Slashdot Mirror
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."
After winning $1.5*10^3 you'd think they'd start to get suspicious.
unlike the US and Las Vegas ahhh yes... the country of Las Vegas
I cant see the problem here. Tough on the Casino if there is a problem with their roulette wheel
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
Remember, once you have a large enough amount of capital, any advantage over 50% is garaunteed to make you money. IIRC, the Wired article on the MIT blackjack card counters said that they had quite a "low" advantage over the casino (one that seems insignificant to a lot of people), but because of the money that was invested, they were able to win over the casino in a big way.
I've seen computerized card counters - but being able to read a roulette wheel, that's something...
:)
some people who would consider themselves professionals do the same thing by eye - make a guesstimate based on when the roulette employee releases the ball - but to do it with computers - well, that's just wrong
but if it ain't illegal, it'll be hard to prosecute - it's like counting cards...not illegal, but you'll get your butt booted from the casino pronto -
RB
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
Randomness is really sometimes just a proxy for "too complex to be understood". Afterall, in any form of mixing bin, all of the balls inside do have to obey the laws of physics. 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.
That's why it's essential that some details of the mixing situation should not be disclosed to the public while betting is still going on. I think what makes most daily blower-bin based lotto games unpredictible is the fact that the exact to-the-nanosecond time at which the bin is opened is being determined by a presenter who is also responsible for talking at the same time. Therefore, they can't possibly have enough control of their hands know what exactly their influence on the outcome is going to do. Since nobody else can really predict down to the fraction of a second what the presenter is going to do, everybody's on a level playing field.
I think the ultimate solution to this roulette wheel issue will be to call a stop to betting before the ball and wheel are put into motion. Therefore, by the time the information needed to determine the result of this spin is available, it will be too late to act upon it.
If the wheel was less than perfectly random, it is the casino that was cheating, not the patrons. So why are they the ones who have been detained?
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... -
Actually their said one beutyful girl was from Hungary with two serb guys. They said they used a mobile-shaped laser-scanning device, but they don't know if it is prohibited.
http://index.hu/tech/tudomany/ritz040323/
in hungarian.
Later they said, that this device cannot exist, as such a device would be least a pc large and needs a calibration of some hours and at least NASA technique to make it.
So at last, they said, that there are a number of people who actually can figure out what is the winning number from the spinning of the wheel by her own eye.
The article also mentions, that after all, they don't really need to now the EXACT target of the ball, if they can close out 2 numbers, they can earn an average of 3% per round.
So anyway, it's a weird weird story with SCI-FI elements...
Two Serbian men, aged 38 and 33, and a Hungarian woman aged 32 have been released on bail until 30 March.
Well, if she hadn't been arrested for cheating at the casino, she probably would have been arrested at the tobacconist anyway...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
British gambling laws from 1845 are currently in the process of being redrafted to bring them up to date with 21st Century gaming.
I bet it's illegal to duel in the casino & you have to leave your hired help in the coat room.
You don't win big when you've got a good scam like that. It's tempting, but really, you just shouldn't do it, it's a dead give away.
Worst case I ever heard of: A guy who had worked on PNRGs for casinos (yes, way back when such things were deemed good enough) decided to cash in, so he got together with a friend and wrote a quick program to sync in the the PRNG given a reasonable number of inputs. The PRNGs were mostly (and still are sometimes!) used for the keno games. He had his friend up in the hotel room with a laptop, and phoned up the numbers from a few rounds of keno. They got what seemed to be a reasonable sync, so he put a massive amount of cash predicting the next 10 numbers in order (which has stupendous returns (naturally)). Bang, up come all 10 numbers, in order. The police arrested his accomplice in the hotel room about 10 minutes later...
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
A group of students from Santa Cruz solved the physics of roulette back in the 1970's. See the Book (amazon.com).
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.
And guess what, he was the guy who throws the ball. He says that he could throw the ball with such a precision that it would fall within a very small range of numbers from the target and most of the time it would fall onto whatever number he wanted. There are at least a few folks like this in any casino. Floor manager brings them in when someone starts winning REAL big to "reduce the odds".
:-)
He said the only way to win on roulette more or less reliably is to play against the guy who has more money than you. If the guy selects some numbers or colors, put your money onto opposite colors and numbers that are far from his numbers if possible. The guy will throw a ball in such a way as to screw the guy who put the most money into the game.
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.
;-) 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...
Unfortunately though, we live in an analogue World. It's impossible to specify the exact position of anything in relation to anything else
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
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.
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.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
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.
the phone was (allegedly) hooked up to a machine outside the building. the information (speed of ball, speed of wheel, location of ball, etc) was passed to the machine, which made a prediction of the sector (not the actual slot) the ball would land in, and fed that sector back to the phone.
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.
But you can't get all the information (uncertainty principle), and in any chaotic system, even small errors in the initial state will blow up exponentially.
Ball Control
Although no casino will admit to its existence and very few dealers will nod in acknowledgement, this method is very powerful and easy to disguise. One cannot deny that a roulette event is heavily influenced by a human dealer. After all, it is the dealer who kicks up the rotor speed and launches the little white ball isn't it? These actions definitely affect where the ball will land. And after years of repeatedly spinning, the dealer develops what athletes call "muscle memory" or a consistent delivery system. I will admit it to you right here, as someone who has dealt the game of roulette, SOME DEALERS CAN CONSCIOUSLY INFLUENCE THE RESULT OF THE GAME. There, I said it! I know that deflectors may knock a ball off its original course or the ball may spatter when it crosses onto the rotor and hits a pocket fret, but even if a skilled dealer could navigate around the heavily bet sectors on the wheel only 10% of the time, the casino's edge would be 100% for those spins! The house's edge would then be [(9) x 5.26% + (1) x 100.00%] all divided by 10. This averages out to a whooping 14.73 % edge! To further add to this dilemma, there is no way to prove that the dealer is trying to cheat you, unless you can read minds! My general observations have led me to believe that "male" roulette dealers are more territorial. If you begin to win steadily at their tables, they feel challenged and may spin against you... that is unless you're a shapely female wearing a low-cut dress. I've also seen first-generation immigrants working as dealers, who are staunchly loyal to their new employers. If the issue of ball control troubles you, you can simply wait for the dealer to spin before placing your bets. You might actually turn this technique in your favor. If you recognize a skillful dealer and can build a rapport with him or her, you may be able to exploit their ability. One way to induce a dealer into hitting your number is to bet a sector or continuous section on the rotor of say, five pockets. Place a toke out for the dealer on the number situated at the sector's center. The dealers seem to appreciate a crack at collecting 35 times their original toke if they exhibit some control. If they miss your center number by one or two pockets, then you still win on the neighbors contained in that sector.
Source
We mathematicians made sure that the games in the casino would steal the customers blind, well with a quite high probability anyway.
You can't win against maths (Any Teenager in any school knows that... ^_^).
So, feel free to play if you want to get poorer...
And feel free to cheat if you want to end up dead/in jail...
It's a classic suckers bet. You'll run out of money or hit the table limit eventually. This is where probability theory comes in handy.
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.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
The greatest hack I ever pulled off involved an online casino. The casino used a Java applet for the gaming - everything from Blackjack to slot machines. Bored on a weeknight, I downloaded the Java applet (JAR file) to my computer and used a java decompiler to restore the original source code. Unfortunately, the code was obfuscated, but what I found next surprises me to this day. The java applet was using the client machine to generate the random numbers used in many of the games, namely the slot machine. I modified the code slightly to increase the chances of winning on the slot machine and then recompiled the code. There was a small problem, however. The code was written so that a response from the client to the server was sent indicating how much was bet, the payout and the winning combination (or hand). Thus, it was possible for them to statistically analyze my gamblings and calculate that I was winning more than I should have been. So instead of winning of the slot machine, I would win at Blackjack by modifying the code to display on screen what the dealer's cards were, and what the next card in the deck was. Thus, it was possible for me to decide on when to hit and when to stand. I will not tell you how much I won but I will tell you that I have never been caught.
I don't think it's right for casinos to do this.
You might as well outlaw all ways that people try to give themselves better odds. Those who go to certain slot machines (that have been loosing for a long time) should be illegial, since it is a way people try to improve their odds.
People playing blackjack should be thrown out if they stay at a pre-set number (eg. 17 or 18).
My point is that it should not be illegial to beat the house... But that seems to be the way it is. There is no consistency in the rules of what is and is not acceptible at a casion, EXCEPT that you are doing something wrong if you win.
Counting cards with a computer could be reasonably considered illegial, but how about those that do so without computer assistance?
People should be able to sue a casio that throws them out (when they are winning) without any proof that they are cheating.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
As a non-gambler, I know nothing about how roulette is played. From the article it seems to imply that you can wait for the ball to be released, observe the course of ball and wheel, do the math to predict the outcome, and then place your bet. Is that correct, or have I misunderstood? Common sense would seem to require that all bets be placed prior to the ball and wheel being put in (randomized) motion to prevent just that sort of thing.
Does a horse track still take bets as the steeds enter the final stretch?
So what we have here are laws that are designed to protect an obsolete business model from technology. And yet: these laws have nothing to do with protecting anyone from force or fraud.
Wait a minute .. why isn't it fraud?
It's not fraud because the little gambler never asserted that he promises to remain stupid and not make use of information, or to not do anything that will help him. (What's next, are you going to make it illegal to cross your fingers and pray?) It's not like the other consenting partner in the gamble, isn't making use of a shitload of information and technology against him. And it isn't as though the other partner doesn't doesn't already have odds on their side. So the very premise that 'fairness' has somehow been compromised, is laughable.
The fact is: some forms of gambling have been made obsolete, and we're propping them up with legislation. That doesn't smell good, to me. And it sets a really lousy precedent. If gambling can be propped up, then other industries can be, too.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yes, but given the odds paid in this game, if any player can sucessfully predict any three spots where the ball won't land, they will have done enough to create a player advantage.
Corollary: it's possible to derive an easily-memorized algorithm for consistently beating the House at Roulette... that only works for spherical cows in a vacuum.
Historical quirk: I live in Kansas City, KS. Across the state line in MO there are riverboat casinos that were originally approved under the language that mentioned 'games of skill'. At that time, video draw poker was legal, because of the skill involved in deciding which cards to hold, and which to discard, but not the run-of-the-mill slots (which have since been allowed by changes in the law). At that time, this method of winning at roulette, or card counting at the blackjack table, could not have been opposed by the casinos because they had to maintain the legal theory that skill was involved in these games. The boats in MO quickly adopted rules for the number of decks in the shoe, how far into it a reshuffle is done, and the delta between minimum and maximum bets, so as to make counting irrelevant. I believe those rules remain in effect today...
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Disclaimer: My ex-wife is a blackjack dealer.
Card counting, and the computer simulations used to justify it, fail in two fatal ways:
1. 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.
2. They assume that the dealer is neutral. This is, at best, naive. The dealer will break a table to run off obnoxious guests and to make room for players that tip well. The dealer will reward players that do tip well. Can't be done legally? Think again.
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.
The dealer cannot target a particular player, but they can target the table as a whole.
Got a dickhead at your table? Watch out! The dealer will break him to make him go away. The house will take all of your money, too.
Is everybody at the table nice, cool, and tipping the dealer and waitresses well? Keep it up and watch your fortunes multiply.
Is the table down (losing money) for the shift? Better leave, because the pit boss gets in trouble when this happens, so he will lean on the dealers to raise some cash for the table.
Is it the end of the night and the dealers want to close the table, but you are persistent and wish to play? Get ready to lose your bankroll at a breathtaking rate.
When a new dealer comes to the table, he or she will generally ask how the game is going. They are trying to ascertain the flow of the current shoe. Sometimes when you lose a hand, they will tell you, "Just wait until the next shoe, it will be better." They are telling you that the shoe flow is favoring the house and they will attempt to reverse it at the shuffle. While waiting for the current shoe to run out, bet low (to keep from losing too much) and tip well (so the dealer doesn't change his mind).
If you don't believe this, just go to a set of blackjack tables and watch for a while.
Sheesh.
<bart
Last time i went to vegas, the dealer cut off betting before the spin, according to this article the betting is cut off after 3 rotations. So basically the method I observed stops any prediction based cheating at all
Give the croupier a dozen or so balls of varying density and elasticity but identical appearance. Have him select one at random for each game.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
..but the new rules will limit the size of countries you can subjugate. It also limits Britain to colouring no more that 40% of the Globe pink.
You can also hack many of those games that are available on satellite/cable networks. In those games where the entire game state is displayed on the screen at the same time, it's possible to grab a frame off the screen, analyze it (convert the screen image into a logical representation), run it through an emulator and use a small amount of AI to find the optimum solution. At the very least, you avoid having to fork out money every time you want to play the game. The real benefit is when there is a prize. Then you only need to play the game twice (first time to get the levels, second time to enter the optimum solution) to get a return for your money.
Clarification for the record:
The U.S. Congress oversees regulation of interstate commerce and those aspects of commerce within states that interstate businesses' lobbyists claim interfere with interstate commerce. The states such as Nevada regulate commerce within a state, and states can delegate responsibility for specific areas to the individual counties or cities within a state. Thus, casinos in Las Vegas have to follow three layers of law: federal law, Nevada law, and Vegas law.
Oh, please, won't someone think of the casinos!?!
Fscking casinos.
Bah, the solution is obvious. The casinos just need to start using subatomic particles as Roulette balls, so that you would have to build a Heisenberg Compensator to cheat like this.
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!
This technique was not new, and as I recall was the plot of a movie once
Yes, that movie is actually one of my favorite classical comedies. It's called The Hoenymoon Machine starring Steve McQueen. The movie tells the story of three navy men who develop a scheme to win at the roulette tables in a Venice casino. At first, their plan goes off without a hitch until Navy Admiral Fitch gets involved and suspects an invasion. It only complicates things that McQueen is dating the Admiral's daughter. Ofcourse, it's a 60s romantical comedy, so in the end everything goes fine and no know gets hurt or jailed or anything.
The Navy officers in the movie actually use a Radar scaner, and a phone to perdict how to win in the roulette. Considering that these guys that are being busted in the UK also more or less used the same technology, I wonder if they actualy got the idea from this movie.
--
Whereas in Las Vegas it is pretty much unheard of. The casinos are owned by entertainment conglomerates, not the mafia. They call the police on cheaters or just throw them out. They understand that the bad pr from mafia-style behavior would cost them far more than the paltry few millions cheaters carry off each year. To the executives of these companies anything less than a billion dollars is not a "large sum of money".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
QM does indeed throw in a level of uncertainty. No-one's quite sure what effect that uncertainty has on the large-scale world; it seems that quantum effects generally get lost when summing over the large numbers of particles we humans deal with. (Unless we do something clever to expose them -- hence lasers, silicon chips, &c.)
But chaos theory is something else. A chaotic system is still perfectly predictable if you know the starting positions and velocities with total accuracy. Instead, chaos theory looks at what happens when you don't know them; it describes how the initial tiny inaccuracies can get larger and larger until they dominate.
So systems like the weather are unpredictable mainly because we can't measure the conditions perfectly, regardless of whether the universe is predictable or not.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
People who say "They are taxes for people who are bad at math" have no understanding of the concept of oppotunity costs or economics. Slashdotters seem to overuse this comment...perhaps to make them feel superior?
WARNING: This sig does not contain a joke
let's say bet size range is 25-400$
you need about 100$
Wouldn't you need about $775 dollars to do this?
At any rate, someone else has already pointed out you have about a 1 in 24 chance of losing all $775 and a 23 in 24 chance of gaining $25.
If you repeat the game four times in a row (to win $100), you'll increase your chances of losing $775 to about 15.4%, or around 3 in 20.
So, If you walk into a casino with $775 twenty times, be prepared to extract about $1,800 from the casinos in twenty little chunks, but for the casinos to extract $2,225 from you in three big chunks.
Don't worry about it too much, though. If you take a friend to twenty hollywood movies, you'll end up spending about the same. And, unless it's a really good movie, you probably won't enjoy it as much.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Quantum uncertainty only becomes important at very small distances, very small energies, and very short timecales.
You are correct about the uncertainty of the universe, but some things are *very* certain. The bouncing of balls in a bin is one of them.
The poster above is correct, since this is a classical system. If you read in all the ball positions with an accurate sensor of some type (X-Ray tomography, like a CAT scan, comes to mind) and then solve the simulation numerically, taking into account gravity, air movement, collision dynamics, etc, etc, (all these things are very well understood for classical systems like this) and you can predict the fall of the balls.
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. if this is such a factor, then the computer would definately not work at predicting the resting spot of the ball without the "studs" programmed in too, the article said nothing about studs programmed in. The Professor said that a good guess can be made from the velocity of the wheel the mass and speed of the ball. It is possible that a dealer could "aim" the ball where he wants it.
WoW: Scheod 70 orc warlock on Shadowmoon
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.
"Stumble before you crawl"
For example, if you found these values for one rotation:
2.4s
2.8s
2.4s
2.2s
2.0s
1.9s
2.6s
2.3s
1.9s
2.0s
2.2s
2.3s
2.4s
2.4s
2.6s
2.8s
Drop the two extremes (I know I said 50%, sue me):
2.0s
2.2s
2.3s
2.4s
2.4s
2.6s
Then average them to arrive at 2.65s.
Wouldn't this eliminate the need to know the mass of the ball and the friction of the track?
Couldn't you then just covertly cross reference the thrown speeds with the actual winning quadrant (1/2, 1/4, whatever) to get yourself a prediction matrix?
I'm not trying to pretend that these are viable methods, I'm just thinking of them as they come into my head and thinking that there must be something wrong with 'em.
Thanks in advance for the replies.
My
Limekiller
The book The Eudaemonic Pie is about the roulette team,
and the book The Predictors covers Prediction Company's exploits.
yeah I'm fully aware of that, that's why the "Not that it matters" remark.
in the long run you will always lose, but roulette is a fine game in the sense that to some extend you can choose the risk(you can never make the probability go so that you'd end up winning in the long run though). playing for profit is of course quite fruitless, but with games like this you can extend the playing time you can get with certain amount of money(which, when playing for fun, is very important).
we got a state protected firm running the casinos and betting, returning the profits to sports, culture & etc(with betting they can't provide as good return rate as some private strictly for profit would be able to but I don't really care, but people who bet often complain about that).
of course some 'pro' losers are just playing on the internet now as a consequence.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.