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Beating Roulette With Computers & Lasers
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Dec 05, 2004 11:46 AM
from the games-people-play-for-cold-hard-cash dept.
from the games-people-play-for-cold-hard-cash dept.
MeerCat writes "The BBC are reporting that a group of gamblers who won more than £1m at the Ritz Casino by using laser technology have been told by police they can keep their winnings.
A laser scanner linked to a computer was allegedly used to gauge numbers likely to come up on the roulette wheel.
Of course this could be Labour spin to try and get people excited about the idea of cheating at mega casinos"
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Of course no law was broken! (Score:5, Funny)
"No more bets... And the number is 7... ZAP! I mean 19... ZAP! I mean 22... ZAP! I mean 13... ZAP! I mean 3... The winner is 3! You win again."
Re:Of course no law was broken! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Of course no law was broken! (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask anyone who's worked in the "gaming" industry. There are NO winners. Sure, the occasional jackpot or lucky player, but that's just advertising.
Re:Of course no law was broken! (Score:5, Informative)
When visiting Las Vegas, I always end up in the back where the high stakes poker tables are. You pay the rake to the casino and unload thick wads of money from other "unsuspecting" tourists who have seen poker on TV
Re:Of course no law was broken! (Score:5, Informative)
Betting on one number has 1 way to win, but 36 ways to lose. But the house pays odds as though you had a 1-in-36 chance of winning, not 1-in-37. So, the house has an advantage over you - in the long term average, they pay out $36 for every $37 they take back. You can easily work out mathematically that all the other bets (ie, splitting a chip across 2 adjacent numbers etc) work out to exactly the same house advantage. (it's about 2.7% or something)
In fact, short of actually using technology to predict the outcome or to affect the outcome of the spin, there is NO betting scheme, algorithm, pattern or method of placing bets on a roulette wheel that leads to any difference in the house's advantage over you.
You are absolutely correct, however, in your assertion in that you must know when to walk away with your winnings. An even more important skill is to know when to walk away after losing.
(In the USA, the presence of the '00' on the wheel actually doubles the house advantage again)
And finally, a corollary to your assertion that you have won hundreds of dollars at roulette: You have also, on other occasions, lost hundreds of dollars at it.
Re:Of course no law was broken!-Broken Spirit. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a game of chance, yes, however, saying "it's not fair to those not similarly equipped" is irrelevant. You are not competing against other players at the table in any way. You winning or not has no effect on their ability to play, or to win. You are competing against the casino.
The "spirit" of the game is guessing what's going to come up next based on the information available to you and everyone else at the table. If I am smarter than the guy next to me, is that an unfair advantage? If I count cards at blackjack, is that "unfair"? (No, it's not, but will likely get me asked to not play blackjack anymore at that particular casino)
This is not about fairness or anyhting like that, it's purely about profit. Odds are in favor of the house. This device shifts the odds in favor of the players, therefore, the casinos cannot afford to operate the game if these devices are permitted on the premesis. Plain and simple. The same reason they do not allow card counters to play blackjack for too long, becuase they would continuously lose money.
If there was no law on the books against this, then rightly so they should walk away with the money. The casino should do more to protect itself from this.
Cheating? Bah! (Score:5, Insightful)
"There is a portion of the population that think that casinos are stupid waste of time because the odds say that the players CAN'T win.
"Well... time to put a stop to that! Let's tell these smarties that very smart people that study the roulette wheel a lot can predict where the ball will land with some kind of accuracy. We'll suggest that people can tilt the odds in their favor! Haha!
"But we all know that the steps to winning are:
1. Get out casino mentioned in the news and in faux "cheating vegas" documentaries.
2. Encourage these smarties to get themselves to the casino and play some roulette. Those smarties will think they are "honing their predictive capabilities."
3. Profit!
Heck, it worked for Blackjack... let's get them into roulette too!
Not the first to try (Score:5, Informative)
see
The Eudaemonic Pie [thomasbass.com]
or "The Newtonian Casino" as the UK print was called
A slightly more detailed article (Score:5, Informative)
And some theory [newscientist.com] behind it from the previous slashdot article.
This is probably pure ignorance but (Score:4, Interesting)
If it is possible to win by detecting non-randomness then the wheel, or the process for using it, is bent.
My main objection to casinos is not that they provide a place for gambling - people will do this, and it is probably better that they do this in a way subject to some sort of regulation - but that reported incidents suggest they do not run fair games, and that the stacking of the odds on e.g. fruit machines is probably intended to fuel gambling addiction. It's like the alcohol industry producing alcoholic fruit drinks to get kids hooked, or just about any strategy of the tobacco industry. If the casino gets caught by someone using statistical analysis, the law should not protect them from their own dishonesty.
Re:This is probably pure ignorance but (Score:5, Informative)
Your preception of what they did is wrong. What makes the roulette wheel work is that no one, with the naked eye, can measure the initial conditions well enough to predict the outcome. From the articles discussed in various links, the group apparently used a laser to measure spin rate and other variables when the roullette wheel was set in motion. Then a computer estimated the final position of the ball. They had a brief window in which to do this. Bets must be placed before the wheel spins three times. If the reports are true, they could do this on a completely fair wheel.
In other words, they were NOT looking at long term averages and saying, for this wheel, the ball lands an unusual number of times on 6. They were looking at the initial conditions of the spin and used to physics to say on the spin, the ball will likely land here. They reduced the odds from 1 in 32 to 1 in 6.
Warning!!! (Score:4, Funny)
Now do this with a stock camera phone (Score:4, Interesting)
It has to find and register the wheel, which is an object of known form. Lane Hawk [evolution.com] could do this. It then has to find and track the ball, which is not too hard (try the Lucas-Kanade feature tracker in OpenCV) and extract position and velocity. Given that information, prediction is possible.
Now that 3D game capability is going into camera phones, there's enough processing power in phones to consider this. It can all be done with passive sensors. You don't need lasers.
Re:Labour spin? Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Labour spin? Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Though recently they backed off from the idea by reducing the number of initial casinos to about six (I cant remember the original number) as there are fears here that they'd cause more crime and more poverty in the surrounding area due to the envitable rise in gambling addiction.
Re:Labour spin? Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would mega-casinos cause gambling addction to rise in the UK? . . . a country where there are bingo parlors, casinos, slot machines and bookmakers (bookies for you yanks) already legal and seemingly found throughout the country.
Are we somehow to assume that the siren's call of a megacasino is somehow more compelling than that of the bookmaker and bingo parlor located round the corner?
Re:Labour spin? Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Labour spin? Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Gambling in casino's in the UK is restricted to private casinos, where you have to register as a member 24 hours before being allowed to make any bets. There are betting shops (bookies) which allow people to make bets on races, but they have to keep the inside of the shop obscured (usually by posters) to avoid anyone falling to temptation. Many pubs and nightclubs have the odd slot machine (fruit machine) with the spinning reels, but they don't really rake in more than maybe 300 pounds a week, and have to have the theme changed every 4-5 weeks, otherwise the punters lose interest. There's also the traditional beach arcades, where you could play various skill games for a pound coin.
The Labour party was caught out with some dodgy visits to and from the Los Vegas casino owners, over the "tightening of gambling laws". The argument goes that since the Internet is allowing people to gamble from home or work, they need new legislation to ban the slot machines from pubs/night clubs, and that these should be replaced by dozens of new super-casinos able to set up all across the UK, especially in deprived areas. The Labour party spin is that this would allow the average UK member of the public to share in the glamour of high society gambling (image of men in tuxedo's and women in elegant evening gowns), although in reality the casinos would simply have hundreds of electronic slot machines linked up for national prizes.
Given the land shortage in the UK, there are far more practical uses for regenerated industrial sites. These include health and fitness centres, shopping malls, conference centres, office blocks, mixed-income housing, with casinos right at the bottom of the list. Especially since there is no real public demand for more casinos.
And there is also a growing public suspicion that New Labour seems to disregard anyone or any business who atttempts to earn a basic living (let alone make a fortune) from honest hard work, but is only interested in people who are prepared to recklessly gamble their own money eg. the obsession with getting "young people" to become entrepeneurs, or getting experienced senior managers to remortgage their homes in order to set up their own companies, or having multi-millionaires buy out companies with declining sales, and simply rebrand everyone and everything with uniforms and company logos.
Re:MIT (Score:5, Informative)
The famous MIT story is that teams didn't use any kinds of computers. You don't need to use computers to beat blackjack either. But they did get kicked out of casinos since they're private property and they dont like cardcounting. The fact it's legal is irrelevant.
Re:MIT (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Easy fix (Score:5, Funny)
Oh... wait.
"Hermit" crab?
Never mind...
Re:Didn't break the law! (Score:5, Insightful)
They probably did break casino rules, and they have almost certainly been banned from going back. But, that doesn't mean they broke the law.
Re:Previous Article (Score:4, Funny)
yea, like that SCO story. slashdot really dropped the ball on that one.
Re:Getting banned (Score:4, Funny)
Re:U.K. Gambling perceptions-Math Failures. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you don't have an intuitive knowledge of odds calculations, you will likely do poorly at poker, because 'knowing' what your opponents could have, and luring them into betting when *you* know they have a much lower chance of winning than you is the best path to winning.