>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.<p>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.
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.<p>If you like the article, the book is also great.
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.)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Similar but different story: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30489022" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30489022</a><p>> Though roulette was considered by many to be purely a game of chance, Jarecki was convinced that it could be “beat.”<p>> 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.<p>> Like any other machine, these wheels acquired wear and tear. Jarecki began to suspect that tiny defects — chips, dents, scratches, unlevel surfaces — might cause certain wheels to land on certain numbers more frequently than randomocity prescribed.
This was neat. It reminded me of a similar story in poker history - Stu Ungar. Stu was a phenomenal player who won the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event three times, in 1980, 1981, and 1997. Like Tosa, Stu had an uncanny ability to read his opponents and seemingly predict their moves.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Ungar is most famous for his WSOP win calling down with a ten high to win.<p>I think a fascinating aspect to all of this is the other idea in any edge based game where nearly all great players will start on a winning streak and how incredibly difficult it is to discern whether you are lucky or good (there's a small chapter in "The Signal and the Noise" about that specifically with poker players).
A couple of notes from my own experience in casino hacking fun:<p>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<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.wired.com/2017/02/russians-engineer-brilliant-slot-machine-cheat-casinos-no-fix/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/2017/02/russians-engineer-brilliant-sl...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.wired.com/2013/05/game-king/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/2013/05/game-king/</a>
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"<p>Card counting is a perfect example - you absolutely <i>can</i> count cards in the right type of blackjack, and you absolutely <i>can</i> get an edge and casinos absolutely know this and can ban you no questions asked if you are tagged as an advantage gambler.<p>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...
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.<p>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.
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].<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>There are a couple other "Breaking Vegas" episodes I remember as standing out.<p>"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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If the casino goes to the tape after a win no problem. The tape will show no tampering because there was none.<p>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.<p>"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.<p>[1] <a href="https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-10-roulette-assault" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-10-roulette...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-01-ultimate-cheat" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-01-ultimate...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-06-counterfeit-king" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-06-counterf...</a>
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.<p>It is not that you can predict the next number from the previous, but the next quadrant on the wheel given the previois outcome is not completely random.
The 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.
Since this is Hacker News and we have a lot of programmers here:<p>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?
Brilliant at roulette they may be but their strategy seems shit. Why on earth did they make themselves so obvious?<p>Softly, softley catchy monkey. Win less over a much longer time.<p>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.
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?