9 ms·

A professor who beat roulette

113 points by yarapavan 5y ago

ajsnigrutin 5y ago
> Teetering on bankruptcy, the casino owner had no option but to issue Jarecki a 15-day ban… for “being too good.” It's funny how they never ban you, if you lose too much.
- Kranar 5y ago
  Why would they ban you for losing?
  - LeoPanthera 5y ago
    They don't ban you, but many casinos, particularly the larger ones, will "suggest" that you might want to take a break if you are losing a lot of money very fast. A player that goes bankrupt is less likely to return.
    - JackFr 5y ago
      I’ve personally been told by a dealer “Really, you don’t need to lose it all tonight.”
    - Kranar 5y ago
      Okay sure, the point is that there is no reason to believe a casino would act against its own interest, so I'm not sure what's funny about a casino banning someone who's found a way of consistently winning money. The casino will serve its own interests and refuse to continue playing with you if you found a winning strategy instead of risking bankruptcy. Nothing really illogical about that.
      - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
        > The casino will serve its own interests and refuse to continue playing with you if you found a winning strategy instead of risking bankruptcy. Nothing really illogical about that. Well casino knows of and has a winning strategy for eg. roulette games. While the odds are in their favour (by the design of the game), they let you play, but if the odds are in your favour (by the wear and tear) they won't. Imagine some national lottery say that you won too many prizes with lotto tickets.
        Kranar 5y ago
        Yes, this is how a casino works by the very design of the game, as you mention. I would be very surprised if someone did not know that. As for lotteries, they also ban people if they win too frequently. This doesn't happen for random lotteries where you pick random numbers since I've never heard of a case where someone managed to figure out how such a lottery worked without committing a crime, but many government operated lotteries do run sports books and if you win too frequently they do ban you.
        IncRnd 5y ago
        > Imagine some national lottery say that you won too many prizes with lotto tickets. This is exactly how casinos operate. If you are winning against the odds, you are either a cheater or too lucky. In some cases you get put into a black book where that casino and others ban you. Furthermore, if you have a problem with gambling too much, casinos may also ban you, since you can sue a casino for letting you gamble.
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  Well they don't let you play for free so they kind of do
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  I hate the casinos as much as you do but to be cynical, they're exactly what the gamblers of the world deserve. They seem made for each other.
lisper 5y ago
> “I [experimented] until I had a rough outline of a system based on the previous winning numbers,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald in 1969. “If numbers 1, 2, and 3 won the last 3 rounds, [I could determine] what was most likely to win the next 3.” I'm calling shenanigans here. I can believe that a roulette wheel might have biases, and that you might be able to leverage those to beat the house. I have a very hard time believing that a roulette wheel could have a contingent bias such that the next outcome depended on the previous one. What possible mechanism could cause that? I'm also skeptical that even if there were such a mechanism that you could reliably determine it with the number of data points that one person could plausibly collect and analyze, especially in the 1960s. In fact, let's do the math: 37*37=1369 so you'd need that many spins at a minimum just to see every possible number pair come up once. Let's suppose that a spin takes a minute. It would take a minimum of 22 hours of watching one roulette wheel to see every combination. More likely you'd need 10-100 times that much data to get a statistically significant result. And that is just for one wheel [UPDATE: and a one-round contingent bias. The claim is a three-round contingent bias. Collecting that much data for even a single wheel would take years of constant effort.] Nope. Not possible.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Yes, I expect more obfuscation to keep the casino owners guessing.
- iratewizard 5y ago
  In the story, they tell the audience that he weaved a false narrative to the public about super computers. There's no reason not to believe that this is also a fabrication.
  - ojosilva 5y ago
    In fact, the amount of press around the guy seems to work as an invitation for people to come to casinos. I wouldn't discard the whole thing as a total scheme, a fabrication set up between the "professor" and the cassinos interested in attracting naive gamblers in this perfect marketing stunt!
- 5y ago
tgv 5y ago
> might cause certain wheels to land on certain numbers more frequently than randomocity prescribed randomocity? What's this, the sequel to Megamind?
- zxcvbn4038 5y ago
  And just like that Disney bought the IP rights to Randomocity and started planning the Avengers tie-ins for Marvel Phase 23.
  - le-mark 5y ago
    Characters with good luck as power have arisen from time to time. Domino from marvel, recently portrayed in Deadpool and a character in Fred Pohls heechee saga are two I can think of
mysterydip 5y ago
There's almost no point in playing a casino today. Nearly everything is digital and biased towards the house, even moreso than straight probabilities would tell you. If you ever do win big, "payouts are void in the event of machine malfunction".
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Some games like blackjack, roulette, etc still have physical versions. Obviously, a casino should never be seen as a money-making option but as an entertainment option. Walk in with a set budget you are happy to lose and don’t gamble beyond that. Most will allow you to set a limit and they won’t let you buy chips beyond that even if you tried. Drinks are very cheap even in high cost of living places so if you can control your gambling (which is more difficult than you imagine - speaking from experience here - that’s how casinos make their money) you can get relatively cheap entertainment. They’re also open until very late (some are 24/7) which is a nice perk.
  - bikingbismuth 5y ago
    When I attend conferences in Vegas, I set a $300 budget for craps. I try to find $5 tables (really tough to do anymore) and just play for as long as possible getting drinks and having fun. I make it out ahead about 40% of the time, but I always enjoy myself. I rationalize it that I am just paying to have a unique, yearly experience (even if it makes little economic sense).
    - dimitrios1 5y ago
      This is exactly how to treat a casino. It's a Dave and Busters with better prizes if you win.
      - jxf 5y ago
        A nearly perfect description. (That is, barring the few cases where it _is_ legally possible to beat the house, e.g. card-counting in blackjack.)
kabdib 5y ago
Thomas Bass' book The Eudamonic Pie describes a project by some people from UC Santa Cruz who did computer-assisted timing analysis of roulette wheels, and did pretty well at applying it (for a while). This was in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and hardware has only gotten smaller and more concealable. I'm not surprised at casinos going to digital "wheels", though it sure seems like cheating when there's no possibility of cheating :-)
- anfractuosity 5y ago
  I really enjoyed that book, there's also this earlier work by Edward O. Thorp and Claude Shannon - https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/thorp.pdf https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/thorp.pdf
- wmwmwm 5y ago
  I remember reading it and wondering whether they’d have had more chance of making their fortunes building home computers out of their garages given the era! Great story though (I read the British edition - The Newtonian Casino)
  - fgh 5y ago
    They ended up founding the Prediction Company and got pretty rich anyway...
- deutschewelle 5y ago
  [dead]
chkas 5y ago
I often played roulette, and the ball came to rest at 28 about every 3rd time. I always won a lot of money. It was toy money and the imperfect roulette wheel was made of plastic and I was about 10. Of course, this effect can also occur in the casino, although weaker.
analog31 5y ago
>>> “Computers were looked upon as creatures from outer space… Few persons, including casino managers, were vocationally qualified to distinguish myth from reality.” Good to see some things haven't changed.
- zxcvbn4038 5y ago
  It has actually gotten much better - head over to Disney+ and watch "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes" to see how people viewed computers in the 60s.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    The first of a great series of wacky live-action films with Kurt Russell and Cesar Romero among others. Back in the 70s it was common to have special all-school events where they'd show 16mm prints of Disney live-action films in the school auditorium. It's amazing how much of these movies I still remember beat by beat decades later.
    - zxcvbn4038 5y ago
      Back in the day I used to carry around a couple Betamax (yes!) cassettes so when the teachers called out sick we could watch something on tv. The school only owned two movies - The Sound Of Music and Romeo and Juliette (with several minutes of static recorded over a love scene). You can only watch the first 40 minutes of The Sound Of Music so many times. I was a hero for having Bullet and Dirty Harry on standby.
zxcvbn4038 5y ago
Not covered in the article is how casinos deal with biased wheels in the modern era. Are they replaced regularly? Are they engineered from more durable materials? Do they audit the wheels to look for biases?
- usefulcat 5y ago
  “Today, most wheels have gone digital, run by algorithms programmed to favor the house”
  - bluGill 5y ago
    So long as the random number generator is unbiased they need no other programming in their favor
  - jen729w 5y ago
    This stood out for me. Does anyone know what it means? I’ve seen electronic roulette wheels, as in on a computer screen, but that can’t be what this means. And if a tiny ball is bouncing around on a real wheel, which is surely what ‘roulette’ still is to the vast majority of people (because the thing on the TV is no fun at all), how has that “gone digital”? Edit: maybe “most wheels” have gone digital, as in most punters at most places are happy to play the TV. I dare say it’s quicker and simpler than standing round a table waiting for someone to spin a wheel. Sounds absolutely terrible though. Might as well just play what we call ‘the pokies’ here in Australia.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Are you saying that physical wheels are also digital and uses some "magic" (magnets?) to land the ball to a number that's actually been determined by an RNG? Seems unlikely, especially considering at the local casino it seems like it's doing the total opposite - the physical roulette tables have a "debug" screen for the dealer that looks like it's monitoring and digitizing the roulette's output and I'm suspecting it might actually be using the physical table as the RNG for the computerized roulette you see on machines.
- jedberg 5y ago
fasteo 5y ago
Related. The Pelayo clan, from Spain, did the same years ago [1] [1] https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2012/04/16/inenglish/1334576944_755582.html https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2012/04/16/inenglish/13345...
aborsy 5y ago
The first wearable computer was conceived in 1955 by Claude Shannon and Ed Thorp to predict roulette, culminating in a joint effort for roulette prediction in Las Vegas https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/729523 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/729523 https://www.roulette17.com/stories/claude-shannon-ed-thorpe-beating-roulette/ https://www.roulette17.com/stories/claude-shannon-ed-thorpe-...
acomjean 5y ago
I won money at roulette. I think I got 5 out of 6 of my almost 50/50 bets. How? Dumb luck. I took my winnings and had a nice meal. The hardest part is stopping. It’s fun to play. Generally I loose when I gamble. The thing about gambling is most people only talk about it when they win.
wodyguy 5y ago
I believe it. It's structured portfolio management. He was likely managing a portfolio of "winning numbers" and adjusting allocations based on micro trends

113 points by yarapavan 5y ago

> Teetering on bankruptcy, the casino owner had no option but to issue Jarecki a 15-day ban… for “being too good.” It's funny how they never ban you, if you lose too much.

Kranar 5y ago
Why would they ban you for losing?
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  They don't ban you, but many casinos, particularly the larger ones, will "suggest" that you might want to take a break if you are losing a lot of money very fast. A player that goes bankrupt is less likely to return.
  - JackFr 5y ago
    I’ve personally been told by a dealer “Really, you don’t need to lose it all tonight.”
  - Kranar 5y ago
    Okay sure, the point is that there is no reason to believe a casino would act against its own interest, so I'm not sure what's funny about a casino banning someone who's found a way of consistently winning money. The casino will serve its own interests and refuse to continue playing with you if you found a winning strategy instead of risking bankruptcy. Nothing really illogical about that.
    - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
      > The casino will serve its own interests and refuse to continue playing with you if you found a winning strategy instead of risking bankruptcy. Nothing really illogical about that. Well casino knows of and has a winning strategy for eg. roulette games. While the odds are in their favour (by the design of the game), they let you play, but if the odds are in your favour (by the wear and tear) they won't. Imagine some national lottery say that you won too many prizes with lotto tickets.
      - Kranar 5y ago
        Yes, this is how a casino works by the very design of the game, as you mention. I would be very surprised if someone did not know that. As for lotteries, they also ban people if they win too frequently. This doesn't happen for random lotteries where you pick random numbers since I've never heard of a case where someone managed to figure out how such a lottery worked without committing a crime, but many government operated lotteries do run sports books and if you win too frequently they do ban you.
      - IncRnd 5y ago
        > Imagine some national lottery say that you won too many prizes with lotto tickets. This is exactly how casinos operate. If you are winning against the odds, you are either a cheater or too lucky. In some cases you get put into a black book where that casino and others ban you. Furthermore, if you have a problem with gambling too much, casinos may also ban you, since you can sue a casino for letting you gamble.
thatguy0900 5y ago
Well they don't let you play for free so they kind of do
JKCalhoun 5y ago
I hate the casinos as much as you do but to be cynical, they're exactly what the gamblers of the world deserve. They seem made for each other.

lisper 5y ago

> “I [experimented] until I had a rough outline of a system based on the previous winning numbers,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald in 1969. “If numbers 1, 2, and 3 won the last 3 rounds, [I could determine] what was most likely to win the next 3.” I'm calling shenanigans here. I can believe that a roulette wheel might have biases, and that you might be able to leverage those to beat the house. I have a very hard time believing that a roulette wheel could have a contingent bias such that the next outcome depended on the previous one. What possible mechanism could cause that? I'm also skeptical that even if there were such a mechanism that you could reliably determine it with the number of data points that one person could plausibly collect and analyze, especially in the 1960s. In fact, let's do the math: 37*37=1369 so you'd need that many spins at a minimum just to see every possible number pair come up once. Let's suppose that a spin takes a minute. It would take a minimum of 22 hours of watching one roulette wheel to see every combination. More likely you'd need 10-100 times that much data to get a statistically significant result. And that is just for one wheel [UPDATE: and a one-round contingent bias. The claim is a three-round contingent bias. Collecting that much data for even a single wheel would take years of constant effort.] Nope. Not possible.

JKCalhoun 5y ago
Yes, I expect more obfuscation to keep the casino owners guessing.
iratewizard 5y ago
In the story, they tell the audience that he weaved a false narrative to the public about super computers. There's no reason not to believe that this is also a fabrication.
- ojosilva 5y ago
  In fact, the amount of press around the guy seems to work as an invitation for people to come to casinos. I wouldn't discard the whole thing as a total scheme, a fabrication set up between the "professor" and the cassinos interested in attracting naive gamblers in this perfect marketing stunt!
5y ago

tgv 5y ago

> might cause certain wheels to land on certain numbers more frequently than randomocity prescribed randomocity? What's this, the sequel to Megamind?

zxcvbn4038 5y ago
And just like that Disney bought the IP rights to Randomocity and started planning the Avengers tie-ins for Marvel Phase 23.
- le-mark 5y ago
  Characters with good luck as power have arisen from time to time. Domino from marvel, recently portrayed in Deadpool and a character in Fred Pohls heechee saga are two I can think of

mysterydip 5y ago

There's almost no point in playing a casino today. Nearly everything is digital and biased towards the house, even moreso than straight probabilities would tell you. If you ever do win big, "payouts are void in the event of machine malfunction".

Nextgrid 5y ago
Some games like blackjack, roulette, etc still have physical versions. Obviously, a casino should never be seen as a money-making option but as an entertainment option. Walk in with a set budget you are happy to lose and don’t gamble beyond that. Most will allow you to set a limit and they won’t let you buy chips beyond that even if you tried. Drinks are very cheap even in high cost of living places so if you can control your gambling (which is more difficult than you imagine - speaking from experience here - that’s how casinos make their money) you can get relatively cheap entertainment. They’re also open until very late (some are 24/7) which is a nice perk.
- bikingbismuth 5y ago
  When I attend conferences in Vegas, I set a $300 budget for craps. I try to find $5 tables (really tough to do anymore) and just play for as long as possible getting drinks and having fun. I make it out ahead about 40% of the time, but I always enjoy myself. I rationalize it that I am just paying to have a unique, yearly experience (even if it makes little economic sense).
  - dimitrios1 5y ago
    This is exactly how to treat a casino. It's a Dave and Busters with better prizes if you win.
    - jxf 5y ago
      A nearly perfect description. (That is, barring the few cases where it _is_ legally possible to beat the house, e.g. card-counting in blackjack.)

kabdib 5y ago

Thomas Bass' book The Eudamonic Pie describes a project by some people from UC Santa Cruz who did computer-assisted timing analysis of roulette wheels, and did pretty well at applying it (for a while). This was in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and hardware has only gotten smaller and more concealable. I'm not surprised at casinos going to digital "wheels", though it sure seems like cheating when there's no possibility of cheating :-)

anfractuosity 5y ago
I really enjoyed that book, there's also this earlier work by Edward O. Thorp and Claude Shannon - https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/thorp.pdf https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/thorp.pdf
wmwmwm 5y ago
I remember reading it and wondering whether they’d have had more chance of making their fortunes building home computers out of their garages given the era! Great story though (I read the British edition - The Newtonian Casino)
- fgh 5y ago
  They ended up founding the Prediction Company and got pretty rich anyway...
deutschewelle 5y ago
[dead]

chkas 5y ago

I often played roulette, and the ball came to rest at 28 about every 3rd time. I always won a lot of money. It was toy money and the imperfect roulette wheel was made of plastic and I was about 10. Of course, this effect can also occur in the casino, although weaker.

analog31 5y ago

>>> “Computers were looked upon as creatures from outer space… Few persons, including casino managers, were vocationally qualified to distinguish myth from reality.” Good to see some things haven't changed.

zxcvbn4038 5y ago
It has actually gotten much better - head over to Disney+ and watch "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes" to see how people viewed computers in the 60s.
- dhosek 5y ago
  The first of a great series of wacky live-action films with Kurt Russell and Cesar Romero among others. Back in the 70s it was common to have special all-school events where they'd show 16mm prints of Disney live-action films in the school auditorium. It's amazing how much of these movies I still remember beat by beat decades later.
  - zxcvbn4038 5y ago
    Back in the day I used to carry around a couple Betamax (yes!) cassettes so when the teachers called out sick we could watch something on tv. The school only owned two movies - The Sound Of Music and Romeo and Juliette (with several minutes of static recorded over a love scene). You can only watch the first 40 minutes of The Sound Of Music so many times. I was a hero for having Bullet and Dirty Harry on standby.

zxcvbn4038 5y ago

Not covered in the article is how casinos deal with biased wheels in the modern era. Are they replaced regularly? Are they engineered from more durable materials? Do they audit the wheels to look for biases?

usefulcat 5y ago
“Today, most wheels have gone digital, run by algorithms programmed to favor the house”
- bluGill 5y ago
  So long as the random number generator is unbiased they need no other programming in their favor
- jen729w 5y ago
  This stood out for me. Does anyone know what it means? I’ve seen electronic roulette wheels, as in on a computer screen, but that can’t be what this means. And if a tiny ball is bouncing around on a real wheel, which is surely what ‘roulette’ still is to the vast majority of people (because the thing on the TV is no fun at all), how has that “gone digital”? Edit: maybe “most wheels” have gone digital, as in most punters at most places are happy to play the TV. I dare say it’s quicker and simpler than standing round a table waiting for someone to spin a wheel. Sounds absolutely terrible though. Might as well just play what we call ‘the pokies’ here in Australia.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Are you saying that physical wheels are also digital and uses some "magic" (magnets?) to land the ball to a number that's actually been determined by an RNG? Seems unlikely, especially considering at the local casino it seems like it's doing the total opposite - the physical roulette tables have a "debug" screen for the dealer that looks like it's monitoring and digitizing the roulette's output and I'm suspecting it might actually be using the physical table as the RNG for the computerized roulette you see on machines.
jedberg 5y ago

fasteo 5y ago

Related. The Pelayo clan, from Spain, did the same years ago [1] [1] https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2012/04/16/inenglish/1334576944_755582.html https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2012/04/16/inenglish/13345...

aborsy 5y ago

The first wearable computer was conceived in 1955 by Claude Shannon and Ed Thorp to predict roulette, culminating in a joint effort for roulette prediction in Las Vegas https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/729523 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/729523 https://www.roulette17.com/stories/claude-shannon-ed-thorpe-beating-roulette/ https://www.roulette17.com/stories/claude-shannon-ed-thorpe-...

acomjean 5y ago

I won money at roulette. I think I got 5 out of 6 of my almost 50/50 bets. How? Dumb luck. I took my winnings and had a nice meal. The hardest part is stopping. It’s fun to play. Generally I loose when I gamble. The thing about gambling is most people only talk about it when they win.

wodyguy 5y ago

I believe it. It's structured portfolio management. He was likely managing a portfolio of "winning numbers" and adjusting allocations based on micro trends