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How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

nytimes.com

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Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#41
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am just guessing but from the name it seems that it's about using one "naive and careful" player to observe the game and count the cards while placing small bets. Once the deck becomes advantageous the "wild gambler" joins and starts blasting huge bets. Of course the first player signaled a good moment to join. This way it doesn't look suspicious as no one altered their behavior (one early method to detect card cou…

This isn't new though, and is one of the most basic forms of team based card counting - it's how the MIT blackjack team did things. IIRC the "naive and careful" player is called the "spotter" and the "wild gambler" is called the "Gorilla".

Yes, this is correct. The blinded player methods call your heavy hitters to both hot and average tables, so the player doesn't actually know whether their odds of success are heightened.

Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#42

For those of you that don't know, the primary character in this piece, James Grosjean, isn't just any advantage player, he is the advantage player. He wrote what is often referred to as the Bible of advantage play - Beyond Counting - and its sequel, Exhibit CAA: Beyond Counting . Both of these books are incredibly hard to find, and when they do come up for sale, often sell for thousands of dollars. Here's a current l…

I know it might be judgmental and possibly hypocritical, but I can't help but think that kind of intellect and education is wasted on trying to beat a casino. If money is the end goal, wouldn't there be a bigger opportunity in pursuing investment strategy ideas (i.e. market inefficiencies), or working on making some process more efficient that could disrupt some industry (i.e. spam/phishing detection, or deep learnin…

I have often thought the same of guys like this. Ed Thorp, who was the first to write about card counting in blackjack, eventually took his math skills to the markets and made hundreds of millions of dollars. Bill Benter, arguably the world's most successful horse race bettor, has also created a nine figure net worth by betting into horse racing pools - i.e. not playing against the house, but against other players, in a very scalable way.

So it isn't just the money that motivates people like Grosjean to personally show up to dark casinos, often in the middle of nowhere, to take on the house. As you said, his earning potential would be far greater in other venues. I've met a few of these people, and while some just like "easy" money, many of them view casinos as thieving, malevolent enemies that need to be beaten by someone. The fact that they can make money at it is almost secondary.

Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it might be judgmental and possibly hypocritical, but I can't help but think that kind of intellect and education is wasted on trying to beat a casino. If money is the end goal, wouldn't there be a bigger opportunity in pursuing investment strategy ideas (i.e. market inefficiencies), or working on making some process more efficient that could disrupt some industry (i.e. spam/phishing detection, or deep learnin…

I'm not familiar with James Grosjean, nor am I a gambler, but I would guess that James became addicted to gambling, and then used his intellect and education to make money doing what he loved.

> I would guess that James became addicted to gambling, and then used his intellect and education to make money doing what he loved.

I'd be a little careful with terminology there. Gambling addiction can be a very serious problem, while a passion/love for gambling can be fine even if you're a losing player.

Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#44
post #2

> But when Sun was arrested in 2007 for a $93,000 gambling debt owed to MGM, she vowed revenge What? How is that legal?

Not legal in Canada. Debt isn't a criminal offense. I don't think they can arrest you. But maybe I'm confusing it for: they can't throw you in jail for debts.

It's also illegal in the US to jail someone for debts. The way they get around this in Nevada is to jail you for writing bad checks, which is fraud. THat is to say: intentionally writing a check you know will bounce is fraud and a crime, but in the event that a check you wrote bounces, it's hard to prove that you didn't know the check would bounce when you wrote it. So it's not really debtor's prison, but almost a loophole to create a debtor's prison.

Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#45
I can expand a bit on how advantage play can work for the hold'em games against the house. I'm sure Grosjean and other professionals at this sort of thing have more sophisticated tactics. Fun fact - last I looked maybe 6-7 years ago, his book was selling for low 4 figures on the secondary market. That's how much advantage players can value an unknown tactic.

About 10 years ago casinos started offering various hold'em variants played against the house, presumably to cash in on the poker boom that was going on. Most of them try to mimic the flow of a hold'em hand as much as possible. You'll always have to ante something (somewhat analogous to posting a blind, but also just required as a way to force action in a table game), and then generally there's a decision point after getting your hole cards where you can bet more or fold. The more complicated games include additional decision points after seeing the flop and sometimes the turn. There's a lot more details I'm glossing over here about how it works (dealer hand must qualify by being a minimum strength, different payouts for various final hand strengths, different allowable bet sizes, bonus bets, etc.), but that's the basic structure. I recall seeing 3 major variants at the time - from least complicated to most, WPT All-in Hold'em, Texas Hold'em Bonus (I think, whatever the WSOP branded one was that Harrah's had), and Ultimate Texas Hold'em. WPT seems dead, UTH I still see around a bit. Not sure if Harrah's and other places still run Bonus.

The basic strategy for all these games generally involves a simple lookup table for the preflop action - for WPT, the correct play is to max bet for 90+% of your hands [1]- it's a very easy game to play perfectly. For UTH, it's probably closer to 25% [2]. (Aside - ignoring bankroll considerations, it's almost always correct to bet the max on any game that allows a range of bets. Either the bet is +EV or it isn't.)

The easiest advantage you can take is to simply know more cards at the table. Most dealers in my experience will allow you to show cards to your friends, ask for advice, whatever. Knowing more cards lets you make better decisions. Simple example - in WPT 83 offsuit is a very borderline playable hand. If you see another 8 in a player's hand, that may make it unplayable (since you're less likely to make a pair of 8s). Alternatively, if you have a borderline unplayable hand, seeing a pair of high cards in another hand may make the dealer less likely to qualify, which is an advantage for you when you have any bad hand.

In WPT at least, this is an extremely minor advantage - the "strategic frontier" where your decisions may be changed by this knowledge is extremely small. It's theoretically a much larger advantage in UTH, but there the strategy changes you can make with this knowledge encompass such a huge state space that you'll not be able to apply it consistently.

A second advantage is touched on in the article, viewing the dealer's hole cards. This is much harder to do and usually involves finding a dealer with bad form - I believe they're trained to slide the cards right out of the machine along the felt to avoid this, but some dealers lift slightly, so you can catch glimpses if you're in the right seat. Hopefully the playing advantages of knowing the dealer's cards are obvious.

I wouldn't be surprised if shuffle tracking is employed as well, but I'm not really sure what the state of the shuffle machines is these days.

Surprisingly, the biggest advantage I ever saw was to simply understand how to evaluate a hold'em hand. I've played hundreds of thousands of hands (former pro), and I still get it wrong occasionally when I'm not paying attention. When all these games first came out, casinos had to train dealers to do this, many of whom had never played poker. I think I calculated that I'd need to see a mistake rate of something like 1/600 to make the game profitable right out of the gate, ignoring any other advantages, and I was seeing 2-3 mistakes/hr (out of maybe 30-100 hands/hr). Admittedly only about half of the mistakes will be in your favor. It's not quite as easy these days, but for the first year or so it was an absolute gold mine.

Orthogonal to all this, some of these games are pretty easy to play at 98+%. Watching how people play these games, I wouldn't be surprised if the average table hold is upwards of 10%. I don't have any particular proof, but I'm pretty sure I've gotten grossly overcomped for play at these games.

[1] Everything but 82o, 73o-, 63o-, 52o, 43o, 32o. I'm not sure why 53o is playable. [2] Something like Ax+, K5o+, K2s+, Q5s+, Q7o+, J8s+, JTo, 33+. You can find the full table at wizardofodds or similar sites.

Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#46
I used advantage gambling to help put myself through grad school during the first online casino boom. There were so many casinos vying for players, that many offered a bonus -- say $500 extra to play with if you deposit $500. Of course that $500 had a playthrough requirement -- you may have to wager a total of 20x that to withdraw -- so $10,000. Now you simply find a casino that has a game with odds that beat the playthough. So, for example, if a game has a 1% house edge, you're expected to lose about $100 wagering that $10000, leaving you a theoretical $400 in profit.

Eventually, the casinos wised up and changed it so the wagering had to be done on slots, which have terrible odds. However, we figured out early on (I was in an advantage gambler forum) that there were "double or nothing" games in the slot machine, that let you go double-or-nothing between 5 and 10 times. These counted towards wagering, and were essentially perfect 50/50 odds (no house edge) - so by always going double or nothing until the end, you could rack up most of your wagers at 50/50 even though the initial slot roll was at a much higher house edge.

I think I started with $100 deposit into a casino and probably made > $50k in the two years after that. About $40k of that went to bills and $10k became my initial poker bankroll while I taught myself to play poker professionally, which I did for the rest of grad school after the casino bonus gambling winded down (they eventually wised up to the slot machine thing too) -- and if you player poker at a high enough level and you use judicious table selection, you can always advantage gamble (because you are gambling with each other, not the house, though the house gets their cut with the rake -- so you have to win at a high enough level that you know you are beating the rake)

I was a "small time" person, just doing it on the side to earn spending money -- there were certainly other people who had many many computers, VPNs, shill addresses, etc who took those casinos for hundreds of thousands a year for those couple years.

I learned a lot about probability theory, estimated value, and the mathematics of gambling in general, gained the emotional strength to deal with high variance (the best description of playing poker professionally that I ever heard was that it was like playing a game of chess for $1, then flipping a coin for $100. In the long run that chess game is the only thing that matters, but in the short run those coin flips can be brutal). Good times.

Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#47

For those of you that don't know, the primary character in this piece, James Grosjean, isn't just any advantage player, he is the advantage player. He wrote what is often referred to as the Bible of advantage play - Beyond Counting - and its sequel, Exhibit CAA: Beyond Counting . Both of these books are incredibly hard to find, and when they do come up for sale, often sell for thousands of dollars. Here's a current l…

I know it might be judgmental and possibly hypocritical, but I can't help but think that kind of intellect and education is wasted on trying to beat a casino. If money is the end goal, wouldn't there be a bigger opportunity in pursuing investment strategy ideas (i.e. market inefficiencies), or working on making some process more efficient that could disrupt some industry (i.e. spam/phishing detection, or deep learnin…

Part of it is the thrill of the chase and beating casinos at their own game. As the saying goes, "it's a hard way to make an easy living"

Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#48

For those of you that don't know, the primary character in this piece, James Grosjean, isn't just any advantage player, he is the advantage player. He wrote what is often referred to as the Bible of advantage play - Beyond Counting - and its sequel, Exhibit CAA: Beyond Counting . Both of these books are incredibly hard to find, and when they do come up for sale, often sell for thousands of dollars. Here's a current l…

"Both of these books are incredibly hard to find, and when they do come up for sale, often sell for thousands of dollars."

I'm sure someone has scanned it in PDF form somewhere..

Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#49

For those of you that don't know, the primary character in this piece, James Grosjean, isn't just any advantage player, he is the advantage player. He wrote what is often referred to as the Bible of advantage play - Beyond Counting - and its sequel, Exhibit CAA: Beyond Counting . Both of these books are incredibly hard to find, and when they do come up for sale, often sell for thousands of dollars. Here's a current l…

"Both of these books are incredibly hard to find, and when they do come up for sale, often sell for thousands of dollars." I'm sure someone has scanned it in PDF form somewhere..

I've been looking for a long time and have yet to find it.

Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not legal in Canada. Debt isn't a criminal offense. I don't think they can arrest you. But maybe I'm confusing it for: they can't throw you in jail for debts.

It's also illegal in the US to jail someone for debts. The way they get around this in Nevada is to jail you for writing bad checks, which is fraud. THat is to say: intentionally writing a check you know will bounce is fraud and a crime, but in the event that a check you wrote bounces, it's hard to prove that you didn't know the check would bounce when you wrote it. So it's not really debtor's prison, but almost a lo…

"Didn't know the check would bounce" implies you, what, don't know how to add up a list of numbers? Its fair to say a bounced check means bad faith.
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