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How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

nytimes.com

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Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#91

Post by mattmaroon »

mmanfrin wrote: post #51
SonicSoul wrote: post #31

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…

You could say the same thing for derivatives traders. At least with beating the casino, you're usually comped swanky rooms and perks (since you're wagering so much money).

If you're good, you get comped a lot more than swanky rooms. A friend of mine has done this for a couple decades. He gets comped cars. Nice ones. He sells them. He's always selling stuff like $1,000 Saks gift certs online.

He gets what they call RFB (room, food, and beverage) out the wazoo. He's drank more expensive wine that most sommeliers. At one point it was hard to find an expensive restaurant in Vegas I hadn't eaten at, and I only saw him a tiny fraction of the time.

He gets his plane trips to basically anywhere with a casino paid for, often in a chartered jet. A guy with a sign with his name meets him at the airport.

In most parts of the country, if you ask enough girls if they want to go with you on a private jet to a luxury suite at the Wynn, one will say yes. Not a direct perk, of course, but an attractive indirect one for a single guy.

The value of the perks is substantial. You could buy them, but it would cost a lot.

Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#93

Post by WalterBright »

dharmon wrote: post #86
llamataboot wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your definition of money I guess. At my peak before I moved to heads-up I was playing about 4-8 tables of 10/20 shorthanded at a time and averaging about 1.5 BB/100 hands after the rake. 4-8 tables online is about 400 hands an hour so that's a take of approximately $120/hour. Granted they were grueling hours and no way could you really do 8 in a day. I could make more contracting programming now I guess, b…

Yeah, I figured the best I would ever do was around $100k / year, and with a huge time commitment. I would not recommend day trading either. A long time ago you could find arbitrage opportunities, but those have been essentially squashed out for quite some time. I have seen technical traders who claim to have a read on things, but to be honest I don't see it. (There are a number of long-term successful commodity trad…

Long term investing is also a lot less work, meaning you can do it without taking time away from other money making activities.

Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#94

Post by abduhl »

erik998 wrote: post #89

This article was great. It made me remember reading Scarne's New Complete Guide to Gambling long time ago. https://www.amazon.com/Scarnes-New-Complete-Guide-Gambling/d... He has a great story of how gamblers would get casinos to increase betting limits and allow them to successfully use a martingale system. To this day, casino owners still fall for this and lose substantially. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_limi…

Martingale systems definitely do not cause casino owners to "lose substantially" - the bettor cannot match the casino's bankroll and any amount of money won back after the first bet increase is actually the bettor's. The casino can afford to let you double because they are only ever putting the original amount bet at risk.

Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#95

Post by jmharvey »

mattmaroon wrote: post #90
SonicSoul wrote: post #31

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…

Money isn't the end goal. It's just the scoreboard. You do something like that because it's thrilling. But yes, if money were your end goal, someone smart enough to pull that off could probably make more elsewhere.

There's a thrill in figuring out a system, and there's some satisfaction in optimizing and executing it, but for the most part, if you're doing it right, being a professional gambler is pretty boring.

Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#96

Post by zappo2938 »

dharmon wrote: post #80
llamataboot wrote: post #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 pla…

I also started playing poker a lot in college for "fun money", and was looking to step up my game. I went a different route, though. I did the math and realized that even at a very good hourly take, I would never make very much money, and that by going up to higher stakes tables if anything I would do worse. I didn't have much hope for tournaments either. A few years before this I had worked at a day trading firm. I…

That's what Edward O. Thorp[0], the inventor of the modern Blackjack counting system, did. He devised a way to beat the dealer, tested it on a computer at MIT, went to Reno and made a bunch of cash. But instead of following that path, he wrote a book which was boon to the gambling industry, and started a hedge fund.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_O._Thorp

Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#97

Post by smm2000 »

mattmaroon wrote: post #91
mmanfrin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say the same thing for derivatives traders. At least with beating the casino, you're usually comped swanky rooms and perks (since you're wagering so much money).

If you're good, you get comped a lot more than swanky rooms. A friend of mine has done this for a couple decades. He gets comped cars. Nice ones. He sells them. He's always selling stuff like $1,000 Saks gift certs online. He gets what they call RFB (room, food, and beverage) out the wazoo. He's drank more expensive wine that most sommeliers. At one point it was hard to find an expensive restaurant in Vegas I hadn't…

How much did he loose in casinos? I am sure all those perks should cost significanlty less than casino's profit?

Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#98

Post by Bahamut »

abduhl wrote: post #94
erik998 wrote: post #89

This article was great. It made me remember reading Scarne's New Complete Guide to Gambling long time ago. https://www.amazon.com/Scarnes-New-Complete-Guide-Gambling/d... He has a great story of how gamblers would get casinos to increase betting limits and allow them to successfully use a martingale system. To this day, casino owners still fall for this and lose substantially. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_limi…

Martingale systems definitely do not cause casino owners to "lose substantially" - the bettor cannot match the casino's bankroll and any amount of money won back after the first bet increase is actually the bettor's. The casino can afford to let you double because they are only ever putting the original amount bet at risk.

Yep, this is certainly true - I've run into it since I bet this way most of the time when playing blackjack in casinos. One of the first things I do before sitting at a table is calculating how many bets it takes to hit the highest possible before hitting the limit, and I have hit it plenty of times (won some of them, lost others).

Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#99

Post by icelancer »

downandout wrote: post #49
ayyn0n0n0 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Original copy should be available as a reference copy in the UNLV library. Was years ago.

Re: How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos

#100

Post by fapjacks »

jchendy wrote: post #43
stronglikedan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right. I think though it takes meeting someone truly addicted to gambling before this really sets in, how devastating a true addiction to gambling is.
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