus -- say $500 extra to play with if you deposit $500. Of course that $500 had a playthrough requirement -- you may have to wager a total of 20x that to withdraw -- so $10,000. Now you simply find a casino that has a game with odds that beat the playthough. So, for example, if a game has a 1% house edge, you're expected to lose about $100 wagering that $10000, leaving you a theoretical $400 in profit. Eventually, the casinos wised up and changed it so the wagering had to be done on slots, which have terrible odds. However, we figured out early on (I was in an advantage gambler forum) that there were "double or nothing" games in the slot machine, that let you go double-or-nothing between 5 and 10 times. These counted towards wagering, and were essentially perfect 50/50 odds (no house edge) - so by always going double or nothing until the end, you could rack up most of your wagers at 50/50 even though the initial slot roll was at a much higher house edge. I think I started with $100 deposit into a casino and probably made > $50k in the two years after that. About $40k of that went to bills and $10k became my initial poker bankroll while I taught myself to play poker professionally, which I did for the rest of grad school after the casino bonus gambling winded down (they eventually wised up to the slot machine thing too) -- and if you player poker at a high enough level and you use judicious table selection, you can always advantage gamble (because you are gambling with each other, not the house, though the house gets their cut with the rake -- so you have to win at a high enough level that you know you are beating the rake) I was a "small time" person, just doing it on the side to earn spending money -- there were certainly other people who had many many computers, VPNs, shill addresses, etc who took those casinos for hundreds of thousands a year for those couple years. I learned a lot about probability theory, estimated value, and the mathematics of gambling in general, gained the emotional strength to deal with high variance (the best description of playing poker professionally that I ever heard was that it was like playing a game of chess for $1, then flipping a coin for $100. In the long run that chess game is the only thing that matters, but in the short run those coin flips can be brutal). Good times.
- llamataboot 10y ago
  There were also plenty of shady operations in those days. I seem to remember some online gaming authorities were particularly bad about not vetting their casino operators. One time we found a casino that had a game (I forget what it was, maybe a video poker variant?) that had a HUGE (5% or so?) player edge when played optimally because of an incorrect payout structure. That casino was blasted with players betting huge amounts of money -- they must have figured something was going on but they couldn't figure out what. They were probably bankrupted within a day or so. Not only did they lock everyone's winnings that had played the game, but they kept their initial deposits as well and shut down the site...
PaulHoule 10y ago
I used to think my sister-in-law was impervious to the law probability because she plays the slots. Then one day she noticed there was a scratch ticket where you could put the losing tickets into a raffle being held at the local casino and win a prize but you had to be present at the drawing. Well, she looked in the jar a few days before the drawing and estimated there were only about 50 tickets in the jar so she bought 80 tickets and put the losers in the jar and got her mother to put 20 in... And her mother won a trip to Las Vegas worth around $2000. Which is the rub because people who look for this kind of thing are people who are serious about gambling and often they lose it back some other way. I think of the many WSOP winners who immediately lose the money playing craps.
jimmywanger 10y ago
Unless you get some other enjoyment out of gambling, this is a hard way to make a little easy money. I used to play poker 30 hours a week. If you play optimally, it is extremely boring and fatiguing.
Swery 10y ago
Liyd
erik998 10y ago
This article was great. It made me remember reading Scarne's New Complete Guide to Gambling long time ago. https://www.amazon.com/Scarnes-New-Complete-Guide-Gambling/dp/0671630636 https://www.amazon.com/Scarnes-New-Complete-Guide-Gambling/d... He has a great story of how gamblers would get casinos to increase betting limits and allow them to successfully use a martingale system. To this day, casino owners still fall for this and lose substantially. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_limit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_limit
- abduhl 10y ago
  Martingale systems definitely do not cause casino owners to "lose substantially" - the bettor cannot match the casino's bankroll and any amount of money won back after the first bet increase is actually the bettor's. The casino can afford to let you double because they are only ever putting the original amount bet at risk.
  - Bahamut 10y ago
    Yep, this is certainly true - I've run into it since I bet this way most of the time when playing blackjack in casinos. One of the first things I do before sitting at a table is calculating how many bets it takes to hit the highest possible before hitting the limit, and I have hit it plenty of times (won some of them, lost others).
  - alkonaut 10y ago
    If you can reasonably match the bankroll, it seems like the players' edge against the house is that they can determine when the game ends (assuming the house can't refuse a bet). The problem is of course matching the bankroll to the point where you can afford a long losing streak - it's just not practical.
  - alasdair_ 10y ago
    It could only happen if the tables had a ridiculous limit which almost never happens. If it did, I could see a few billionaires grouping together to be able to bankrupt almost any casino by betting a billion on black instead of red.
ipsin 10y ago
Kk

299 points by troydavis 10y ago

mmastrac 10y ago

> But when Sun was arrested in 2007 for a $93,000 gambling debt owed to MGM, she vowed revenge What? How is that legal?

objclxt 10y ago
As you might expect, laws around casino debt in Nevada heavily favour the casinos: https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2014/dec/3/debtors-prisons-prevail-las-vegas-thanks-prosecutors-and-casino-markers-law/ https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2014/dec/3/debtors-pris...
- CyberDildonics 10y ago
  Loan someone money, arrest them when they can't pay. Workin' hard, makin' bucks.
downandout 10y ago
Under Nevada law, "markers" - the instrument one signs to draw against a casino credit line - are considered checks. They even imprint your checking account information on them. About a month after your trip, the casino will send you a bill for all outstanding markers. If you fail to pay it, they simply deposit the markers you signed into their bank (remember, they have your checking account information imprinted on them). If they bounce, they are treated and prosecuted as if you had simply written a bad check. Unsurprisingly, this is fraught with conflicts of interest, made worse by the fact that Nevada law entitles the DA's office to a percentage of anything it collects on behalf of the casinos. They are effectively a debt collector that can throw you in jail.
Waterluvian 10y ago
Not legal in Canada. Debt isn't a criminal offense. I don't think they can arrest you. But maybe I'm confusing it for: they can't throw you in jail for debts.
- criddell 10y ago
  The way the loan is structured, it's essentially a cheque. If you can be arrested for bouncing cheques, then you can be arrested for not paying the casinos.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 10y ago
  It's also illegal in the US to jail someone for debts. The way they get around this in Nevada is to jail you for writing bad checks, which is fraud. THat is to say: intentionally writing a check you know will bounce is fraud and a crime, but in the event that a check you wrote bounces, it's hard to prove that you didn't know the check would bounce when you wrote it. So it's not really debtor's prison, but almost a loophole to create a debtor's prison.
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    "Didn't know the check would bounce" implies you, what, don't know how to add up a list of numbers? Its fair to say a bounced check means bad faith.
    - MOARDONGZPLZ 10y ago
      Here are some examples where it wouldn't mean bad faith, and I'm pretty sure the majority of the time a bad check would NOT indicate bad faith: I wrote a check, but I was changing direct deposit accounts at my employer to a new account. I transposed my account number, my paycheck didn't get deposited, my check bounced. Oops! I completely forgot that I wrote a check earlier in the week. I write the second check after looking at my bank account balance which says I should be able to write the second check. The first check then comes through, the second check bounces. Oops! My landlord usually cashes my rent checks on the 3rd. This month he was out of town so didn't get around to cashing it until the 10th. I checked my balance on the 9th and assuming my rent check had been cashed as usual, that I had enough to write the second check. By the time the second check is cashed, there is no money in my account so it bounces. Oops! Didn't mean to write a check that would bounce in any of those (imaginary) situations. No intent to write a bad check means no crime of fraud, as fraud requires specific intent to defraud.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Spooky23 10y ago
Gambling is a scummy business. One of the reasons why I always eye roll when some sports nerd is passionately arguing about how allowing sports books is some sort of expression of freedom.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Mikeb85 10y ago

Personally I love the fact that people try to beat the house. And to play devil's advocate for a second, the fact that consistently winning is even possible should just drive more business.

TheCowboy 10y ago
I feel that the idea, that consistently winning is possible, is partially a myth, but it persists among casino regulars. I know people who do this or have in the past, and the big problem is eventually getting banned from various casinos. It seems rather one-sided to me, but legally they're allowed to ban people for consistently winning.
- jly 10y ago
  Yes, getting banned is the other obstacle. Any casino won't take long to ban anyone clearly playing with an advantage. This makes it even harder to do for the long haul, which is what you need to take advantage of the edge.
- johnwatson11218 10y ago
  What about this issue that big winnings would be taxed but you would only be allowed to deduct a certain amount of your losses each year - otherwise people could claim unlimited losses. Even if you had a slight advantage over the house I don't see how you could beat the tax system.
  - TheCowboy 10y ago
    That's not how gambling taxes work. You can't claim unlimited losses. Filing as a professional gambler allows you to net your wins and losses, usually defined as a session of play. If winning is so volatile that you have frequent winning years and significant losing years, then yes it could be a problem since you can't report negative income. I've only heard of winning players having negative years when accepting risk beyond what their bankroll and access to games year-round can over (for example, high high stakes games are not that common).
- 10y ago

the_watcher 10y ago

> “We killed most of the cards-based craps games, including one at Agua Caliente casino near Palm Springs. That’s where we won $335,000 I grew up a few miles east of this casino, I wondered where craps went when I ended up there during a bachelor party.

moron4hire 10y ago
I don't understand what "cards-based craps" is. I'm only familiar with the dice kind.
- itp 10y ago
  It's explained pretty exhaustively in this article.
- stonemetal 10y ago
  Take 12 cards, 2 sets of 1 through 6. Shuffle and deal one from each set to the player. This is identical to rolling the dice.

the_watcher 10y ago

Casino (and gambling in general) benefit from the perception that they can be beaten. It's why they sell card counting books in the gift shops. While they'll shut down anything like card based craps that advantage players can just clean up on, they're generally perfectly fine with professional gamblers who work their asses off to get a slight advantage.

s_q_b 10y ago
They will toss you out on your ass for any systemic card counting that actually works, especially the newer blinded player methods.
- logicallee 10y ago
  I'm just generally curious, you seem to know about this area. What are the new "blinded player methods"? I googled that phrase but didn't come up with anything.
  - bluecalm 10y ago
    I am just guessing but from the name it seems that it's about using one "naive and careful" player to observe the game and count the cards while placing small bets. Once the deck becomes advantageous the "wild gambler" joins and starts blasting huge bets. Of course the first player signaled a good moment to join. This way it doesn't look suspicious as no one altered their behavior (one early method to detect card counters was to observer changes in bet sizings as the count changes).
    - sbov 10y ago
      This isn't new though, and is one of the most basic forms of team based card counting - it's how the MIT blackjack team did things. IIRC the "naive and careful" player is called the "spotter" and the "wild gambler" is called the "Gorilla".
      - 10y ago

downandout 10y ago

For those of you that don't know, the primary character in this piece, James Grosjean, isn't just any advantage player, he is the advantage player. He wrote what is often referred to as the Bible of advantage play - Beyond Counting - and its sequel, Exhibit CAA: Beyond Counting. Both of these books are incredibly hard to find, and when they do come up for sale, often sell for thousands of dollars. Here's a current listing for the original book, at the low price of $1600: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Beyond-Counting-Exploiting-Casino-Games-from-Blackjack-to-Video-Poker-James-G-/131848943010?hash=item1eb2cf35a2:i:131848943010 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Beyond-Counting-Exploiting-Casino-Ga... Here's a link to his Beyond Numbers blog: http://beyondnumbers.lvablog.com http://beyondnumbers.lvablog.com

SonicSoul 10y ago
I know it might be judgmental and possibly hypocritical, but I can't help but think that kind of intellect and education is wasted on trying to beat a casino. If money is the end goal, wouldn't there be a bigger opportunity in pursuing investment strategy ideas (i.e. market inefficiencies), or working on making some process more efficient that could disrupt some industry (i.e. spam/phishing detection, or deep learning) and have better chance of long term gains. I'd think casino strategies once discovered can be mitigated over time so all that hard work will payoff temporarily?
- abduhl 10y ago
  People like this do what they do because they enjoy the challenge of a sophisticated adversary. The only other place this guy would be happy is crypto.
- stronglikedan 10y ago
  I'm not familiar with James Grosjean, nor am I a gambler, but I would guess that James became addicted to gambling, and then used his intellect and education to make money doing what he loved.
  - jchendy 10y ago

olalonde 10y ago

> illegal for dice to determine financial outcomes in games of chance That's pretty odd, anyone knows why that is?

downandout 10y ago
It has to do with some quirks in the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, and its interaction with state law. Card Craps is sometimes referred to as "California Craps" because it was invented to sidestep restrictions on the use of dice to determine the outcome of any wager in California tribal casinos. The situation is similar in other states with Indian casinos, which is why this game has spread.
cperciva 10y ago
Weighted dice. Go back a century and it's much easier to ban gambling using dice than it is to ensure that the games are fair.
- jonknee 10y ago
  Or it was a [poor] way to try and ban certain types of gambling while allowing others.
  - cperciva 10y ago
    Same thing, really. Dice games tended to erupt into violence amid accusations of dice being weighted; there was no practical way to sure that the dice weren't weighted, but the state had an interest in preventing violence; so the solution was to ban those games while allowing other forms of gambling which were less likely to become violent.

splonk 10y ago

I can expand a bit on how advantage play can work for the hold'em games against the house. I'm sure Grosjean and other professionals at this sort of thing have more sophisticated tactics. Fun fact - last I looked maybe 6-7 years ago, his book was selling for low 4 figures on the secondary market. That's how much advantage players can value an unknown tactic. About 10 years ago casinos started offering various hold'em variants played against the house, presumably to cash in on the poker boom that was going on. Most of them try to mimic the flow of a hold'em hand as much as possible. You'll always have to ante something (somewhat analogous to posting a blind, but also just required as a way to force action in a table game), and then generally there's a decision point after getting your hole cards where you can bet more or fold. The more complicated games include additional decision points after seeing the flop and sometimes the turn. There's a lot more details I'm glossing over here about how it works (dealer hand must qualify by being a minimum strength, different payouts for various final hand strengths, different allowable bet sizes, bonus bets, etc.), but that's the basic structure. I recall seeing 3 major variants at the time - from least complicated to most, WPT All-in Hold'em, Texas Hold'em Bonus (I think, whatever the WSOP branded one was that Harrah's had), and Ultimate Texas Hold'em. WPT seems dead, UTH I still see around a bit. Not sure if Harrah's and other places still run Bonus. The basic strategy for all these games generally involves a simple lookup table for the preflop action - for WPT, the correct play is to max bet for 90+% of your hands [1]- it's a very easy game to play perfectly. For UTH, it's probably closer to 25% [2]. (Aside - ignoring bankroll considerations, it's almost always correct to bet the max on any game that allows a range of bets. Either the bet is +EV or it isn't.) The easiest advantage you can take is to simply know more cards at the table. Most dealers in my experience will allow you to show cards to your friends, ask for advice, whatever. Knowing more cards lets you make better decisions. Simple example - in WPT 83 offsuit is a very borderline playable hand. If you see another 8 in a player's hand, that may make it unplayable (since you're less likely to make a pair of 8s). Alternatively, if you have a borderline unplayable hand, seeing a pair of high cards in another hand may make the dealer less likely to qualify, which is an advantage for you when you have any bad hand. In WPT at least, this is an extremely minor advantage - the "strategic frontier" where your decisions may be changed by this knowledge is extremely small. It's theoretically a much larger advantage in UTH, but there the strategy changes you can make with this knowledge encompass such a huge state space that you'll not be able to apply it consistently. A second advantage is touched on in the article, viewing the dealer's hole cards. This is much harder to do and usually involves finding a dealer with bad form - I believe they're trained to slide the cards right out of the machine along the felt to avoid this, but some dealers lift slightly, so you can catch glimpses if you're in the right seat. Hopefully the playing advantages of knowing the dealer's cards are obvious. I wouldn't be surprised if shuffle tracking is employed as well, but I'm not really sure what the state of the shuffle machines is these days. Surprisingly, the biggest advantage I ever saw was to simply understand how to evaluate a hold'em hand. I've played hundreds of thousands of hands (former pro), and I still get it wrong occasionally when I'm not paying attention. When all these games first came out, casinos had to train dealers to do this, many of whom had never played poker. I think I calculated that I'd need to see a mistake rate of something like 1/600 to make the game profitable right out of the gate, ignoring any other advantages, and I was seeing 2-3 mistakes/hr (out of maybe 30-100 hands/hr). Admittedly only about half of the mistakes will be in your favor. It's not quite as easy these days, but for the first year or so it was an absolute gold mine. Orthogonal to all this, some of these games are pretty easy to play at 98+%. Watching how people play these games, I wouldn't be surprised if the average table hold is upwards of 10%. I don't have any particular proof, but I'm pretty sure I've gotten grossly overcomped for play at these games. [1] Everything but 82o, 73o-, 63o-, 52o, 43o, 32o. I'm not sure why 53o is playable. [2] Something like Ax+, K5o+, K2s+, Q5s+, Q7o+, J8s+, JTo, 33+. You can find the full table at wizardofodds or similar sites.

llamataboot 10y ago

I used advantage gambling to help put myself through grad school during the first online casino boom. There were so many casinos vying for players, that many offered a bonus -- say $500 extra to play with if you deposit $500. Of course that $500 had a playthrough requirement -- you may have to wager a total of 20x that to withdraw -- so $10,000. Now you simply find a casino that has a game with odds that beat the playthough. So, for example, if a game has a 1% house edge, you're expected to lose about $100 wagering that $10000, leaving you a theoretical $400 in profit. Eventually, the casinos wised up and changed it so the wagering had to be done on slots, which have terrible odds. However, we figured out early on (I was in an advantage gambler forum) that there were "double or nothing" games in the slot machine, that let you go double-or-nothing between 5 and 10 times. These counted towards wagering, and were essentially perfect 50/50 odds (no house edge) - so by always going double or nothing until the end, you could rack up most of your wagers at 50/50 even though the initial slot roll was at a much higher house edge. I think I started with $100 deposit into a casino and probably made > $50k in the two years after that. About $40k of that went to bills and $10k became my initial poker bankroll while I taught myself to play poker professionally, which I did for the rest of grad school after the casino bonus gambling winded down (they eventually wised up to the slot machine thing too) -- and if you player poker at a high enough level and you use judicious table selection, you can always advantage gamble (because you are gambling with each other, not the house, though the house gets their cut with the rake -- so you have to win at a high enough level that you know you are beating the rake) I was a "small time" person, just doing it on the side to earn spending money -- there were certainly other people who had many many computers, VPNs, shill addresses, etc who took those casinos for hundreds of thousands a year for those couple years. I learned a lot about probability theory, estimated value, and the mathematics of gambling in general, gained the emotional strength to deal with high variance (the best description of playing poker professionally that I ever heard was that it was like playing a game of chess for $1, then flipping a coin for $100. In the long run that chess game is the only thing that matters, but in the short run those coin flips can be brutal). Good times.

llamataboot 10y ago
There were also plenty of shady operations in those days. I seem to remember some online gaming authorities were particularly bad about not vetting their casino operators. One time we found a casino that had a game (I forget what it was, maybe a video poker variant?) that had a HUGE (5% or so?) player edge when played optimally because of an incorrect payout structure. That casino was blasted with players betting huge amounts of money -- they must have figured something was going on but they couldn't figure out what. They were probably bankrupted within a day or so. Not only did they lock everyone's winnings that had played the game, but they kept their initial deposits as well and shut down the site...

PaulHoule 10y ago

I used to think my sister-in-law was impervious to the law probability because she plays the slots. Then one day she noticed there was a scratch ticket where you could put the losing tickets into a raffle being held at the local casino and win a prize but you had to be present at the drawing. Well, she looked in the jar a few days before the drawing and estimated there were only about 50 tickets in the jar so she bought 80 tickets and put the losers in the jar and got her mother to put 20 in... And her mother won a trip to Las Vegas worth around $2000. Which is the rub because people who look for this kind of thing are people who are serious about gambling and often they lose it back some other way. I think of the many WSOP winners who immediately lose the money playing craps.

jimmywanger 10y ago

Unless you get some other enjoyment out of gambling, this is a hard way to make a little easy money. I used to play poker 30 hours a week. If you play optimally, it is extremely boring and fatiguing.

Swery 10y ago

Liyd

erik998 10y ago

This article was great. It made me remember reading Scarne's New Complete Guide to Gambling long time ago. https://www.amazon.com/Scarnes-New-Complete-Guide-Gambling/dp/0671630636 https://www.amazon.com/Scarnes-New-Complete-Guide-Gambling/d... He has a great story of how gamblers would get casinos to increase betting limits and allow them to successfully use a martingale system. To this day, casino owners still fall for this and lose substantially. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_limit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_limit

abduhl 10y ago
Martingale systems definitely do not cause casino owners to "lose substantially" - the bettor cannot match the casino's bankroll and any amount of money won back after the first bet increase is actually the bettor's. The casino can afford to let you double because they are only ever putting the original amount bet at risk.
- Bahamut 10y ago
  Yep, this is certainly true - I've run into it since I bet this way most of the time when playing blackjack in casinos. One of the first things I do before sitting at a table is calculating how many bets it takes to hit the highest possible before hitting the limit, and I have hit it plenty of times (won some of them, lost others).
- alkonaut 10y ago
  If you can reasonably match the bankroll, it seems like the players' edge against the house is that they can determine when the game ends (assuming the house can't refuse a bet). The problem is of course matching the bankroll to the point where you can afford a long losing streak - it's just not practical.
- alasdair_ 10y ago
  It could only happen if the tables had a ridiculous limit which almost never happens. If it did, I could see a few billionaires grouping together to be able to bankrupt almost any casino by betting a billion on black instead of red.

ipsin 10y ago