9 ms·
How 4000 Physicists Gave a Vegas Casino Its Worst Week (2015)
- BlackLotus89 9y agotldr; they got a hotel cheap, because hotels+casino outbid each other when larger groups want to rent rooms and they didn't play so the casino lost money. It was exactly as I expected although the article tried to shove the idea that they gambled down your throat and stretched an anecdote over one page instead of one sentence
- cocoa19 9y ago"but you'd never guess why." Sigh. People with basic math and statistics skills (physicists) don't gamble. What a shocker.
- rxhernandez 9y agoEngineers have both basic math and statisitics skills and I've seen plenty gamble.
- fred_is_fred 9y agoGambling is entertainment, not an investment strategy. I assume physicists still go see movies, go out to dinner, or read books. Those too are entertainment.
- tonyarkles 9y agoI had a friend in undergrad who would gamble on Friday nights (poker, at the casino, if I remember right). Gamble, but not drink. I would bug him sometimes about the money he was throwing away. Then one day he said "Tony, you know what the difference is between my Friday night [at the casino] and your Friday night [at the bar]? There's some probability that I'll have more money at the end of the night than I started with." And I quit bugging him!
- abhv 9y agoIn 2001, one of the premier theoretical CS conferences, Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), held its meeting in Las Vegas at the Tropicana. Only about 200 people attend, but it was memorable: (1) The conference hall right next to the FOCS conference room was hosting the international lingerie trade conference ! Still, the talks were more interesting and well attended. (2) I, like many others, didnt gamble, but I watched my office mate from MIT (now a brilliant scientist who recently won the Godel Prize) lose his 40$ (a big amount for grad students back then) at the blackjack table in literally 3 hands (35 seconds). He said, "I cant leave vegas without at least trying" and he proceeded to show exactly how LV works.
- severine 9y agoI'd pay to see that movie!
- drallison 9y agoThe "do not play" strategy to win in Las Vegas was pioneered by attendees of the AFIPS sponsored Fall and Spring Joint Computer Conferences and the National Computer Conference. Sponsoring organizations included the ACM, the IEEE Computer Society, and others.
- KKKKkkkk1 9y agoI'm under the impression that the general public understands that casinos and lotteries are not charities. Do you really need a PhD in physics to figure this out? The reason people gamble is not because they're dumb.
- Spooky23 9y agoPeople gamble for fun, but they get into trouble because of the dopamine rush.
- brokenmachine 9y agoI don't gamble, or find gambling fun, because of the Cortisol rush.
- technofiend 9y agoIt's more about the pervasive cigarette smoke for me. Even though poker rooms are now smoke free you still have to wade through the rest of the casino to get there and no air filtration system is perfect. The result is you leave smelling like an ashtray regardless.
- dogruck 9y agoSummary: they didn’t gamble.
- booleandilemma 9y agoThat article wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be.
- jeron 9y agostill was a good chuckle
- killjoywashere 9y agoThe only career advice we got in my physics undergrad was when the quantum professor told us few if any would go on to PhDs, but we could get jobs in Vegas or Wall Street. It was at that moment that I learned to stick with index funds and never, ever gamble. There's no way one of me for a few hours can possibly beat 100s of me working on a problem for decades.
- moondev 9y agoPlaying craps is a bunch of fun for me personally. I treat it like entertainment and just play the pass line plus odds. The pass line is just a 1.41% house advantage. And there is 0% house edge on odds. It's actually cheaper than buying drinks if you are planning to. Also much more fun than staying in your room and staring at your mutual funds the entire night!
- jrs235 9y agoI go slightly more risky. Putting a little more at risk by placing a few come bets plus odds too.
- smoothgrips 9y agoSame here. Last time I was at a craps table: pass line, come bet, with odds on both. Made something like $500 in less than an hour ($5 table). Granted, this doesn't happen every time. I do lose money sometimes. But, the atmosphere is fun. Chips flying all over the table... everyone drinking and feeling loose... laughs, jokes, chatting with others... the cheer when the shooter hits... camaraderie... it's great. Definitely better than sitting in your room. I see it as a form of entertainment. Before I go gambling, I plan it out. Determine how much I can comfortably play with. I also expect that I will lose it. And then once the money is gone, I'm done gambling.
- jeron 9y agoI've heard this strategy before - go to the penny slots for the drinks, not the money
- jacobkg 9y ago"It was an unmitigated disaster for the Grand. Financially, it was the worst week they’d ever had. After the conference was over, APS was politely asked never to return—not just by the MGM Grand, but by the entire city of Las Vegas."
- bognition 9y ago"The only winning move is not to play"
- analog31 9y agoBetter still, be the casino.
- quickthrower2 9y agoBetter still, be a hedge fund.
- overcast 9y agoWhatever the case may have been, the week of the '86 APS April meeting found the gaming floor almost completely empty, leaving the casino with its record-low take; in the (probably apocryphal) words of one casino waitress: "They each brought one shirt and a ten-dollar bill, and changed neither."
- United857 9y agoI wonder if relative lack of gambling also holds true for other Vegas conventions frequented by a generally technical crowd (e.g. Defcon, etc)
- TallGuyShort 9y agoI attended a convention with a bunch of probability & statistics experts. A number of them absolutely cleaned up and it wasn't at all surprising to see who - but I suspect the casino's losses to them were quickly subsidized by their less keen peers who were also playing (albeit badly) and the dozens who were watching and ordering drinks like our plane was going down. Honestly if I was hosting Defcon, nerds winning at the Blackjack table would be the least of my concerns.
- closeparen 9y agoApparently it was a similar story for a convention of anti-money-laundering/compliance specialists in accounting.
- strictnein 9y agoWas just wondering about Defcon actually. Maybe the amount of parties around Defcon and Blackhat makes up for the lack of gambling, in terms of revenue?
- chungy 9y agoVegas is also much less centered around gambling than it was 30 years ago. With the World Convention Center and other venues, there's not even an expectation that convention-goers are going to gamble, and if they want to, they have to go out of their way to get to a casino.
- superfx 9y agoI think the same exact thing happened with NIPS 2011 in Reno.
- JoeDaDude 9y ago"...a documentary I’d seen a while back, where some science-minded gamblers proved that a roulette wheel could reliably be beaten with a timer and a pocket computer.." I suspect those two gamblers were Claude Shannon, founder of information theory, and Ed Thorp, a physicist who developed a card counting method for blackjack [1]. [1] http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/claude-shannon-the-las-vegas-cheat http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/claude-shannon-the-las-v...
- jholman 9y agoI'd suspect not. Rather, I'd suspect it's a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie , which is about work that was probably inspired by Shannon and Thorp.
- peapicker 9y agoDocumented in "The Eudaemonic Pie" by Thomas Bass. Doyne Farmer is the key guy as I read it. He and other guys went on to Form 'The Prediction Company' (where they used Chaos Theory to play the stock market very successfully – eventually bought by Swiss Bank/now UBS). I interned in his group (the Center for Nonlinear Studies) at Los Alamos Natl Laboratory between these two events.
- notacoward 9y agoIf they had a convention of HN commenters in Vegas, it would probably be their best week ever. So many people sure they've found some secret way to beat the odds. It's a casino boss's dream come true.
- jerrysievert 9y agofunny, whenever I'm stuck at a casino (I've had an inordinate amount of "retreats" for work at casinos), I take $100 out of the ATM and hit up the lowest deck table of blackjack I can find, and spend the evening entertaining myself. when the inevitable "are you counting cards?" question comes, I simply answer, dryly, "no, I just understand math". it's usually at that point they close the table for the night.
- erikb 9y agoI think these "I found the magic trick to beat the casino" websites and movies are funded by casinos.
- lithos 9y agoWhere do you think they'll be filming, and who'll be giving them access. I'm sure some teams will choose a Vegas film over another just for the perks.
- to3m 9y agoIf you don't have a very high opinion of HN commenters, you'll probably assume that they get their opinions from Wikipedia. But that means they'll have a pretty good idea of whether a given game is good or bad in terms of odds. Besides, casinos will often give you free booze simply because you're sat at a table gambling. You don't have to actually win money to profit! You just need to start sensible, and then keep it going long enough to get drunk.
- scythe 9y agoActually this is also a documented form of advantage gambling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advantage_gambling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advantage_gambling But my personal favorite, as a physics major, is the observation that most roulette wheels are unfair, due to slight asymmetries. If only you could get good surveillance of the roulette tables for a few days (hard to do alone), you could make a killing. On roulette!
- trixie_ 9y agoEveryone knows the house has an edge. Gambling is a form entertainment. Unfortunately like drinking some people can’t just do it socially. I find an occasional weekend in Vegas fun. Just budget yourself $x you’re willing to spend per day. Play a game here and there, drink some, go to the pool, eat at a buffet, get a massage, whatever. It definitely took me some time at first to ‘get’ Vegas.
- derefr 9y agoI feel like I get the reward-value of gambling... but whenever I think about it, I think about how much more fun it would be to start a casino. Is there a good one of those "___ Tycoon" business-sim games for starting your own casino? One where things like comping whales and decide whether to break cheaters' kneecaps are part of the gameplay? Because that would be an addictive game ;)
- trixie_ 9y agoYea SimCasino would be fun. There is definitely a rush you get in gambling that is different from video games.
- erikb 9y agoAnd you don't even need to collaborate on that. Every person with enough statistical experience (and scientists have to have that) know by intuition that the odds are stacked against them in a casino. So it's really know fun if you can estimate with each dice or ball roll how much money you're losing (on average).
- jbyers 9y ago"The year was 1986 ... ended up settling on Las Vegas's MGM Grand." This immediately made me think this story is made up: the MGM Grand as described and pictured opened in 1993. As noted in the comments, the actual year is more likely 1988 and the casino likely Bally's.
- goodcanadian 9y agoA minimum of googling found this: http://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2814928 http://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2814928 It was 1986, and yes, it would probably be what is now known as Bally's which, at the time, was called MGM Grand.
- analog31 9y agoWhen I was a physics student in the late 80s, there was a conference in Reno, held in one of the casinos. I think it was just one of the divisions of the APS, and we certainly didn't occupy the entire place. I recall an amusing anecdote. Of course we didn't gamble. But after the conference banquet, my friends and I were standing around talking shop, and another guy accused us of being nerds for not at least trying out the slots. So he bought us a bucket of quarters and led us into the fray. After some time spent in sheer boredom, winning little bets and losing little bets, my friend decided to dispute the result of a machine. The attendant came over, and we got to see the insides of a slot machine. It was a garden variety IBM PC-AT with a color CRT, inside a fancy case with buttons and a pull handle. The attendant pulled the keyboard out of its slot, started typing commands, and showed us the result of our game. The machine was of course right, and the attendant smugly shut the lid and walked way. Eventually we ran out of quarters and all went to bed. There were some really cool pawn shops in Reno.
- mbrumlow 9y agoThis was the best story I have read all day! Thanks for sharing!
- blunte 9y agoAnd I have sat many times beside a guy who has no qualms against pumping $2,300/min into $100 slot machines, only to walk out of the casino with far more than he came in with. He talks to the VIP slot hosts, and to other VIP players. Then he picks the machines that are "loaded up" and "are due to pay out". I've tried to explain that this means nothing. But in his mind, it makes total sense. In the limited experiences observing him, I cannot say his (unfounded) beliefs are not accurate. That said, I've explained that slots are designed to pay out a certain percentage in a year, based on millions of plays. One high roller weekend is just a drop in that bucket, so _anything can happen_. It's quite a scene to have several machines tied up because they're on the jackpot, and the slot host is busy working on 1099 forms while you play another "due" machine. None of this is near as exciting as the MIT blackjack stories, but it is still pretty cool to see what $161k looks like in neatly wrapped stacks of 10k.
- 9y ago
- tacon 9y agoI never play the games, either. Once I took the "learn craps" class where the casino gives everyone (fake) chips to learn with. That was relaxing and fun, and they were all gone in ten minutes.
- gizmo686 9y agoA while ago, I would regularly go to a kink happy hour at a local bar. I was talking with the organizer and, apparently they were almost not invited back after the first one; because a significant amount of the attendees wouidn't actually get anything from the bar. (There is now an entrance fee redeemable for equal value at the bar).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- TangoTrotFox 9y agoFun factoid. Have you ever noticed how absurdly tacky casino carpet is? This is intentional. The idea is to keep people's eyes up and looking at the casino games. There's also that characteristic smell many casinos have, and I'm struggling to avoid the really tempting jokes there. That derives from quite expensive fragrances and oils filtered through the air circulation. Once again, they're designed to incentivize gaming with a bit of metascience - musk is a popular component in the scents, for instance. The games begin when you walk through the door, whether or not you realize you're participating.
- crystaln 9y ago[1986]
- rdiddly 9y agoThis seems to get attributed to a better understanding of math, because that's the obvious thing about physicists. But how much of it is just flat disinterest, from either being too smart or too interested in other things, to find a game of chance remotely interesting? I mean how exciting is a coin flip for example? Would I bet money on either outcome? No, because who cares? Same thing for any game a casino offers. It all seems geared for an 1800s or early 1900s attention span. But even a modern slot machine - what is it other than a very simple, weird, short, boring video arcade game with only one level?
- xchip 9y agoTL;DR: the week of the '86 APS April meeting found the gaming floor almost completely empty, leaving the casino with its record-low take by staying at a gambling hotel but obstinately refusing to gamble
- xchip 9y agoDownvoted? Why?
- xchip 9y agoJust so I can learn I'd appreciate to understand the reasons for the downvoting.
- grzm 9y agoI suspect because tl;drs are often frowned upon. The article isn’t so long, and HN members generally strive for substance and more depth (even if they don’t always achieve it) and tl;drs work against that. That’s my guess, anyway. Mindreading is tough, and those that downvote without comment tend not to comment even when prodded (which is one of the reasons comments on voting is against the guidelines).
- xchip 9y agoAnd how does a TL;DR stop people from getting more substance and depth? You still have the option to read the article...
- gluejar 9y agoThis article gets its facts wrong. It was the 1986 MARCH Meeting in Las Vegas where this happened. I was there. A friend of mine overheard the saleswomen talking in the lingerie shop (dressed as you might imagine) "I could be stark naked and these guys wouldn't notice me".