Slashdot Mirror
Beating Roulette With Computers & Lasers
MeerCat writes "The BBC are reporting that a group of gamblers who won more than £1m at the Ritz Casino by using laser technology have been told by police they can keep their winnings.
A laser scanner linked to a computer was allegedly used to gauge numbers likely to come up on the roulette wheel.
Of course this could be Labour spin to try and get people excited about the idea of cheating at mega casinos"
Casino marketing manager:
"There is a portion of the population that think that casinos are stupid waste of time because the odds say that the players CAN'T win.
"Well... time to put a stop to that! Let's tell these smarties that very smart people that study the roulette wheel a lot can predict where the ball will land with some kind of accuracy. We'll suggest that people can tilt the odds in their favor! Haha!
"But we all know that the steps to winning are:
1. Get out casino mentioned in the news and in faux "cheating vegas" documentaries.
2. Encourage these smarties to get themselves to the casino and play some roulette. Those smarties will think they are "honing their predictive capabilities."
3. Profit!
Heck, it worked for Blackjack... let's get them into roulette too!
You don't need computers to count cards. The MIT guys sure didn't. Hell, whipping out a PDA in the middle of a blackjack game would be an excellent way to tip off the casinos as to what you're doing. One of the hardest parts about counting cards is making it look like you and your accomplices are just a bunch of unrelated people playing a normal game of cards.
Casino rules != The Law
They probably did break casino rules, and they have almost certainly been banned from going back. But, that doesn't mean they broke the law.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Sounds like a good way to get yourself banned from every Casino on earth. The house ALWAYS wins, just ask the MIT blackjack team.
Who's leg do I have to hump to get a dry martini around here?
IANAGAE (I am not a gambling addiction expert) but to me, it would seem far more likely that someone could get addicted to a megacasino with it's flashing lights, sounds, atmosphere, progressive jackpots, everything. They're just much slicker than anything else that people are used to and as such, it's far easier to become addicted. So yeah, I guess that would be a safe assumption.
-Dizzle
"I most likely AM so interested in myself."
funny how casino rules aren't the law, but mpaa/riaa/gnaa says something and it somehow becomes the law.
oh, america.
Roland Piquepaille and slashd
Sorry, BS.
It's a game of chance, yes, however, saying "it's not fair to those not similarly equipped" is irrelevant. You are not competing against other players at the table in any way. You winning or not has no effect on their ability to play, or to win. You are competing against the casino.
The "spirit" of the game is guessing what's going to come up next based on the information available to you and everyone else at the table. If I am smarter than the guy next to me, is that an unfair advantage? If I count cards at blackjack, is that "unfair"? (No, it's not, but will likely get me asked to not play blackjack anymore at that particular casino)
This is not about fairness or anyhting like that, it's purely about profit. Odds are in favor of the house. This device shifts the odds in favor of the players, therefore, the casinos cannot afford to operate the game if these devices are permitted on the premesis. Plain and simple. The same reason they do not allow card counters to play blackjack for too long, becuase they would continuously lose money.
If there was no law on the books against this, then rightly so they should walk away with the money. The casino should do more to protect itself from this.
Ask anyone who's worked in the "gaming" industry. There are NO winners. Sure, the occasional jackpot or lucky player, but that's just advertising.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Was it fair? No. But it's theirs now.
Goo goo g'joob.
No, I don't think it's plain and simple.
The goal of roulette is to try to guess where the ball will land, and to bet accordingly. These people simply used technology to make better guesses than everyone else.
There is a huge difference between people who break the rules, and people who exploit a loophole in the rules.
If the rules clearly stated (like the do in Nevada) that you cannot use electronic devices to predict the outcome of a game, then they would be cheating. But if there is no rule about it, then it's not cheating. It's just being creative.
Many slashdotters (myself included) are impressed because it's people who find loopholes in the rules that make progress for society.
Here's an extremely contrived example. There is no "rule" of nature that explicitly states "man cannot fly". For centuries, people saw that all flying things had wings, humans didn't have wings, and concluded that it was impossible, against the rules of nature. People even made pithy comments like "If God had intended man to fly, He would have given us wings."
As smarter people looked at the rules of how the universe worked, they found things like gravity, buoyancy, Bernoulli's law (something to do with gas pressure and velocity), but no actual law of nature that says "humans can't fly". Lots of laws that made it really challenging, but nothing to say it's impossible. So the clever people started to look for loopholes in the rules, and devised artifical wings. And now we fly further, higher and faster than the birds. This is because people were willing to ignore the assumed rules, and only focus on the rules that are actually there.
Now what often happens when someone is good enough to exploit a loophole in the rules, is that new rules are created (not in nature, but in casinos). So I wouldn't be surprised to find new laws passed that makes what they did illegal for the next people who try it. --- Personally, I think it would be a badge of honour to have a law created to patch a loophole that you found and exploited.
(On another note, here's an interesting theological/moral question: Assume that the lottery rules clearly state that it's illegal to affect the outcome of the game, but don't mention prediction the random outcome. Assume that God is all-powerful and all-knowing. If you pick 6 numbers at random for the lottery, and then you pray to God to make your numbers the winning numbers (and you win), did you cheat? If you pray for the right numbers, see the 6 numbers in a dream, and you then play those numbers the next day and win, did you cheat?)
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
Two factors will screw things up:
1) Inconsistencies in the roulette wheel itself. No wheel is going to be perfect. Therefore when the ball hits those imperfections, your laser calculation magic is going to be off.
2) The spin on the ball is going to alter behavior. The spin won't be the same every time. Also, since the ball is shiny metal with no markings, the spin will be rather hard, if not impossible to detect.
Maybe you can improve your odds with such a device, maybe not. Better bring along a good sized wad of cash to cover yourself on the losing rounds.