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Student Creates On-Line Poker Playing Program
Psyber Samurai writes "Online-Athens has this story about Paul Apostolik, a cognitive science and computer science student at the University of Georgia that has created a program that plays the risk-free online video poker sites. The program takes over the screen and actually reads the cards off the screen then determines which cards to hold and which cards to discard. I've run it, and it is extremely fun to watch it play. Yes, it does win over the long term as it collects many, many tokens."
It really proves that to get the best chances, GO TO THE CASINO! At least you can see if they are swapping card on you or something.
But this article is talking about *video poker*, which if you haven't been to Vegas, is played using electronic machines even in the casinos.
I have windows and it still didn't do anything. Was it supposed to?
I've always wondered if you could use computers to generate a perfect list of moves which would, given enough time, always turn a profit.
Consider the game of blackjack...imagine a grid that has all the possible blackjack hands (from 2, 2 to Ace, Ace) versus all the possible dealer shown cards (from 2 to Ace). Each spot on this grid can hold one of two values: Hit or Stand. For example, when the dealer is showing a 6 and you are holding a 10 and a 6, that spot on the grid should tell you whether to hit or stand (definitely stand!)
Now, here's the tricky part. Make a routine with a giant loop. The loop should assign values to every spot on the grid (starting with all stands, for example) then play a few thousand hands using those rules. After a few thousand hands, change one spot on the grid to hit and repeat until the program has tested every possible combination (i can't even begin to imagine how many calculations this is but hell, there are several programs trying to crack huge key values and this is certainly a more financially valuable goal).
At the end, the program should print out a grid that contains the values that generates the highest number of wins. Then, if we human players were to memorize that grid and then use those rules when we play in the casino, shouldn't we have a good chance at making money? Dare I say, even finding the perfect combination that always turns a profit?
I dunno, but rather than trying to invent a blackjack genius that you would have to continuously update and modify, just brute force the game and be done with it.
Anyone feel like writing this routine in a p2p fashion? I have a few cycles I'd like to donate...
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
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Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
In this case, the program reads the screen and moves the mouse to click on the proper places. Pretty clever I suppose. But once you get past the fancy I/O code, it's just applying simple formulas to decide what cards to hold. There's nothing "intelligent" about calculating that holding the pair will give an expected return of $0.21, while going for the flush will give an expected return of $0.08.
The only thing about poker vaguely related to "intelligence" is its condensation of the social relationships of zero-sum games into the formal interface of betting. Placing bets is much more amenable to mathematical analysis than the fuzzier stuff we do when we're playing similar zero-sum games, say, negotiating the price for a used car: furrowing our brows, clearing our throats, poking fingers at each other's chests, yelling, pretending to think over an offer, saying "my manager will have to approve this," and so on.
When you simplify the interface between entities to just a few operations (raise, call, fold), suddenly mathematics can play a role.
John von Neumann was one of the first to recognize this, and it was the game of poker that he focused on, in his study of game theory:
Though much more interesting to analyze than, say, blackjack, playing a good game of poker still does not qualify as "artificial intelligence." It's been pretty well analyzed since, if I'm not mistaken, the 1920s:
(Quotes from Prisoner's Dilemma, William Poundstone, 1992, pp. 40, 60-61.)
A program that applies von Neumann's minimax theorem to place poker bets is still just doing simple math. But Apostolik's program -- cool though it is -- doesn't even do that. He hasn't incorporated betting yet. "That would be an interesting thing to play around with," he says. True! But even that still wouldn't be A.I.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
A friend of mine has written code that can play Minesweeper and FreeCel. It's amazing to watch it play freecel. I think the streak record for it is like 250 games.
10-15 decks? If your casino is playing with more than 6-7 decks go to a different casino!
But this article is talking about *video poker*, which if you haven't been to Vegas, is played using electronic machines even in the casinos.
This is a common misconception. The video poker machines are actually miniature kiosks with midgets inside who shuffle and deal the cards. Surveilance cameras are set up inside so that casino employees can look in on and make sure the midgets aren't cheating, but if you're lucky you can find a machine which if you whisper "Hey midget, i'll split my winnings with you" into you will find yourself winning a lot more than probability will allow for. Of course you don't actually have to split your winnings with the midget, he's a midget what's he gonna do? beat you up? Ha!
Like I Said... I'm going on memory. I'm not a gambler. You're probably right.
Gambling is only a sport for people who can't do math.
Though I have no personal proof, I am fairly certain that if this is true, they are making the 'free' game easier, to attract players, rather than cheating on their live gambling. Again, I have no proof of this, but it makes sense.
The fact that you can consistantly win should tell you something; unless you are a card-counting prodigy, you cannot consistantly win.
The most common auditor being the very well-respected accounting firm of Price-Waterhouse-Coopers. Would you accuse them of being paid to lie? I doubt it.
One of the *main* things looked at, in these casinos, is the payout rate. You don't analyze every single game and audit the code, but rather, look at how much is gambled -vs- how much the house is profiting. The common average for online casinos is around 98% payout I believe. The audits show exactly how much.
If they were cheating, you'd know.
I only had a Mac handy but the casino client software was windows-only, so I ran the client under SoftWindows emulation figuring this would make it harder for the client to determine something untoward is going on.
Recognizing the cards involved nothing more complicated than hit-testing for colored points along lines with certain offsets. The card pictures never changed, so it was just a matter of partitioning the set appropriately. For instance, a "9" of anything has a pip in the top-left corner; an ace does not. The only thing that was at all tricky there was differentiating a couple of the face cards. For instance, I seem to recall that their Jack of Spades and Jack of Clubs looked very similar to my algorithm. Differentiating spades and clubs generally was hard but it was especially hard with the face cards.
As for the play, that also required no original work. There are people who play video poker professionally; you can order basic strategy charts for all the major games that detail what payout schedules have what expected value and tell you how to play the hands. Some common casino machines are positive expectation and the casinos don't care because the average player makes enough strategy errors to be a net loser. My program had to recognize the card values, categorize the hand, then run down a chart (either a table lookup or a series of if-thens) to determine what strategy to employ. Then it had to simulate a mouse click on the appropriate "hold" buttons, then on the "draw" button.
To tune and debug the program, I had it play the hands but NOT hit draw until I verified the right cards were selected. I played through many hundreds of hands, discovering and fixing several bugs along the way. There were a couple of card-recognition bugs and a couple of play-related bugs, but eventually I got to the point where every time I questioned a play and looked it up in the rules, the computer was right. My program could play faster and more accurate video poker than I could.
InterCasino had two modes. You could play just for fun with fake money, or you could play for real money. To shake out the bugs, I played in the "just for fun mode", letting it run through the night while I slept. I had it preprogrammed to pause at random intervals for random amounts of time to simulate bathroom breaks or whatever, but mostly it just played.
In the morning, I'd won about a thousand dollars of fake money. As long as I played in "free" mode, I seemed to be earning about what was expected, occasionally hitting the big payoffs that make up for the long term negative grind.
So I switched to the real-money mode. I figured it was easily worth investing $500 or so of my blackjack earnings to see if I could institute a real money machine. The dream was to have a bank of PCs in my closet raking in the cybercash while I sleep, eat, read, or go to work... So I deposited the money and set the thing to work. Again I ran it in semi-interactive mode for a while before putting it into automatic.
And it lost. So long as I played with real money, it just wasn't hitting the big payoffs as often as I think it should have. I switched back to free mode and won again, switched back to paid mode and lost again. After losing several hundred dollars I decided to pull the plug.
I did not play enough hands to be sure I didn't have a run of bad luck. Video poker is a game with a very small edge and almost all of the edge you have comes from hitting that once-in-a-blue-moon royal flush or equivalent. Maybe if I'd been willing to lose $10k I'd have eventually gone positive. But there's no way to prove that the game is honest, so I couldn't count on the laws of probability being in my favor. My only protection was to have a reasonable stop-loss figure, and I hit it.
So I won't be retiring to the carribbean just yet. :-)
(In fact, I'm currently unemployed due to a recent dot.bomb event. Need a lead QA engineer, software engineer or otherwise just generally smart guy? My resume is here; check it out. Especially if you're doing something with handhelds.)
I play Nerd-Folk!
Why not reply to my post? "Perfect play" is a well defined term in gambling, and in some games skill is actually a factor. I point the interested reader at the rec.gambling faq. We now return you to your regular ignorant trolling.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Blackjack strategy cards have been around for ages. They come in laminated business-card size, so that you can put them in your wallet to study them anywhere.
There are dealer rule variations, which change the chart somewhat. For example, dealer hits on soft 17 means that if the dealer has 16, or has a 'soft 17' including an ace, but doesn't have 17 with non-ace cards or higher, then the dealer must hit. This is usually printed on the felt of the casino's blackjack tables, so it's hardly a secret.
There are other "moves" besides HIT and STAND. For maximum advantage, you have to know when to double down, or split, also. You don't need to know anything about Insurance-- it's a bad bet and the house makes a lot of profit from it.
The odds at perfect play are just barely in the house's favor, if you don't count cards. If you do count cards (even a simple increment/decrement on high/low cards), you may swing the odds to be slightly in your favor. The fewer decks the dealer uses, the worse it is for card counting, and the dealer can shuffle more often if they think you're counting. Some casinos will also ask you to leave if they analyze that you're a card-counting savant.
For an example, I just searched Google, and got this link.
[
Actually, that was quite fun, because the machine would lock up in such a funny state. Any key you pressed on the keyboard or the mouse would result in a clicking sound, and even moving the mouse would result in this sound for each "tick". Thus, you could make funny roaring sounds simply by moving the mouse around. It's almost sad they took it away. I'm not sure if it could cause any serious damage, but I guess the press this eventually got forced them to remove the "feature".
Actually, computers have, as of now, never been able to master the game of Go. For an intro to the game from the angle of Game Theory, check out http://eksl.cs.umass.edu/~heeringa/home/doc/go_pap er/. A human being with a mastery of the basic strategy can beat most of the best artificial intelligence simulations. Fascinating stuff....
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"Here to discuss how the AOL merger will affect consumers is the CEO of AOL."
grep -ri 'should work'
Or disassemble the java code, and rewrite it with some AI, which, depending on your hacking mindset may or may not be easier than reading the screen and moving the mouse. But I digress... it was a wonderful hack.
My background? I'm a Sysadmin for one of the biggest on-line gambling companies in the world. I work in the software development house, advising on sysadmin & security issues. We do casino games, sports books, and parimutuel. Sure, people always whine and complain about companies "fixing the odds" but I'll tell you, we don't even bother. The games that we create are straight odds exactly like you'd get from a fair dealer, perfect roulette wheel, etc. No "real" on-line casinos will change their odds, because there's no point in fixing the games. The real money in online gambling comes from the hard-core players. They're always the ones who bet lots of money, and play religiously. You don't mess with these guys, you just let 'em play. See, the great thing about being running a gambling outfit is that statistics works for you. You win some, you lose some, but after a few thousand customers it all evens out. In order to make money, the casinos don't actually pay out at 100% -- they usually pay out at something in the high 90s. It's not much different to Joe Gambler, but after thousands and thousands of gamblers go through the casino, that couple of percentage points adds up to give the casino a net win. So in a sense, I suppose they do "rig" the games, but they tell you right up front exactly how they do it, by telling you the payouts. Moral of the story? Casinos always win in the long run. They really have no reason to cheat.
In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it. -John Archibald Wheeler
I know at least 5 people who have shown me code which does this. It's no biggy. What is interesting is that looking at their statistics it is clear that online casinos cheat when they detect perfect play, but it is very very hard to prove.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The only thing new about this is it's interacting with online gambling. Interesting if it could be used in a monetary sense - like Texas Hold Em or 7 Card Stud to actually win money. (if you're playing video draw poker, you're playing to lose. The house has the best odds) - In fact, I half wonder if it's being done right now...people playing online and feeding odds and stats into a computer to see if they've got the odds to win.
FYI - the most commonly recognized poker playing software is Wilson Software - www.wilsonsw.com - they design poker programs with very detailed programmable profiles...That's how I improved my game...a thousand hands a day no problemo. (it's also good for simulation - wondering if you'd save or lose money raising AK preflop? Run 100000 hands and find out!)
The most interesting thing is this...Poker is actually a lot like a casino. You think you're playing each other, but if you get the ten best players together, then all you have is 10 steady declines of bankrolls. The house rake sucks it all away at 10% a hand. The best way to make money at poker is to find a fish - which I'm thinking he could program this thing to beat no problemo
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
The article doesn't have a link to the program anywhere, and neither does the /. story. Where is this guy's Web site so that we can download and try out the program?
> and actually reads the cards off the screen
...
> Yes, it does win over the long term as it collects many, many tokens.
The question is: can this program Punch the monkey to win ?
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1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
(Although about 10 years ago, there was a scandal where someone had a special key sequence that would cause the game to leave the "fair" power up mode and go to a mode that prevented a couple of the big payoffs--tough to find, as when you seize the game, it cuts power) . . .
hawk
Often when the stockmarket starts to get predictable in some way, there's a force in it looking for randominity. The knowledge of a "perfect" computer playing on the stock-market, could disrupt the market into even more illogical ups and downs than it already has. Which is not good for the market of course.
As it is now, everytime an analyst predict upgoing trends on a stock, it's time to sell and vice versa. Of course they use this to sell their own because of it. However, as closed-analysis becomes even more advanced the stocks will seem even more random. So the stockmarket is reduced to a pure gambling pot. What this could do is reduce the incentive for people to gamble on it, slowing down the economy.
Analytical reports are designed to manipulate the market. This is unfortunate because the people being suckered in, as always, are of course the small-time gamblers. It's also unfortunate because what should drive the market is knowledge of good companies to invest in, not obscure ideas in an analysts mind or manipulation to get an unfair advantage. So the system is already cracking up as it is, affecting the commercial psyche. Companies are met with unreasonable expectations every single year, some develop obscure bussinessplans or decides to play hard ball with their customers because they need all the economic growth they can possibly grab.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
"What is interesting is that looking at their statistics it is clear that online casinos cheat when they detect perfect play, but it is very very hard to prove"
The thing is, wouldn't this system prove that it's impossible to win?
I'm sure they use some sort of algorithims to deal the cards and can never really be random. And what dictates 'perfect play'? Counting, in poker? Wouldn't a trained player play similar to the computer? Garbage in, garbage out.
It really proves that to get the best chances, GO TO THE CASINO! At least you can see if they are swapping card on you or something.
Get your Unix fortune now!
The way it worked was casinos used to let you place bets when the roulette ball was already rolling. By clicking the toe switches the first few times the ball went around, the shoe computer could calculate the deceleration rate of the ball and predict where it was going to end up. It couldn't predict perfectly of course, but it was enough to give a substantial advantage over the house.
The circuitry was flaky but worked well enough to prove the concept was sound. The builders claimed they didn't actually win much money with it, but they sound a little bit coy. More interesting is the book's description of the looney, communal environment that the hackers lived in when they built the thing.
Bass's later book "The Predictors" is about the same guys using similar techniques to program computers to automatically pick stock market trades (www.predict.com). They were the first to do that and were apparently pretty successful, but now I think all the brokerages are doing it and there's not much advantage to be had any more from those methods.
The casinos do everything they can to make it out to be 'illegal' or 'bad behavior'.
Though I can fully understand how they can't afford to let these people play blackjack forever, as they will always, statistically, take more than the house, it's silly to paint them as 'bad' just because they can beat you at your own game.
'Come play our game! Win Win Win! Unless you actually CAN win, then we don't want you here!'
ALso, they don't necessarily shuffle when there is only one deck left; they shuffle at a fairly random point when the pile gets a bit low. If memory serves (and it may be exaggerating on me) she reshuffled when there were about 4 decks left,l and they were playing with about 10 or 15 decks (but as I said, my memory could be playing tricks on me)
"So is this kind of like Big Blue, I mean if I were to play some of the best poker players with this little programs assistance would I win a majority of matches?"
In college we played hi-low poker for table stakes and it was... interesting. $100 might change hands in a single "tap" - a lot of money, then. Later I played 5-stud in $2 limit games (that's a loser to the house rake). Win some, lose some, but I do like poker. Haven't played much for years, though. If it's recreation, then don't count the chips. If it's for real money, it takes as much focused concentration as any profession. And as professions go, it's a fairly stressful one. Hacking MVS, networks, Linux is lots easier.
It's also an unfortunate fact that people do cheat at poker. I sat in a low-ball game once where the guy to my left said "watch this" before dealing me a low wheel (A2345, perfect hand). I raised the open and everyone folded; I took the pot and left. When there's real money on the table, the odds of people cheating in various ways go way up. Be aware. There's even more danger of cheating online in virtual casinos, where you don't know which "players" are shills and which aren't; the server (house) knows your cards.
Poker isn't like chess, in that it's not just a deterministic game. A simple poker 'bot will be too predictable (below 50% fold, above 75% raise, etc.). The reason it's an interesting game is that human strategies, emotions, and intuition all play at some times in any session. Poker, like playing the stock markets, is 50% money management and 50% picking plays. The similarities are very striking.
Poker 'bots have been written and played against each other by academics for decades. Best results are obtained by heuristic routines that analyze the moves of all other players and learn from the progression of play, building a 'book' on each from which to calculate odds about bluff or hold. There are many books out about poker (most published to scam wannabe winners out of a few dollars), and not a few academic papers - use Google to find them. Probabilities are easy, strategies are hard, for many reasons.
But poker is a complex game, especially with human factors added. The complexities are infinite and arguably incalculable. There is no perfect way to play. One of the best session strategies is to bluff on small pots early, have 'em on big ones, then later "on towards morning" reverse the strategy - but like all poker, it's risky and won't work repeatedly with the same group of players, like most poker session strategies. Or, one could reverse the above strategy. These are the two basic possibilities for any one game. If one plays consistently though, others will see it and learn when to duck or push. There are levels within levels, in each session and venue.
I've been killed at poker, and I've also shut down a small poker parlor by taking every player until no one would sit down with me (400% profit). One good piece of advice I'll offer is... don't play for blood with friends, or especially, coworkers. Those relationships are more valuable than money, and some people take lasting offense at a sandbag. If they give you hands, OK - but don't extract it.
I live in Athens, in fact, I live on the UGA campus. I'll have to hunt this guy down and talk to him....
Just basking in my indirect association with a now famous person.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
I'd think that'd be where the *real* research issues are -- with the added complexity of knowing when to check, call, raise or fold... Not just, say, figuring out which cards to replace...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
get this: macro express for windoze. I can't even program. I just made it mimic me playing the game then optomized the timings.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Darse Billings and others at the University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group have done quite a bit of research on computer poker. Their program, Poki (source here) plays a reasonably good game of Texas Hold-Em. This is the primary game at the famous World Series of Poker.
While not as great an accomplishment, I wrote a macro to play a java golf game online. Since there was some randomness to the game and my reflexes are not that good, I figured it would be a way to get my name in the top ten. after three days running the macro, I had all ten of the top ten spots. The game was pulled on the third day. It has never been back. Computers playing games are always much better than humans if their AI is done correctly. I realized that I had ruined the game for everyone else. Deep blue beat Kasparov, My AMD box beat java golf, Aimbots beat me at TFC, Paul Apostolik beat pogo poker, and the power producers are beating California (with a great weather model/consumpion prediction algorithm) on the energy trading floors.
Are we are all cheating? Cheating only applies to games and applying enourmous computer power to commodity markets is simply shrewd? Will we one day wake up with zero value in stocks because some bright day trader wrote a miraculous piece of code that makes a billion perfect trades in the course of a day? Cheating by attacking protien folding with petaflop power?
What are the moral causes for the application of analytical force? When is the right time to spray for moths? When is the right time to let a hummingbird fly over japan? (obscure reference, chaos theory: the ammout of air a hummingbird moves in flight over japan is all that is required to generate a hurricane a month later in florida)
With IBM predicting a teraflop available on your (or Saddams) desktop by 2004, these questions need to be addressed yesterday.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
The ONLY "house" game you can play and WIN at with perfect play is Blackjack. You can learn to do it by counting cards, or you can program a machine to help you do it. Both are against most states' gambling laws. Mathematicians MUCH smarter than you have already analyzed Blackjack to death, and the "counting"/"tens richness" strategies are well documented.
There are no other games, other then the odd progressive jackpot game (when the jackpot becomes high enough, the expected value becomes positive). AND this already assumes "perfect" play, which the average human playing video poker can easily learn and be 100% accurate at. Video poker is an EXTREMELY simple game.
Craps is close with pass/don't pass come/don't come, but it is still negative. There is NO way in hell any gambling machine (unless poorly programmed) would give a statistically postive payout, unless the programmers are complete idiots.
I see so much uninformed BS flying around it is fucking amazing. Slashdot may be a good place to get facts on computer/technology based topics, but when it comes to statistics and gambling.. well this is just plain pathetic.
I can only assume that the programmers of the online video poker games are morons.. all COMMERCIAL video poker machines have net house gain.. tweakable by the individual rules. Video poker machines offer among the WORST payout expectation in casinos, except for certain progressives.
And you don't need a computer to play "perfect" video poker. It is an extremely trivial game.
I have a friend who has written several perl scripts to automatically play online games, the kind that reward you with pseudo-money. (Sometimes you can trade the pseudo-money for prizes, sometimes you can use it in auctions.)
Some of his programs are quite primitive; he randomly 'clicks' on links that could pay off, and a small percentage do. He wins simply through the massive number of clicks.
But he has at least one program that plays a trivia game. If the question is new, it guesses, but it "learns" when it has won the question. If the question ever comes up again, it now knows the answer. Pretty impressive for a few hundred lines of perl. (And he's not even that good of a perl programmer!)
He has been caught several times, and usually gets a 'cease-and-decist' letter (for violating the terms of service you have to sign to get an account), but has never gotten in any real trouble. (A key to not getting caught is to never do TOO good; never be the top winner of the day.)
Moral of the story: Programmatic attacks on games go on all the time, and my friend has dozens of free t-shirts to prove it.
Posting anonymously to protect the guilty.
Good thing this thing doesn't play solitaire for you, if it did what would all the execs and marketing people at my work do all day? Not actual work that's for sure. :)
> After losing several hundred dollars I decided to pull the
>plug.
>I did not play enough hands to be sure I didn't have a run
>of bad luck. Maybe if I'd been willing to lose $10k I'd
>have eventually gone positive.
Wow, it sounds like not only did you write a program to simulate video poker playing, but also to simulate a gambling addiction!
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Once a blue moon I had an idea. Here where I live casinos aren't allowed to play as the bank (win people's money), so they have to let the people be the bank, rotating every few turns. These casinos make $ by taking in a "collection fee" of $1 per hand.
Anyways, some of the games definitely gave the "bank" an advantage. Pan-9 because you could see if people are hitting or not. If they're not, and you have a low-scoring hand, you'll know to hit. I'm too lazy to get into the details, but trust me, there's an advantage for the bank.
Then there was Pai Gow. Here the bank has this "copy advantage". If a player has equal rank with the upper 2-card hand as the bank, the bank will win that set. Blah blah...
One more thing. You'd also have to factor in the collection fee into your chances. You'd need to put in enough money per hand to offset the disadvantage created by this fee or you'll lose. Also, I made a vow to NEVER tip those greedy-ass, good-for-nothing, I'll-sell-your-mom-just-to-make-a-dime dealers.
Anyways, I wrote this program to simulate playing the game from beginning to finish. I ran in on an Apple II GS. Yeah very primitive heh? That's all I had at the time. I did this just to prove that I was right that the bank did have an advantage.
Since that computer was slow and lame and didn't have a hard drive, I had to have everything printed out to me for record-keeping.
So day and night this Apple ran. A few days go by so I decided to analyze the results.
What do you know? There were distinct patterns repeating over and over again. Then it occurred to me, the damn computer's random number generator wasn't really random after all! I had wasted my time with that cheap computer.
So anyways, off I went to the casino to test my theory out. With $3000 in my pocket I started gambling away day after day... Up, down, up, down.
I was actually up $5000 for a while (and this was after I'd logged over 150 hours of gambling), but then I got greedy and started betting too big. This proved to be my fatal mistake. Wham in one night it was all gone. Just like that... After a month of hard work it all disappeared. >(
Anyways, I'd gotten sick and tired of the constant smoking and rude atmosphere. Besides, I wasn't learning anything and it was a HELL of a job (if I can call it that). So I quit cold turkey and went back to school.
To this day I'm sure there's an advantage there. Maybe one day when I'm really really bored or really really rich I'll try that again.
What a life.
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Did you just fart? Or do you always smell like that?
eTrade SUCKS
Not in a casion. Why? They pay 3 to 2. Yes, supposing that you play for 2 to 1 odds and the dealer plays by normal dealer rules (hold on 17 and over, hit on 16 or less) and you are good, you'll make money. However casinos pay 3 to 2 odds. So if you bet $100 you only get $150 back. That's enough to tip the odds back in their favour.
A couple of reasons.
Firstly, because it makes logical sense. Yes, they COULD be rigging all the games, but if the casino still maintains a 98% payout (ie: They are taking, on average, 2% of what's gambled), I find it hard to see how games are 'rigged'. If they fixed one game to win, they'd have to fix another to lose to keep the numbers working, and what would be the point?
Thirdly, because I work for an online casino/sportsbook, and if I thought for a moment they were rigging the games, I'd leave.
And finally, because there is not NEED to rig the games to win. Profit margins for online casinos are higher than those of meatspace casinos; overhead is much lower, and if it ever got out that the house was cheating (and it WOULD get out) you could say goodbye to your business.
Also, if this was some unheard of firm, I would have suspicition. These casinos go out of their way to have their things audited by the most respected firms out there; those firms do NOT get respect by being anything but impartial; they certainly wouldn't ditch that respect for an online casino; they'd stand to clients that are orders of magnitude larger (like the Fortune 500 companies, say). Online casinos are generally NOT multi-billion dollar operations like you might think.
I used to play a game called alien online where you raise stats on your alien by battling other peoples aliens etc. like a bbs game there were many sub-games where you could make money to buy better equipment. There was a nice hangman game, and after playing it a couple of times I realized I sucked at it. So I wrote a program (costed me a couple of days of freetime) in PHP using the excellent Snoopy class file (to navigate over the pages) that could beat any hangman game not by storing all answers but by generating an answer using a large dictionary and making intelligent guesses, my success rate was 85%, not bad.. After running the script for 2 hours I realized their dictionary was very limited and there were only 500 guesswords so I could only make something like 1500 gold.
I hadn't thought of that, I would had made far more when I just played regular. But my friends were impressed and we had a good laugh.
I made several grammatical and spelling mistakes; I'm not fully awake yet.
.....'
That last bit should read 'They stand to lose clients that are orders of magnitude larger
The first real useful application of programming for me was writing programs to determine optimal seating positions or hands for all those made up poker games like 'Screw Your Neighbor'. I'd brute force the games on a couple of million decks and later use the stats to fold, stay or just sit out. It was time well spent.
Definitely time to go cold turkey. I'll just read one more story before I go.....