25 ms·

A Gambler Who Beat Roulette

209 points by cyanbane 4y ago

oxfeed65261 4y ago
https://archive.ph/7CmWl https://archive.ph/7CmWl
throwaway81523 4y ago
Article starts out lame but then gets very good. Worth reading all the way through. In the 1980s some nerds figured out how to use hidden computers to beat roulette, by placing bets after the ball is already spinning and the computer can time its movement to predict (nowhere near perfectly, but well enough to have a statistical edge over the house) where it will land. There is a fantastic book about the adventure, called "The Eudaemonic Pie". The guys in the article managed to do the same thing without computers, and it drove the casino detective nuts. If you like the article, the book is also great.
- staringback 4y ago
  I'm not expert on casinos, but placing a bet after the ball starts spinning just sounds wrong? Why would casinos ever allow that?
  - nsxwolf 4y ago
    The game would seem really boring if that's how it worked. There's an energy when the ball starts going that makes you want to bet.
  - qup 4y ago
    Because it wins them more money, until wearable PCs come on the scene.
  - rrobukef 4y ago
    It's probably because people would believe the dealer is cheater and throwing harder or softer in exactly the same way. Or it is so the casino can argue roulette is a game of skill instead of chance. But this would be paradoxical.
  - jfk13 4y ago
    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.
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      The article confirms this: > There’s one surefire way casinos could stop prediction: calling “no more bets” before the ball is in motion. But they won’t. That would cut into profits by limiting the amount of play and deterring casual gamblers.
    - mrandish 4y ago
      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.
    - pmoriarty 4y ago
      How can customers be assured the casino isn't using a magnet or some other cheating device?
      - vuln 4y ago
        Gambling regulations and board certify / audit these machines / tables, etc?
        pmoriarty 4y ago
        How can the consumer have confidence in any of those?
        vuln 4y ago
  - davidktr 4y ago
    from the article > There’s one surefire way casinos could stop prediction: calling “no more bets” before the ball is in motion. But they won’t. That would cut into profits by limiting the amount of play and deterring casual gamblers. Instead, the industry seems willing to pay a toll to a select few who know the secret, while trying to design out the flaws that make the game vulnerable.
- bradreaves2 4y ago
  Claude Shannon[1] claims he did something similar in the early 60's, proving it worked in Vegas. He and his collaborator Ed Thorpe quit playing well before the legitimate businessmen who ran the casinos could realize they were winning too much and have a friendly chat with them about it. For more, see: https://boingboing.net/2017/07/27/wearable-computing.html https://boingboing.net/2017/07/27/wearable-computing.html [1] If the name doesn't ring a bell, he discovered that Boolean logic could be used to analyze and design electric switching circuits -- as a Master's thesis. He went on to a storied career at Bell Labs where he invented Information Theory.
  - ackbar03 4y ago
    The story was about Claude Shannon. And Ed Thorpe was the father of modern day hedge funds or something
    - deeel 4y ago
      There is a good interview with Thorp around his quantitive strategy he developed after beating Las Vegas: https://thunderclapresearch.com/a-conversaation-with-ed-thorp/ https://thunderclapresearch.com/a-conversaation-with-ed-thor...
  - Terretta 4y ago
    Yes, the article goes into that with photos and everything.
- gtoubassi 4y ago
  +1 the book is entertaining (esp for engineers). Also was released under the title "The Newtonian Casino".
MrMember 4y ago
>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.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  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.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    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.
    - mjklin 4y ago
      “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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracies_against_the_laity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracies_against_the_laity
hkmaxpro 4y ago
Similar but different story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30489022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30489022 > Though roulette was considered by many to be purely a game of chance, Jarecki was convinced that it could be “beat.” > He noticed that at the end of each night, casinos would replace cards and dice with fresh sets — but the expensive roulette wheels went untouched and often stayed in service for decades before being replaced. > Like any other machine, these wheels acquired wear and tear. Jarecki began to suspect that tiny defects — chips, dents, scratches, unlevel surfaces — might cause certain wheels to land on certain numbers more frequently than randomocity prescribed.
- mhb 4y ago
  randomocity :)
htrp 4y ago
if these are the people i think they are, they practiced a ton to train themselves to be able to identify the underlying physical aspects, in effect memorizing how to do everything the computer would nominally do. if you know wheel rpm plus an estimate of the speed the croupier throws the ball, you can get a pretty good physics sim of where the ball lands.
- zamnos 4y ago
  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.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Like many urban legends, there's probably some truth - https://www.vice.com/en/article/bn3j44/dice-control-dominic-the-dice-dominator-loriggio-craps https://www.vice.com/en/article/bn3j44/dice-control-dominic-... digs into it. Card counting is well known and casinos encourage it, because MOST people can't do it well enough, and they shuffle often enough.
  - spaceguillotine 4y ago
    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.
  - nestorD 4y ago
    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).
    - 4y ago
tzs 4y ago
The "Roulette Assault" episode of the old History Channel series "Breaking Vegas" covers another way to beat roulette but without requiring computers or communications devices in the casino or timing anything. Archive.org has a copy of that episode [1]. A family went to casinos around Europe and observed the roulette wheels, keeping extensive records on where the ball landed. They were not covert about it. They'd just openly write down the results. You might think casinos would not allow that, but actually they love people who do things like that. A person taking notes is a person who thinks they can invent a system to beat the casino, and those people often lose a lot of money before giving up. The family took all that data and analyzed it to find wheels that had slight consistent biases that were big enough that bets based on them would come out ahead long term. They then went around making those bets and won long term. The family members had spent so much time looking at wheels that they could recognize individual wheels by things like scratches and discolorations and other ordinary visible wear and tear, so even if a casino moved a wheel the family would recognize it and know which bets to place. There are a couple other "Breaking Vegas" episodes I remember as standing out. "Ultimate Cheat" [2] is about another way to win at roulette, but this one involved a team cheating on the bets using a twist on an old cheating method. There's an old way to cheat on bets where you place small bets that consist of a stack of minimal value chips. You adjust the stack so that the croupier cannot actually see the bottom chip. You and your teammates all do this. If one the bets wins you try to use sleight of hand to replace the stack with a stack that consists of minimal value chips except for a high value bottom chip, still arranged so the bottom chip is not visible to the croupier. Your teammates can help by trying to distract the croupier so your sleight of hand won't be spotted. When the croupier goes to your winning bet you point out the amount is wrong and point out the high value chip in the stack that the croupier missed. Casinos are on to that, and if they suspect at all that you are doing it before paying out they will go to the security tapes to make sure no one tried any sleight of hand on the winning stack. The team in this episode realized they could work this the other way. Instead of trying to retroactively raise the value of winning bets they could retroactively lower the value of losing bets. So now the first stack is a stack of low value chips with a high value chip on the bottom with the stack askew to hide the high value chip. If the bet wins no sleight of hand is needed. The high value chip is already in place. If the bet loses that's when they try sleight of hand to switch it for a stack with all low chips. That's easier than switching a winning stack because the croupier is paying attention to the winners. If the casino goes to the tape after a win no problem. The tape will show no tampering because there was none. The casino security people knew the team was up to something for quite a while and were scrutinizing every one of their wins and getting really annoyed and frustrated that they couldn't figure out what the heck was going on. "Counterfeit King" [3] was about counterfeit casino tokens. Manufacturers incorporate a variety of anti-counterfeiting measures in their token designs, but Louis Colavecchio was able to match them all. The only reason anyone knew there was counterfeiting going on was casinos were finding themselves gaining token. No one, including the token manufacturers, were able to figure out which tokens were genuine and which were Colavecchio's. [1] https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-10-roulette-assault https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-10-roulette... [2] https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-01-ultimate-cheat https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-01-ultimate... [3] https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-06-counterfeit-king https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-06-counterf...
jamal-kumar 4y ago
A couple of notes from my own experience in casino hacking fun: 1. if they spot you singularly winning way too hard, they will cut you off 2. if you can distribute the wins wide enough between enough individuals you might get away with it There ARE exploits and you can get away with them. People find them pretty regularly and the ones who get away with it are really organized. My favorites over the past years: Weak PRNG in the Buffalo slot machines [1], and people cleaning that, and the guy who figured out an exploit in the game king brand video poker machines [2] - One got away with it and the other didn't, it's worth being aware of how. [1] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/russians-engineer-brilliant-slot-machine-cheat-casinos-no-fix/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/russians-engineer-brilliant-sl... [2] https://www.wired.com/2013/05/game-king/ https://www.wired.com/2013/05/game-king/
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
  “Got away with it” would imply they committed an elaborate scheme. It sounds like they played the game with a strategy and never broke any rules. Except the cardinal one that the House always wins.
  - whichfawkes 4y ago
    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.
- TheHappyOddish 4y ago
  > 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?
urs 4y ago
This was neat. It reminded me of a similar story in poker history - Stu Ungar. Stu was a phenomenal player who won the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event three times, in 1980, 1981, and 1997. Like Tosa, Stu had an uncanny ability to read his opponents and seemingly predict their moves. Similar to Tosa, people questioned Ungar's poker prowess as to whether he was cheating or not (it's a pretty deep conspiracy rabbit hole that you can go down if you'd like). People wondered if he had some secret method for reading his opponents — like whether his blue glasses were letting him read marked cards, but it turned out to be like Tosa, he was a product of pretty deliberate and intense practice. In both cases, it's a weird example of humans being exceptional at pattern matching in ways you almost can't imagine after deliberate practice. Ungar is most famous for his WSOP win calling down with a ten high to win. I think a fascinating aspect to all of this is the other idea in any edge based game where nearly all great players will start on a winning streak and how incredibly difficult it is to discern whether you are lucky or good (there's a small chapter in "The Signal and the Noise" about that specifically with poker players).
- j0hnyl 4y ago
  There are also people that spend hours every day practicing throwing dice on replica craps tables to gain a slight edge.
kraussvonespy 4y ago
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.
- lcedp 4y ago
  It must be quite a book if you reread every year. Could you elaborate on what questions that book answers?
  - kraussvonespy 4y ago
    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.
emdeedee 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230406203734/https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-how-to-beat-roulette-gambler-figures-it-out/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230406203734/https://www.bloom...
llamataboot 4y ago
In a previous life as an advantage gambler (there are always edges somewhere, but you better know you actually have one and know why you know and your risk of ruin etc), I would say that "how can we keep exploiting this below the radar" is as common of a discussion topic as "what is there to exploit" Card counting is a perfect example - you absolutely can count cards in the right type of blackjack, and you absolutely can get an edge and casinos absolutely know this and can ban you no questions asked if you are tagged as an advantage gambler. Always rubs me a bit the wrong way actually, given that by its very nature the casino is advantage gambling 99% of the time whether you know it or not...
- marktangotango 4y ago
  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.
  - arsenide 4y ago
    I’m curious about this. Do you have a dataset? I’d be happy to take a look.
nessus42 4y ago
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.
- Terretta 4y ago
  Had probably read Dr. Z's guide to winning at the track
  - nessus42 4y ago
    It's likely he did, since he read just about anything reputable related to gambling. But he was doing this before Dr. Z's was published.
listenallyall 4y ago
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?
hilbert42 4y ago
Brilliant at roulette they may be but their strategy seems shit. Why on earth did they make themselves so obvious? Softly, softley catchy monkey. Win less over a much longer time. I really am at a loss as to why they acted so. They were on a good thing, and with care they could have kept at it for years.
- 55555 4y ago
  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.
  - hilbert42 4y ago
    OK, if it was show-off time that's fine and makes sense. Still, if I'd had such fortune and skill I'd prefer to fade away quietly. :-)
tmp60beb0ed 4y ago
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?
PeterStuer 4y ago
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.
- defrost 4y ago
  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). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie
TheHappyOddish 4y ago
> He traveled the world to talk about the Ritz case, giving speeches in Macau, Las Vegas and Tasmania. Ah yes, all the high roller capitals.

209 points by cyanbane 4y ago

https://archive.ph/7CmWl https://archive.ph/7CmWl

Article starts out lame but then gets very good. Worth reading all the way through. In the 1980s some nerds figured out how to use hidden computers to beat roulette, by placing bets after the ball is already spinning and the computer can time its movement to predict (nowhere near perfectly, but well enough to have a statistical edge over the house) where it will land. There is a fantastic book about the adventure, called "The Eudaemonic Pie". The guys in the article managed to do the same thing without computers, and it drove the casino detective nuts. If you like the article, the book is also great.

staringback 4y ago
I'm not expert on casinos, but placing a bet after the ball starts spinning just sounds wrong? Why would casinos ever allow that?
- nsxwolf 4y ago
  The game would seem really boring if that's how it worked. There's an energy when the ball starts going that makes you want to bet.
- qup 4y ago
  Because it wins them more money, until wearable PCs come on the scene.
- rrobukef 4y ago
  It's probably because people would believe the dealer is cheater and throwing harder or softer in exactly the same way. Or it is so the casino can argue roulette is a game of skill instead of chance. But this would be paradoxical.
- jfk13 4y ago
  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.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    The article confirms this: > There’s one surefire way casinos could stop prediction: calling “no more bets” before the ball is in motion. But they won’t. That would cut into profits by limiting the amount of play and deterring casual gamblers.
  - mrandish 4y ago
    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.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    How can customers be assured the casino isn't using a magnet or some other cheating device?
    - vuln 4y ago
      Gambling regulations and board certify / audit these machines / tables, etc?
      - pmoriarty 4y ago
        How can the consumer have confidence in any of those?
        vuln 4y ago
- davidktr 4y ago
  from the article > There’s one surefire way casinos could stop prediction: calling “no more bets” before the ball is in motion. But they won’t. That would cut into profits by limiting the amount of play and deterring casual gamblers. Instead, the industry seems willing to pay a toll to a select few who know the secret, while trying to design out the flaws that make the game vulnerable.
bradreaves2 4y ago
Claude Shannon[1] claims he did something similar in the early 60's, proving it worked in Vegas. He and his collaborator Ed Thorpe quit playing well before the legitimate businessmen who ran the casinos could realize they were winning too much and have a friendly chat with them about it. For more, see: https://boingboing.net/2017/07/27/wearable-computing.html https://boingboing.net/2017/07/27/wearable-computing.html [1] If the name doesn't ring a bell, he discovered that Boolean logic could be used to analyze and design electric switching circuits -- as a Master's thesis. He went on to a storied career at Bell Labs where he invented Information Theory.
- ackbar03 4y ago
  The story was about Claude Shannon. And Ed Thorpe was the father of modern day hedge funds or something
  - deeel 4y ago
    There is a good interview with Thorp around his quantitive strategy he developed after beating Las Vegas: https://thunderclapresearch.com/a-conversaation-with-ed-thorp/ https://thunderclapresearch.com/a-conversaation-with-ed-thor...
- Terretta 4y ago
  Yes, the article goes into that with photos and everything.
gtoubassi 4y ago
+1 the book is entertaining (esp for engineers). Also was released under the title "The Newtonian Casino".

MrMember 4y ago

>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.

ryandrake 4y ago
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.
- javajosh 4y ago
  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.
  - mjklin 4y ago
    “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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracies_against_the_laity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracies_against_the_laity

hkmaxpro 4y ago

Similar but different story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30489022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30489022 > Though roulette was considered by many to be purely a game of chance, Jarecki was convinced that it could be “beat.” > He noticed that at the end of each night, casinos would replace cards and dice with fresh sets — but the expensive roulette wheels went untouched and often stayed in service for decades before being replaced. > Like any other machine, these wheels acquired wear and tear. Jarecki began to suspect that tiny defects — chips, dents, scratches, unlevel surfaces — might cause certain wheels to land on certain numbers more frequently than randomocity prescribed.

mhb 4y ago
randomocity :)

htrp 4y ago

if these are the people i think they are, they practiced a ton to train themselves to be able to identify the underlying physical aspects, in effect memorizing how to do everything the computer would nominally do. if you know wheel rpm plus an estimate of the speed the croupier throws the ball, you can get a pretty good physics sim of where the ball lands.

zamnos 4y ago
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.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Like many urban legends, there's probably some truth - https://www.vice.com/en/article/bn3j44/dice-control-dominic-the-dice-dominator-loriggio-craps https://www.vice.com/en/article/bn3j44/dice-control-dominic-... digs into it. Card counting is well known and casinos encourage it, because MOST people can't do it well enough, and they shuffle often enough.
- spaceguillotine 4y ago
  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.
- nestorD 4y ago
  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).
  - 4y ago

tzs 4y ago

The "Roulette Assault" episode of the old History Channel series "Breaking Vegas" covers another way to beat roulette but without requiring computers or communications devices in the casino or timing anything. Archive.org has a copy of that episode [1]. A family went to casinos around Europe and observed the roulette wheels, keeping extensive records on where the ball landed. They were not covert about it. They'd just openly write down the results. You might think casinos would not allow that, but actually they love people who do things like that. A person taking notes is a person who thinks they can invent a system to beat the casino, and those people often lose a lot of money before giving up. The family took all that data and analyzed it to find wheels that had slight consistent biases that were big enough that bets based on them would come out ahead long term. They then went around making those bets and won long term. The family members had spent so much time looking at wheels that they could recognize individual wheels by things like scratches and discolorations and other ordinary visible wear and tear, so even if a casino moved a wheel the family would recognize it and know which bets to place. There are a couple other "Breaking Vegas" episodes I remember as standing out. "Ultimate Cheat" [2] is about another way to win at roulette, but this one involved a team cheating on the bets using a twist on an old cheating method. There's an old way to cheat on bets where you place small bets that consist of a stack of minimal value chips. You adjust the stack so that the croupier cannot actually see the bottom chip. You and your teammates all do this. If one the bets wins you try to use sleight of hand to replace the stack with a stack that consists of minimal value chips except for a high value bottom chip, still arranged so the bottom chip is not visible to the croupier. Your teammates can help by trying to distract the croupier so your sleight of hand won't be spotted. When the croupier goes to your winning bet you point out the amount is wrong and point out the high value chip in the stack that the croupier missed. Casinos are on to that, and if they suspect at all that you are doing it before paying out they will go to the security tapes to make sure no one tried any sleight of hand on the winning stack. The team in this episode realized they could work this the other way. Instead of trying to retroactively raise the value of winning bets they could retroactively lower the value of losing bets. So now the first stack is a stack of low value chips with a high value chip on the bottom with the stack askew to hide the high value chip. If the bet wins no sleight of hand is needed. The high value chip is already in place. If the bet loses that's when they try sleight of hand to switch it for a stack with all low chips. That's easier than switching a winning stack because the croupier is paying attention to the winners. If the casino goes to the tape after a win no problem. The tape will show no tampering because there was none. The casino security people knew the team was up to something for quite a while and were scrutinizing every one of their wins and getting really annoyed and frustrated that they couldn't figure out what the heck was going on. "Counterfeit King" [3] was about counterfeit casino tokens. Manufacturers incorporate a variety of anti-counterfeiting measures in their token designs, but Louis Colavecchio was able to match them all. The only reason anyone knew there was counterfeiting going on was casinos were finding themselves gaining token. No one, including the token manufacturers, were able to figure out which tokens were genuine and which were Colavecchio's. [1] https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-10-roulette-assault https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-10-roulette... [2] https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-01-ultimate-cheat https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-01-ultimate... [3] https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-06-counterfeit-king https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-06-counterf...

jamal-kumar 4y ago

A couple of notes from my own experience in casino hacking fun: 1. if they spot you singularly winning way too hard, they will cut you off 2. if you can distribute the wins wide enough between enough individuals you might get away with it There ARE exploits and you can get away with them. People find them pretty regularly and the ones who get away with it are really organized. My favorites over the past years: Weak PRNG in the Buffalo slot machines [1], and people cleaning that, and the guy who figured out an exploit in the game king brand video poker machines [2] - One got away with it and the other didn't, it's worth being aware of how. [1] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/russians-engineer-brilliant-slot-machine-cheat-casinos-no-fix/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/russians-engineer-brilliant-sl... [2] https://www.wired.com/2013/05/game-king/ https://www.wired.com/2013/05/game-king/

0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
“Got away with it” would imply they committed an elaborate scheme. It sounds like they played the game with a strategy and never broke any rules. Except the cardinal one that the House always wins.
- whichfawkes 4y ago
  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.
TheHappyOddish 4y ago
> 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?

urs 4y ago

This was neat. It reminded me of a similar story in poker history - Stu Ungar. Stu was a phenomenal player who won the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event three times, in 1980, 1981, and 1997. Like Tosa, Stu had an uncanny ability to read his opponents and seemingly predict their moves. Similar to Tosa, people questioned Ungar's poker prowess as to whether he was cheating or not (it's a pretty deep conspiracy rabbit hole that you can go down if you'd like). People wondered if he had some secret method for reading his opponents — like whether his blue glasses were letting him read marked cards, but it turned out to be like Tosa, he was a product of pretty deliberate and intense practice. In both cases, it's a weird example of humans being exceptional at pattern matching in ways you almost can't imagine after deliberate practice. Ungar is most famous for his WSOP win calling down with a ten high to win. I think a fascinating aspect to all of this is the other idea in any edge based game where nearly all great players will start on a winning streak and how incredibly difficult it is to discern whether you are lucky or good (there's a small chapter in "The Signal and the Noise" about that specifically with poker players).

j0hnyl 4y ago
There are also people that spend hours every day practicing throwing dice on replica craps tables to gain a slight edge.

kraussvonespy 4y ago

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.

lcedp 4y ago
It must be quite a book if you reread every year. Could you elaborate on what questions that book answers?
- kraussvonespy 4y ago
  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.

emdeedee 4y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230406203734/https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-how-to-beat-roulette-gambler-figures-it-out/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230406203734/https://www.bloom...

llamataboot 4y ago

In a previous life as an advantage gambler (there are always edges somewhere, but you better know you actually have one and know why you know and your risk of ruin etc), I would say that "how can we keep exploiting this below the radar" is as common of a discussion topic as "what is there to exploit" Card counting is a perfect example - you absolutely can count cards in the right type of blackjack, and you absolutely can get an edge and casinos absolutely know this and can ban you no questions asked if you are tagged as an advantage gambler. Always rubs me a bit the wrong way actually, given that by its very nature the casino is advantage gambling 99% of the time whether you know it or not...

marktangotango 4y ago
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.
- arsenide 4y ago
  I’m curious about this. Do you have a dataset? I’d be happy to take a look.

nessus42 4y ago

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.

Terretta 4y ago
Had probably read Dr. Z's guide to winning at the track
- nessus42 4y ago
  It's likely he did, since he read just about anything reputable related to gambling. But he was doing this before Dr. Z's was published.

listenallyall 4y ago

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?

hilbert42 4y ago

Brilliant at roulette they may be but their strategy seems shit. Why on earth did they make themselves so obvious? Softly, softley catchy monkey. Win less over a much longer time. I really am at a loss as to why they acted so. They were on a good thing, and with care they could have kept at it for years.

55555 4y ago
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.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  OK, if it was show-off time that's fine and makes sense. Still, if I'd had such fortune and skill I'd prefer to fade away quietly. :-)

tmp60beb0ed 4y ago

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?

PeterStuer 4y ago

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.

defrost 4y ago
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). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie

TheHappyOddish 4y ago

> He traveled the world to talk about the Ritz case, giving speeches in Macau, Las Vegas and Tasmania. Ah yes, all the high roller capitals.