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."

Comments

Why were they detained ?

[Timesprout]

I cant see the problem here. Tough on the Casino if there is a problem with their roulette wheel

Re:Why were they detained ?

[kwandar]

But, they didn't cheat. The croupier turned the wheel and released the ball. All they did was "predict", albiet with the help of some equipment. Isn't that what gambling is about? Predicting?

As the article states, the casino can avoid prediction, by simply spinning the wheel faster.

Re:Why were they detained ?

[mr_tenor]

I have mod points, but I feel the need to reply here, though it sounds like flamebait.

The 3 other "obvious" emaples you cite are cheating - they circumvent the rules of the guessing competition. Why do you label the actions mentioned in the story as cheating? No rules have been circumvented. All that is being done is making use of the information which is available to everyone in a clever way.

A similar thing happens with card counting in blackjack - all you do is play the game in a smart way instead of blindly guessing. However, the casinos don't want people to do anything other than blindly guess because it means the odds can be tipped in their favour instead of in favour of the house.

Re:Why were they detained ?

[WalksOnDirt]

Casinos love card counters, most of them that is.

Counting cards is hard, and a lot harder when you are actually in the casino than when you are practicing at home.

Most card counters are easily spotted, but only the few who are able to win get banned.

Re:Why were they detained ?

[mlippert]

Actually I don't even think all of those other methods of cheating are actually cheating.

Some other obvious cheating examples:

• Bringing in cameras and linking them so a player can see his opponent's cards.
• Using a device to let you predict/influence the roll of the dice.
• Hacking a slot machine to produce winning pulls

Cheating involves breaking the rules of the game.

The 1st example is cheating because you the rules specifically forbid you from circumventing your opponents ability to prevent you from seeing his cards.

The 2nd example is both cheating and not cheating. A device that influences the roll of the dice is cheating, a device that helps you predict the roll of the dice is not.

The 3rd example is also clearly cheating because hacking a slot machine is clearly changing the rules of the game. However having a device that could let you know if a slot machine was close to paying off would not be cheating.

Mike

Re:Why were they detained ?

[John Hasler]

Even if it was cheating, so what? Why should they be arrested? It's the casino's problem to detect cheaters and throw them out (and perhaps sue them for damages). It's a private matter between the casinos and their customers. If the casinos can't handle it, tough shit.

Re:Why were they detained ?

[mindstrm]

No, it's not cheating.

They are using public information available to everyone. That is not cheating.

They are in no way influencing the outcome for everyone else.

Using hidden cameras to view other player's poker hands is cheating.. the game is based on the fact that you can't see other players cards.

Unethical? Casinos are unethical in the first place, many would argue.

Counting cards at blackjack is not cheating. Neither is using the same system with a computer instead of your brain... however, the latter is illegal in Nevada. It is still not, however, cheating.

It may very well be that the law where these guys pulled this stunt has nothing in it that bars observing the game or computer assistance. So long as they in no way tampered with the outcome of the game, it's not cheating.

Re:Why were they detained ?

[the.pornlord]

Counting cards is quite possible with multiple decks. Using a basic plus/minus system you can gain quite an advantage over a 6 or 8 deck shoe.
For a casino that uses and 8 deck shoe (+.58% H/A) and allows doubles after splitting (-.14% H/A) you are playing a game with a .44% house advantage. If you play perfect basic strategy with no deviations you reduce the house advantage to 0.
While playing this shoe, if you use the high/low count system, and have a true count of +2 you are actually playing at a .5% PLAYERS advantage. While .5% doesn't sound lilke much, this is slightly more of an advantage than the house usually has. If you are using a 5 unit bet spread you can actually beat the house.
There are thousands of books on counting out there, I suggest that you check out a few and see what can really be done.

I know...

[lukewarmfusion]

Don't gamble.

If you can find a way to improve your chances, it's probably against the rules. The only game I'm aware of that has a better than 50% chance of winning (against the house, that is) is blackjack.

Winning big (and often) on roulette raises eyebrows right away. They could have at least tried to beat a game that wasn't quite so obvious.

Re:I know...

[LostCluster]

A game with a .25% advantage in favor of the player would still require a high number of games be played before the player is assured victory. The game could take a random walk unfavorable to the player, just like some lucky people can win big despite playing blackjack poorly according to book logic just because they happened to hit a random walk in their favor.

Re:Physics can solve anything if it has all the in

[FyRE666]

If you knew the starting positions and details about all of the activities that are going on in the bin, you could possibly solve for which ball is going to be the one selected.

Unfortunately though, we live in an analogue World. It's impossible to specify the exact position of anything in relation to anything else ;-) So although you may be able to predict the positions of the balls over a very short space of time, the inaccuracies would mount until your predicted results bore no resemblance to reality...

read "the eudaemonic pie" by thomas a. bass

[drfireman]

Thomas A. Bass wrote a pretty good book on this. I think it's out of print at the moment, but Amazon seems to list it as shipping, so who knows. It's called "The Eudaemonic Pie." It's a far better book than the recent Mezrich book on blackjack. The teams Mezrich describes were basically working some old and well-known techniques that they didn't themselves invent (despite Mezrich's heroic efforts to make them seem like geniuses). The folks described in the Bass book are much more interesting people, doing much more interesting things. The Bass book has good hack content, the Mezrich book has little if any.

As an aside... If you really want to play an advantage game in a casino, try a game where you don't play against the house. Like poker.

Fuck Em

[Monkelectric]

Does anyone have ANY sympathy for the gambling industry? Living within 100 miles of 8 or so indian casinos in southern california, I have seen first hand that gambling is as destructive as drugs, alcoholism and tobacco.

Re:Physics can solve anything if it has all the in

[RogerWilco]

Your comment is only valid in a linear process. You always have some measuring error, if only the size of an atom. in a linear process this is no big problem as small measuring errors only give a small deviation in the result. In non-linear processes a small variation can have a large difference in the result. This behaviour described by chaos theory mathematics.
The most famous example is the weather, were a butterfly flapping it's wings in the Amazone could theoretically cause a violent storm in Brittain. This mathematician in the first Jurassic parc film also tries to explain it, using drops flowing down from a hand.

I think balls in a bin are a chaotic process.

Re:Are oppotunity costs similar to opportunity cos

[The Only Druid]

Actually, the irony of your post is that your claim about gambling (that you always lose) belies your actual lack of understanding of the relevant concepts of economics here.

Its obviously true that over a long enough period of time, all of the games in a casino have a probability spread that benefits the casino over the player (although some games are as low as 51% to the casino). However, the very same math shows us that at different times the results of gambling will favor either the casino or the gambler (that is, at point A the gambler may be low, at B the gambler be high, whereas at C he's way down). The real trick to gambling (and I know, incidentally, two men who are professional poker players, i.e. they make all their income gambling) is to recognize when you're too deep in to recoop your losses (and thus, to bail out), but also to recognize when you're sufficiently high up so that you're statistically likely not to get any better. The good gamblers know how to quit, and in doing so they ride the same probabilities that the casino does.

Casinos LOVE this type of thing.

[ljavelin]

Casinos LOVE this type of thing.

Why?

Because the PRESS claims that with a little smarts, the average guy can beat the casino! If you're really smart and really quiet about it, you can beat 'em and become rich beyond your wildest dreams!

Therefore, you get a lot of quasi-smart losers into the casinos, all who have the fantisy of "out-smarting Vegas". Those people proceed to lose all kinds of money as they "hone their smarts".

This is exactly how casinos attract people who are "too smart" to waste their time gambling.

Card counting, roulette prediction, psuedo-random numbers of elecontrics-based slot machines - they're all an ADVERTISEMENT designed to attract those who imagine that they're super-smart enough to tilt the odds. Of course, it simply isn't true.

The casinos in Vegas would love you to come to Vegas and attempt to put your super-smart skills into action... just as long as other players don't see you "attempting to cheat" - the casinos don't want you to scare any other customers away.