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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."
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.
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.
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... -
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
If you have that much capital, then to hell with the gambling. Go get some hookers!
Sheesh.
<bart
As a roulette dealer myself, I can assure you that this is a conceivable position but not an agreeable one. Spinning the wheel faster does cause the frets to have a greater influence on the ball, but its still statistically going to stick to that section.
As well, as the article notes, PLAYERS don't like it! There are only so many rule changes you can make in the interest of cheat reductions before the legitimate players get fed up and leave. (One of these is disallowing blackjack players to increase the number of hands they play mid-shoe). As an aside, in the Province of Alberta, casino dealers are to stop betting two ball revolutions BEFORE THE DROP, not after the spin commences. As in many gambling areas, the regulations must be changed: the casino can't just create rules (even sensible ones) out of the blue.
For this reason, speeding up the wheel and reducing bet times are not good ideas. It will prevent cheating, because the legitimate players will stop playing and the game will be shut down!
The best way to prevent wheel tracking I've found is just to constantly (every spin) change the speed of the wheel and the ball. I like to let the wheel slow and then push it with the ball just before I spin. This would require these cheats to constantly re-compute, increasing the likelihood of detection.
That's the point really. There is a way to predict the outcome. Like a lot of games, it is not a game of pure skill, it has an element of chance and an element of skill in the form of predicting where the ball will land. Just like blackjack is a game of chance and skill. The skill comes in when you try to predict what cards are going to be dealt based on statistics and your knowledge of what cards have been dealt so far. Of course, the casinos consider people who are too good at "counting cards" to be cheaters as well.
The problem here is that the argument that you cannot use technological devices to help you in gambling is a slippery slope argument. I've never heard of a casino banning anyone for glasses or contacts, even if they help people see better and therefore enhance their natural gambling skills. What about future visual aids. Lets say you have a low resolution artificial retina for blind which cannot see as well or in the same way as a normal retina and makes up for it by, for example, using a computer to track motion and plotting courses for objects in Heads Up Display? Or how about if it allows the user to rewind their vision to specific bookmarks, allowing them to supplement their memory (helpful in remember what cards have already been dealt, for example). Are the disabled going to be banned from future casinos?
All this is really beyond the point in my opinion. Random redistribution of wealth at casions is stupid. Redistribution of wealth based on exceptional skill at gambling is considered cheating by the casinos. The government, when they allow private gambling to interfere on their own gambling monopoly, seem to agree with the casinos in these matters. So, the end result is that, on the whole, the only people who actually win at casinos are the odd successful gambler, the cheaters who do not get caught, and the casinos themselves. In other words, casinos are dumb. I guess I hold the view that people should be allowed to gamble if they want to, but I think they are stupid to do so.
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!!!
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.