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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."
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"
Actually, there's a reason why we have some of the best knee surgeons in the world in Northern Ireland.
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.
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);
but card-counting is not cheating, it's good memory.
Card counting really has little to do with memory. It simply involves assigning a point value to each card value and keeping count as each new deck is dealt out. As such. the only thing you have to remember is the current count.
The most useful aspect of card counting is determining your bet size. When there are more tens and aces left in the deck, you have better odds over the dealer (often this becomes an advantage). At this point, you increase the amount of your bet.
Unfortunately, this does make card counting rather easy to spot, so another aspect of card counting is to determine your playing strategy based on the current count. You then have to memorize charts that tell you what is the best play for a certain combination of cards and a given count. This does involve memorization, but not the kind that most people think of when you mention card counting.
Card counting has never really been about memorizing exactly which cards have been dealt out of the deck. Very few people would have the ability to do that. Card counting as it is actually practiced is not that hard to do... though it is very hard to master it such that you maintain your advantage AND don't get kicked out of the casino.
One of the simplest counting systems involves assigning a +1 to all the tens in the deck (tens and face cards), and a -1 to all the 2s, 3s, 4s, and 5s. Whenever the count is positive, you have a higher ratio of tens to the lower cards, and thus you probably have an advantage. The more tens, the more likely you get a blackjack, and the more likely the dealer will bust if you don't get a blackjack.
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?
One of the simplest counting systems involves assigning a +1 to all the tens in the deck (tens and face cards), and a -1 to all the 2s, 3s, 4s, and 5s. Whenever the count is positive, you have a higher ratio of tens to the lower cards, and thus you probably have an advantage. The more tens, the more likely you get a blackjack, and the more likely the dealer will bust if you don't get a blackjack.
You apparently have that backwards. If 8 face cards, and no small cards came up the first hand, that would leave you with a +8, but you would be at a disadvantage since more 10's would out of the deck than the small cards. From looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_counting the 10/face cards should be -1, and the low cards +1.
Ken
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 An entire book about a group of people who made it work