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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"
Didn't a bunch of MIT kids a while back use computers to count cards in several Vegas casinos? They ended up being banned from every casino's blackjack table.
As an American living in the U.K. I can say that Britain's perception of their gambling is distorted. Sure poker's big in the U.S., and the last few decades have had a dramatic increase in casinos but, the U.K. seems to think that the rest of the world's addicted to gambling and they're responsible. Blair's mega-casinos; case in point.
The truth is there are slots machines in tons of roadside stops, sports betting shops (ladbrokes, etc) on busy corners, and national lottery ads [adverts] pervasive on t.v. America, (nevada aside) treats gambling much more as a kind of entertainment; in the U.K. it's more about gambling.
I don't doubt there're gambling problems across most cultures, just, I see very little legitimate entertainment in roadside slot machines. It seems to be preying on those with problems.
If it is possible to win by detecting non-randomness then the wheel, or the process for using it, is bent.
My main objection to casinos is not that they provide a place for gambling - people will do this, and it is probably better that they do this in a way subject to some sort of regulation - but that reported incidents suggest they do not run fair games, and that the stacking of the odds on e.g. fruit machines is probably intended to fuel gambling addiction. It's like the alcohol industry producing alcoholic fruit drinks to get kids hooked, or just about any strategy of the tobacco industry. If the casino gets caught by someone using statistical analysis, the law should not protect them from their own dishonesty.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
The roulette shoe computer is here.. UCSC, MIT ... that's near enough for government work.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
but stories about how "the only time I played I put in $2 and made $20" help fuel that gambling addiction.
It's the few people who win at casinos that give the rest hope.
THis is what happens whe you dont pay mathematicians or engineers enough. THey go and do something insane, and everyone else doesnt know what to make of it, heheheh. Seriously though, developing that kind of program - to calculate the precise number of rotations on a spinning wheel - is the perfect example of high level engineering. I've done many questions like that only instead of Gambling wheels, it was vehicle wheels. Once you know the accelleration and the velocity at time 0, you just use standard energy equations. If you want to get fancy with your program you could figure out the oil used and the shaft used, and add in the known values for friction, etc (all this is available in charts/tables). THen all you need is the time for one full rotation, the size of the wheel and its weight (initial conditions) which you could find after two test runs with the laser velocity/accelleration finder. After that, you could make, say, a device that all you do is click a button when it starts spinning, click again after half a rotation or a full rotation, then it displays the winning number on a screen. Then, if you have an electrical engineer around, you could make into its own embedded device with a screen, about the size of a watch. Voila - El Cheaterwatch. The best thing since the Black Box. Who needs the ability to make free phone calls when you can win millions of dollars gambling, booyah.
So what's next, oh wise British lawmakers? Marking cards on Carribean Draw legal? Pre-arranging with the dealer to load a baccarat shoe with front-faces legal? Soft-spinning a Sicbo wheel legal? Collusion in poker legal?
These are cheaters, plain and simple. Why would we think them any different?
It has to find and register the wheel, which is an object of known form. Lane Hawk could do this. It then has to find and track the ball, which is not too hard (try the Lucas-Kanade feature tracker in OpenCV) and extract position and velocity. Given that information, prediction is possible.
Now that 3D game capability is going into camera phones, there's enough processing power in phones to consider this. It can all be done with passive sensors. You don't need lasers.
A less ethical method is for the casino to randomly switch the balls for each round, having an assortment of light and heavy balls. Or for the dealer to learn how to put a little "English" on the ball, using back spin and top spin to randomize the ball's time-of-flight (it doesn't take much).
If all else fails, the casino can deal with the big winners the old fashioned way: switch on the hidden electro-magnet hidden under the table. Any crooked gambling house knows how to rig a roulette wheel!
It is not illegal to count cards in your mind. However, the casinos have the right to refuse to allow you to play for any reason (and being a successful card counter is one that they think is a good reason). All they can do is escort you from the property, and if you resist or refuse, they can charge you with tresspass.
The Nevada state courts ordered a casino to pay a card counter who won a small pile of cash there, which the casino had refused to pay. That pretty much sums up the legality, I believe.
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
Umm...You may think that math precludes gambling, but I believe that you'll find many of the more 'serious' gamblers are people well-versed in math, who beleive that their deep ability to quickly calculate their momentary odds provides them an advantage. One of my friends has a masters in mathematics from a highly prestigious university, and is the most dedicated gambler I personally know.
If you don't have an intuitive knowledge of odds calculations, you will likely do poorly at poker, because 'knowing' what your opponents could have, and luring them into betting when *you* know they have a much lower chance of winning than you is the best path to winning.
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
Statistically, no matter how you play, the house eventually wins at roulette.
Statistics only work reliably over long periods of time. Let's say you roll a 12 sided die. Each side has a 1 in 12 chance of coming up. Now let's say that 1-5 represent black, 6 and 7 represent 0 and 00, and 8-12 represent red. The odds are even more against you than in roulette, but it's still quite possible to win 3 or 4 times in a row and then quit.
Overall the house still wins and it's more likely to win than you but it's not improbable to come out ahead in the short term. The key is to quit while you're ahead.