Slashdot Mirror
Cheating At Roulette May Be Legal In UK
nuke-alwin writes, "A hidden device that appears to give an advantage to roulette players may be legal in the UK when the gambling industry is deregulated next year. The device — which consists of a small digital time recorder, a concealed computer, and a hidden earpiece — uses predictive software to determine where the ball is likely to land. It has been tested by a government lab, which found that 'the advantage can be considerable.' It will be up to casinos to spot people using such devices."
just like it will be legal for the Casino to shoot you in the knees... Spot on the subject, every geek should read the Eudaemonic Pie about besting the Las Vegas roulettes.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
If you want to know just what kind of consequences are in store for serious cheaters, even if what they are doing is perfectly legal, see Mezrich's Bringing Down the House , the story of the MIT students who used card counting to make millions. Even when they wore disguises on repeat visits, the casino still found them out, and hired goons to put the hurt on. So all of you thinking that you'll now become millionaires, think about how hard it would be to hide all this whizbang gadgetry if even simple card-counting doesn't fly at casinos.
They may be legal but it doesnt mean casinos have to let you in with them, or to allow you to continue playing should you be caught with one.
Because the guys at MI6 want an advantage when they are "doing their work".
Simpler than that: the house can just set a rule that all bets have to be down before the croupier releases the ball.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Actually, casinos have a very simple method to sense if you are cheating: you are winning.
Clicker: Used to record the speed of the rotor and ball, the data acquisition clicker can be concealed in a pen, a watchstrap, a shoe or even clipped to a molar tooth. The device is clicked as the two entities pass reference points to gauge the deceleration speeds. The data is sent to a remote computer
Computer: Uses the timings to calculate which number the ball will strike based on an algorithm from data gathered and transmits the information to the earpiece. It is small enough to be hidden in a mobile phone, MP3 player, handbag or cigarette lighter.
I wasn't actually sold on the idea until I read those two parts.. If I can conceal the clicker in my shoe or watch strap, then I can practice at home until I can do this undetected. I could rest my arm against the table and press on the table slightly until it clicks... just a matter of practice. Same thing for the shoe. If you fidgit from foot to foot regularly, it's a simple matter to press your foot down slightly. As far as a lighter - well I can't see casinos banning any form of vice... they themselves sell vice!
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
This has nothing to do with the weel beeing biased, it has to do with timing the ball and the weel and calculating where the ball will most likely stop. All this is in the article. (yeah, yeah, I know, I must be new here :))
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
No, that wont work. The shoe computer simply tries to guess which half of the wheel the ball will land on, and the mass of the ball isn't one of it's assumptions. It basically just times the ball, finds out how quickly it's slowing down, and does a simple projection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemons
An old boss of mine did something similar a few years later, in the early 80's. He built a card counting machine in a cigarette pack, and sent him signals through 2 LEDs hidden in his watch band, which were burried in small tubes angled at his face, so only he could see them.
He made about $10K with the machine, then stopped using it. The money he made wasn't justifying the risk he felt he was taking. He worried he would be killed if caught.
So, he still has the cigarette pack, and made his money honestly, founding a successful company in Silicon Valley, and taking it public.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
Companies have sophicticated electronic detection equipment that can detect the hash from your shoe computer. Using a device to 'help' with roulette is thirty years old. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend the book The Eudaemonic Pie. One of the first shoe computers, using a 6502. This should be in the nerd's top ten books to read.
Of course, if you used an asynchronous computer there would be no hash to detect....
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
They want to be careful - they might end up playing Le Chiffre. That doesn't end well. Chairs with the bottom cut out and all that.
And also there's no way to predict weather behaviour because there needs to be blah blah sensors and blah blah devices to detect infinate number of samples and also a model etc. etc. You should not need to be 100% exact for most of times. And that device is one of those. It might not be 100% exact, but even 70% or 60% prediction level might help you alot to earn horse sack of money. Just as in weather forecasts. It's not 100% exact, but you still know that it's better to carry an umbrella in a rainny reported forecast. Or you can ignore that and turn back home soaked keeping your 40% doubt for those measures.
Here in Victoria, Australia it really is illegal to implement a system to beat the casino. People have been charged for doing that. Its silly, but so is the whole casino thing.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
On the other hand, of course, people aren't expecting to play against a combination of human and machine...
I've never played cards at a casino, but it was always my understanding that, unlike you sitting around the kitchen table with your buddies, blackjack in a casino isn't played against the other players. It's basicly multiple 1-on-1 games of player-vs-house, all played at the same time. The only effect that another player "cheating" would have on you would be which cards you get. However, that's all random. The other player taking an extra card because he knows what the count is could help you just as well as it could hurt you. His extra card could end up being the card that would have busted you, and instead you get exactly the card you need.
The primary reason this doesn't get done at the moment is that it opens the house up to accusations of cheating: it's very hard but not totally out of the question to influence which area of the wheel the ball ends up in. Allowing bets to placed after the ball is released removes any suspicion that this might be happening.
If you start to win too consistently, then yeah, the house may well become suspicious. However, the old adage that the house always wins is only true generally. In specific cases, the house will lose - someone will beat it from time to time. The point is that the chances of it being *you*, *this* time are pretty damn low.
If it was actually impossible to win, very few people would play. There has to be the occasional big win to give people something to hope for.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
... influencing the outcome of the game (e.g. with a magnet) is cheating. There's nothing in the rules of Roulette that says "The gamblers shall not attempt to predict when and where the ball lands" -- or, at least, not the last time I checked. Roulette is simply flawed in an era when palm-sized computers are ubiquitous. Similarly, blackjack can be beaten by card-counting, but card-counting is not cheating, it's good memory.
Why-oh-why don't casinos just use entropy generators? The user presses a button, a computer generates a number between 0 and 100, if it's lower than or equal to 48 they lose, if it's above then they win.
In fact by using central limit theorem, and allowing the user to enter how many bets they would like to place, and how much money, you can compound an entire nights worth of bets into a fraction of a second! What a time saver!
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
I'm not exactly sure, but from what I've read, it's somewhat obvious that not too many of you that are posting comments really know how the wheels themselves are made. They're not just machined on a lathe anymore. They're made with a laser guided lathe that's completely automated. The bearings are very close to perfect spheres, and the weights and balances are also perfect before they get shipped to the casino's. Yes, there are small imperfections depending on the wood used, quality of the brass used, and other small things, however they have absolutely no effect on the outcome of the game. It's completely random. until the computer comes into play. With simple alogarithms, you can predict where the ball will land. The fact that the numbers on the wheels are in a standard order is what allows this.
When it comes to the bets being closed before the wheel spins and the ball drops, it won't happen. Part of the excitement of roulette is hopping into a game already in action. It gives the illusion of an advantage, and sadly, with the computer, it is an advantage. They can easily detect electronics like that, and soon it will be standard practice to scan for the computer.
Just knowing on which quarter of the roulette the ball will fall is more than enough. You don't just go and put everything in one number. Putting money in consecutive numbers is a common practice. If you know it's going to fall arround 17, then three persons working togheter may place their bets on 17 and consecutive numbers.
Without help, you can win. Reducing the possible ressults to a 25%, or even 50% is good enough for most players. Thay may not win an all bets, but at the end of the night, they will get out of the casino with a very large ammount of cash.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
The appearance of impropriety. Once the ball has been thrown, all the input from the dealer is done. If the ball is thrown afterwards, the casino could theoretically cheat or use a dealer with really good technique to try and sway the wheel in their favor (spin the wheel the same way, throw the ball the same way, the only variable is where you start in terms of what half/quadrant the ball falls into).
It would be the same as if the dealer in blackjack only dealt himself one card, face up, and then waited for the rest of the table to play through (either busting or holding) before dealing himself the second. Technically, the odds are the same but, from the player's perspective, the possibility of cheating or underhanded play is greatly increased.
As with blackjack, the non-random roulette winner is fairly easy to spot. Placing bets that cover a particular segment of the wheel (the best computers right now can narrow it down to about 5 sequential positions) is a somewhat odd bet. When a pit boss notes someone winning by making a series of "segment" bets, he can simply refuse their action (and of course, take their picture and distribute it to other casinos).
Why would you have to place your bet on a sequential segment of the wheel ? It would seem to me that if you just played each time on a single number in the interval that the computer predicts, you would still tremendously increase your chances of winning : 1/5 instead of 1/37 ! Therefore, statistically you would still have a net gain at the end of the game, and would not get suspected.
This isn't the first system invented that can beat the house. Before card counting was invented and described in Edward O'Thorpe's book "Beat the Dealer," he had discovered and capitalized on a couple side-bets with positive expectation he found in Bacarat. The casinos simply eliminated them. When card-counting arrived, casinos introduced multiple decks (which don't eliminate the edge, but does decrease it) and early shuffling. Early shuffling costs them money by decreasing the hands played per hour, but they can employ it only when they suspect a counter at the table. A simple solution for removing the edge for roulette is for the coupier to re-touch the center wheel once after closing the betting, either accelerating or decelerating a little. Easy to do, effective, and no decrease in the amount bet/hour.
You're missing some salient facts:
a) Fraud is a criminal offence, prosecuted by some representative of "the people". Breaches of contracts are not criminal acts, they are not even "illegal", but each side may sue the other under civil law to have the terms of the contract enforced and/or redress.
I.e. you seem confused about law, and appear to be mixing up different parts of it.
(At least, above is generally true in English jurisprudence and its derivatives, such as Canada, Ireland, the USA, etc.. - approaching half the world.).
b) Casinos in the past *have* retained winnings of customers who "cheated", and the *customer* sued and *won*. In both the UK and in Spain (well, i didn't read who sued who in the spanish case, but the Casino lost either way).
c) UK courts have ruled that using skill, without influencing the game in any way, is *not* cheating.
d) If you'd read the article, it covers why the UK super-casinos are not keen on overbearing measures, such as contracts, to try counter "clever players" - it would do them more harm than good. Would you gamble large amounts of money if the Casino made you sign a contract to say it could arbitrarily not pay you if you won?
When will slashdot learn that US jurisprudence (or common practice), particularly region-specific in a region uncommonly beholden to some industry, has 0 bearing on the rest of the world? Particularly when the story is about *some other part of the world*???
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
The Eudaemonic Pie is a classic tale of a few brilliant UCSC physics and math majors building a roulette predictor using the KIM-I 6502-based single board computer. The guy with the KIM timed successive rotations of the ball around the wheel to get its decelleration. He used switches in his shoes connected to the KIM if I remember right. And from the decelleration and the position of the ball at the start of the timing, the KIM computed the octant into which the ball was most likely to fall. It then transmitted the octant by RF to the bettor who was ignoring the table so as not to attract the attention of the house. The bettor had an RF receiver attached to some simple electronics that activated one of eight vibrators attached to different places on his body. The bettor then bet on the numbers in the appropriate octant and achieved a significant advantage over the house. The students had a professional wheel in the basement of their house on which the tested their system. I believe that one of the students was instrumental in developing the basis for chaos theory when he wasn't working on the roulette cheater. Or maybe it was the other way around. And one or more of them went to work at Los Alamos National laboratory after leaving Santa Cruz. I found this story very interesting and exciting, not the least reason for which was that I also had a KIM-I computer (my first electronic comuter) for which I had written some software to automate my darkroom, and I was considering programming it to cheat at Blackjack in a similar, if much less technically advanced, way. I never went through with my project, but I still have my KIM-I on my wall, right next to my first non-electronic computer, an abacus.
The Eudaemonic Pie An entire book about a group of people who made it work