Famed poker pro with ‘remarkable’ $9.6M scheme has to pay it back • Hacker News Board

Re: Famed poker pro with ‘remarkable’ $9.6M scheme has to pay it back

#211

Post by betenoire » Thu, Dec 22, 2016, 8:35 PM UTC

georgespencer wrote: post #169

solatic wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still convinced that it won't hold up on appeal. If the judge considers the cards to be marked because of manufacturing flaw that made the cards not perfectly symmetrical, then that manufacturing flaw would be present in all the casino's card games, rendering them all invalid and illegal and opening up the casino to lawsuits for return of losses from illegally operated games, which were illegal essentially because of…

> rendering them all invalid and illegal The crucial word is "knowingly". You would have to demonstrate intent for all of the games with those cards to be under scrutiny.

Crucial?

"...ruled that a game was voided because the casino accidentally..."

How does one accidentally knowingly do this?

Re: Famed poker pro with ‘remarkable’ $9.6M scheme has to pay it back

#212

Post by EdHominem » Sun, Dec 25, 2016, 8:38 PM UTC

jdmichal wrote: post #208

EdHominem wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but the casino has a great opportunity to rotate the cards in every game. Can you definitively state that the dealer never rotated one of your face-up cards after a hand? We only have their word that they didn't know the deck was marked. They could have been cooperating in fraud for years. Let certain players win, especially against a troublesome high-roller. Save it to invalidate a huge win, etc. It's improba…

Baccarat is a purely mechanical game from the house perspective. Even if the dealer had perfect premonition and telepathy, the behavior of the house would not change. > Sun trained herself to identify aberrations along the left or right margins of the card backs, no wider than 1/32 of an inch, the Times reported. Also, the imperfection was 1/32 of an inch, not 1/32 of the card width. Though the wording is ambiguous;…

> Even if the dealer had perfect premonition and telepathy, the behavior of the house would not change.

Yes, but we can't say nobody cheated before because they could have done it silently. All we can say is that nobody caught this method before. As for the house's motive, perhaps the hypothetical dealer is helping a confederate win in the same way as in this story, but just to a lesser amount. This also isn't the only card game this would work in.

> the imperfection was 1/32 of an inch, not 1/32 of the card width.

Right, I said it wrong but that's where I got 1/80th from. And yeah, it would be a fraction of a millimeter. But with proper technique (such as is used to check for marked backs anyways) of riffling through them, you'd see the shape move around.

I also worked in something similarly finicky and know from experience that difference is easily within normal ability to spot.

Anyways, the point is that there are two parties who are possibly hurt by marked cards - the house and its customers. The customers don't get the opportunity to inspect the game pieces so the responsibility should fall fully on the house. If they had skin in the game they'd try harder. But if they can rollback customer wins with it, it becomes a feature. Why look too hard, if at all?

Re: Famed poker pro with ‘remarkable’ $9.6M scheme has to pay it back

#213

Post by EdHominem » Mon, Dec 26, 2016, 12:15 AM UTC

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #201

EdHominem wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The system would be much better if we actually enforced it. Right. But ... > Which you guys refuse to demand from officials, because you've bought in to the notion that what they're doing is legal. No. Many of us demand that but nobody listens because they know they don't have to. Realize that making the laws unenforceable is the intent. This is what I mean by patching vs replacing. Let's say we managed to get a fe…

Limited liability for corporations isn't unconstitutional. However, Im very interested to hear how you propose to make an economy work without limited liability. I dont think you have anything like a plan for that, and have confused the behavior of a few large corportations with corporatioms in general, while simultaneously missing the actual social structures causing the problems you list and the benefits of corpora…

> However, Im very interested to hear how you propose to make an economy work without limited liability.

Fwiw, I'd be interested to hear how you think the current system could work if we didn't come along and bail the economy out every few years by backing these bad business debts with public money.

> corporations in general

The sole defining characteristic of a corporation is limited liability. Everything else a corporation is, is inherent it being a group of people.

Further, all benefits we enacted corporate law to provide are now handled much more directly by bankruptcy statutes and welfare. You don't have to risk everything to engage in a business anymore.

> simultaneously missing the actual social structures causing the problems you list and the benefits of corporations.

So many benefits you couldn't list them all in the space provided? You favor a system where I pay for the crimes your business commits so the burden of proof is yours.