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A Gambler Who Beat Roulette

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Re: A Gambler Who Beat Roulette

#81

Post by AussieWog93 »

jacquesm wrote: post #21
MrMember wrote: post #10

>Tosa, Marjanovic and Pilisi returned to the Ritz at 10 that night, as promised. This time they were led to a private room where a squad from the London Metropolitan Police was waiting. An officer politely informed them they were under arrest on suspicion of “deception” and led them away to be interviewed at a nearby police station. Once the gamblers were out of earshot, Wootten urged the cops to check their shoes an…

That jumped out at me too. You could lose 500K in a casino and nobody would bat an eye but win 500K and suddenly the police is involved and the casino refuses to pay out. Personally I think if they can't prove that you are cheating that you should be allowed to continue to play as long as you feel like and the casino stays afloat. What's good for the goose should be good for the gander. The police automatically sidin…

I'm sure if you did the maths you'd find that the casino winning >$500k from a particular set of games has a high chance of occuring whereas the probability that the punter wins 500k legitimately is almost zero.

It's like those Minecraft speedruns; you can't necessarily prove it's false (at that point), but if there's a 1/10,000,000,000 chance that an outcome is achieved legitimately, what would you expect them to do?

Re: A Gambler Who Beat Roulette

#82

Post by reducesuffering »

bastardoperator wrote: post #61
ryandrake wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Casinos are pretty pathetic. They claim to run an honest game, and if you lose, they are totally fine with keeping your money. But, if you consistently win, and it looks even slightly statistically improbable, the casino turns into a crybaby health insurance adjuster, going over the rules/law with a magnifying glass to find something, anything that lets them avoid payment. At worst, the ones run by less savory organi…

Casinos have never claimed to run an honest game. It's common knowledge that the odds are always in favor of the house with the exception of maybe blackjack where the odds can theoretically be equal. I played roulette for hours at the Venetian with family a few weeks ago and we basically walked away with a ton of money, we got lucky, but they didn't say a word to us, in fact they were friendly to us and took care of…

> exception of maybe blackjack where the odds can theoretically be equal

Better than equal. Most Blackjack is -0.6% EV playing basic strategy, but with counting, each true count is an extra ~0.5% of EV, leading to big betting on high count hands with EV of 1-3%. Of course, that's why casinos kick out counters. They're literally "too good" at the game, and they don't want that.

Re: A Gambler Who Beat Roulette

#83

Post by reducesuffering »

tzs wrote: post #20

The "Roulette Assault" episode of the old History Channel series "Breaking Vegas" covers another way to beat roulette but without requiring computers or communications devices in the casino or timing anything. Archive.org has a copy of that episode [1]. A family went to casinos around Europe and observed the roulette wheels, keeping extensive records on where the ball landed. They were not covert about it. They'd jus…

That story may be true, but it sounds very suspect. Advantage on a casino like that takes a lot of hands. And if you need to swap chips for many losing hands, that's going to require sleight of hand swaps like hundreds of times. I'd be very surprised a dealer doesn't catch any of those. And then for the security team to watch footage of them playing for just 30 minutes and not see any?

Re: A Gambler Who Beat Roulette

#84

Post by jacquesm »

lancesells wrote: post #69
jacquesm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It wasn’t that they won; Of course it was! If they had lost using the same method there would have been no issue. > It’s that these folks won in a statistically hugely unlikely way, and that alone is pretty damning evidence that something is off. That's the casino's problem though, not law enforcement. Statistically unlikely equates 'we haven't seen this before' and that should not be enough reason to arrest people…

> The police should not be in the business of protecting the revenue streams of gambling installation operators. What about in something like betting on a boxing match and having the fighter throw the fight? Is that the casino's problem too? If you're ok with someone cheating then it all makes complete sense what you're saying. If you're not then someone has to investigate. Do you really want the casino being law enf…

It's the casino here that's cheating, and the casino that doesn't know its own business well enough to spot the flaws that are exposed. Winners have no obligation to explain how they won just as the casino isn't going to tell the losers to stop losing.

Re: A Gambler Who Beat Roulette

#85

Post by jacquesm »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #81
jacquesm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That jumped out at me too. You could lose 500K in a casino and nobody would bat an eye but win 500K and suddenly the police is involved and the casino refuses to pay out. Personally I think if they can't prove that you are cheating that you should be allowed to continue to play as long as you feel like and the casino stays afloat. What's good for the goose should be good for the gander. The police automatically sidin…

I'm sure if you did the maths you'd find that the casino winning >$500k from a particular set of games has a high chance of occuring whereas the probability that the punter wins 500k legitimately is almost zero. It's like those Minecraft speedruns; you can't necessarily prove it's false (at that point), but if there's a 1/10,000,000,000 chance that an outcome is achieved legitimately, what would you expect them to do…

Except of course that in this case it was legitimately, and the chance was substantially better than that.

Re: A Gambler Who Beat Roulette

#87

Post by marktangotango »

llamataboot wrote: post #77

In a previous life as an advantage gambler (there are always edges somewhere, but you better know you actually have one and know why you know and your risk of ruin etc), I would say that "how can we keep exploiting this below the radar" is as common of a discussion topic as "what is there to exploit" Card counting is a perfect example - you absolutely can count cards in the right type of blackjack, and you absolutely…

I'll post this here if anyone has noticed something similar. There's a state lotto game that I'm convinced uses at least two different sets of balls, and one set has a distinct weight imbalance such that draws using the set have a bias. A bias such that picking numbers with a 15-20 number gap would have significantly better odds of winning.

I'm not a statistician though and analyzing historic draws is beyond my ability.

Re: A Gambler Who Beat Roulette

#88

Post by scotty79 »

MrMember wrote: post #10

>Tosa, Marjanovic and Pilisi returned to the Ritz at 10 that night, as promised. This time they were led to a private room where a squad from the London Metropolitan Police was waiting. An officer politely informed them they were under arrest on suspicion of “deception” and led them away to be interviewed at a nearby police station. Once the gamblers were out of earshot, Wootten urged the cops to check their shoes an…

Fair play is for loosers. No gambling enterprise actually gambles. If you can grease the wheels to have police on speed dial when someone plays too well for your liking, you do.

Re: A Gambler Who Beat Roulette

#89

Post by joshyeetbox »

reducesuffering wrote: post #82
bastardoperator wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Casinos have never claimed to run an honest game. It's common knowledge that the odds are always in favor of the house with the exception of maybe blackjack where the odds can theoretically be equal. I played roulette for hours at the Venetian with family a few weeks ago and we basically walked away with a ton of money, we got lucky, but they didn't say a word to us, in fact they were friendly to us and took care of…

> exception of maybe blackjack where the odds can theoretically be equal Better than equal. Most Blackjack is -0.6% EV playing basic strategy, but with counting, each true count is an extra ~0.5% of EV, leading to big betting on high count hands with EV of 1-3%. Of course, that's why casinos kick out counters. They're literally "too good" at the game, and they don't want that.

I thought casinsos started using multiple decks (like 6) and auto shuffled between games now so that counting was pretty much impossible?

Re: A Gambler Who Beat Roulette

#90

Post by nessus42 »

My uncle was a professional gambler and did well at it. At first he counted cards playing Blackjack, but eventually was banned from most casinos where it was actually possible to win at Blackjack. (Casinos in Atlantic City aren't allowed to ban card counters, so they use huge decks and shuffle frequently to make winning via card counting infeasible.)

He mostly switched at some point to betting on sports. He arbitraged the odds that the bookies used compared to odds that were apparently more accurate, probabilistically.

I asked him how he could possibly have a better sense of the probabilities than the bookies, whose job it is to get this right. He replied that the bookies don't set the odds based on probabilities, but rather just so that they have an equal amount of money on both possible outcomes, and therefore they would always make money no matter what.

So the odds that the bookies used were often not good measures of the actually probabilities, but rather often more a measure of public sentiment. And he could take advantage of this difference.

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