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A High-tech Wheel of Fortune
tcp writes "The BBC is reporting that the London police have detained three people, for allegedly beating the roulette wheel at a London casino. Using a cell phone, a computer and a laser scanner, they were able to predict where the roulette ball would land, winning more than 1.5 million dollars in the process. This technique was not new, and as I recall was the plot of a movie once. The suspects have not been charged yet. The UK has been behind in bringing their gambling laws to deal with new hi-tech threats unlike the US and Las Vegas."
There isn't a better than 50% chance of winning if you don't count cards. If you play absolutely perfect non-card-counting strategy, your chances of winning are 49 1/2%.
Even the most basic of card counts gives you a slight advantage (1/4 to 1/2%), however. You have to be very patient and wait for a good shoe, however.
Chris
Anyone ever read the book "Bringing Down the House" by Ben Mezrich? It's an excellent read and follows the theme of this story (people beating the casino / gambling system). I think it's a little bit more sophisticated in that the characters in the book were more involved in social engineering / hacking and weren't reliant on machines to help accomplish their goal. Might be offtopic but I thought people might like to read it. I really enjoyed it :)
- I never know what to write for these things... -
It's not about the wheel being less than perfect. This sort of problem becomes obvious.
If you know the wheel speed and the entry quadrant of the ball then you can calculate the probability of the resulting quadrant.
Since the table is laid out in numerical order, with groupings that do not allow betting on wheel sectors, you have to quickly spread chips across the numbers that this system selects.
This must all be done very quickly. It has been done before without the phoone/camera - but yoy still need a spotter to communicate with the person placing the chips.
Three things that make this a short term proposition - you need a spotter and a gambler and a covert means of communication , you need to have the ammo to bet consistently for a long time, it is easy to detect - start winning consistently at roulette and a lot of eyes will be watching.
One of the key elements of the MIT Blackjack scheme was that taken as individuals, each member of the team behaved like a typical casino customer. The spotters played a consistant value at the tables they were playing. When they spotted good cards due, instead of increasing their own bets like an individual counter would, they signaled for a "whale player" to come in and make a few big bets, which is what rich people tend to do at a casino as well.
Any analysis looking for individual card counters would turn up nothing interesting going on... and trying to determine that a team was in play posed the problem of identifying team members while there was noise from other casino customers moving through the same tables.
The book you want to read is "eudaemonic pie"
It's about some kids who did this back in the 70s.
The article interviewed one of them.
Roulette isn't random, you have to have a real ball released at a real time and place at a real velocity.
Same for the wheel.
Beating the odds on a roulette wheel has been done before and was done most famously by "the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo" Joseph Jaggers. He made $450,000 which in 1873 was a LOT of money.
AFAIK in order to circumvent predicting the numbers by this method, the casinos regularly move the wheels from one table to another. The act of moving the wheel throws the predictors off aswell as changing any possible bias in the wheel.
This newer technique seems better, although it seems that you have to know the coefficient of friction between ball and wheel which I suppose could vary enough between each wheel to throw of your calculations.
The Machine stops.
at roulette, by Edward Thorp and Claude Shannon.
In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.
Remember, once you have a large enough amount of capital, any advantage over 50% is garaunteed to make you money.
This is true, but you need to have amounts of money approaching or exceeding the capitalization of the casino (the ratio of the sizes is important). IIRC, big casinos are usually capitalized at over $10 billion to avoid the problem of losing streaks. With a only a slight advantage and a modest starting stake, too many random walks of bets end in gambler's ruin. And if you pick a tiny casino, then the most you can win is modest. (And if you pick any casino, they will throw you out if you win too much.)
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Utter, utter bullshit.
First, there are metal studs on the wheel into which the ball occasionally runs. These pop the ball up a little bit and cause it to run down to the numbers more quickly.
Secondly, the ball is launched before betting begins. Unless the mark always bets on the same numbers, how is the dealer supposed to know on what number to put the ball?
A casino has nearly guaranteed profit, and lots of it, from a perfectly honest wheel. Every bet available has a house edge of 5.26%. Why would you cheat the guy who is "winning REAL big" when you can chip away at his winnings gradually perfectly legally?
Finally, the last place a casino would put such a person is anywhere near a roulette wheel. Such a person could have a confederate making bets on pre-selected numbers in a completely undetectable way.
This post is mostly bunk. If your ex-wife was really a blackjack dealer, she was a truly clueless one.
They assume a random distribution of the cards at shuffle. This is so far from the truth it is unreal. Each casino has a different way to shuffle the shoe. It does redistribute the cards, but it is not at all random. Since casino has its own shuffle any strategy will be casino-specific. The distribution of high and low cards gets slowly shifted at each shuffle. At the beginning of the day every deck is in a pre-set order. Each shuffle modifies that order in a predictable way. If you have a card counting strategy, it would be best to include, as part of your strategy, the number of times a shoe has been shuffled. When they break open new decks of cards, the shuffle count starts anew.
First off: shuffle tracking and card counting are two separate matters. Shuffle tracking identifies high and low card slugs, by counting the show, and then tracks those slugs through the shuffle in order to take advantage of them. Card counting is a mathematical system to keep track of how many high/low/neutral cards have come out of the shoe (depending on the system). Then, using this running count and the remainder of cards left in the shoe a card counter can determine the advantage at that moment, wheter for the player or house, and adjust his betting strategy. When a dealer shuffle and a new shoe begins, all of the cards have been put back in, and the count starts again. It doesn't matter how many times, or what way this deck has been shuffled.
Any experienced dealer will tell you that a shoe has a "flow" to it. The shoe will either be rewarding the house or the players. When the dealer shuffles the cards, they can either shuffle in a way that generally preserves the flow or shuffle in a way that generally reverses the flow. This does not work 100% of the time, but it does work.
Really, and what is exactly this flow? A slug of high cards, or is it just a bunch of good Karma on the cards? How exactly does this dealer ex-wife of yours shuffle cards in order to maintain "the flow". I, and many other gaming professionals, would be very interested to learn more about maintaining "the flow" of a shoe during a blackjack shuffle.
The dealer cannot target a particular player, but they can target the table as a whole.
Again, I would really like to learn this trick. I have yet so any demonstatable techniques for a dealer to target a table so that they all lose. Does she summon the goddess Rita who will smite all these nasty players, or does she just send some bad Karma their way?
Sorry if I am so sarcastic, but these are just ridiculous old wives tales, akin to if she floats, shes a witch!!!
BBC News last year, Australian last week. I sent the story in, I thought they would be too prudish to publish. I was right.
Under UK law it is considered prostitution but prostitution is not and never has been illegal in the UK. Soliciting an act of prostitution is illegal however. It is far from clear that this was technically soliciting in the meaning of the act.
Prostitution and internet soliciting have actually been widely tollerated by the police in the UK for about ten years. The police would rather be in the business of regulating brothels than dealling with street walkers.
There is another police angle that I have a personal connection with. I used to work in a computer shop at the weekends. It was not in a very good location and it closed down sometime after I left. After a while the shop became a 'massage parlor'. This operated without complaints for a year until a girl was murdered by one of the clients. As the law stood (still stands in fact) a single girl working on her own is not a brothel, but two are. As a result the city council and the local police decided to tell the local establishements that from now on they would not enforce the brothel-keeping law. They also tolerate Web sites which give little doubt as to their true purpose. Oh and the shop is now a very expensive financial services advice place catering to 'high net worth' individuals.
The other reason that the virginity auction is unlikely to be prosecuted is that the event was a staged protest at the cost of school fees. The government does not want this to become a saga, particularly as they have proposed complete legalization.
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