
Turkish Casino: Gambling of the Future [pdf] - crablar
http://jeffmeyerson.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/TurkishCasino.pdf
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dsjoerg
I like the general idea — gamblers can do useful work for society — but one
area that needs improvement is the kind of things that the participants will
be betting on.

"IBM wants to offer the minimum amount that the candidate will accept,"
however the gamblers are not asked to figure that out, instead the "entire
wager pool is awarded to the Turks who had the closest answers [to what IBM
actually offered]".

Thus the smart gambler tries to figure out not what the candidate would
accept, but what IBM is likely to offer. At this point the prediction market
does _not_ predict what the candidate will accept, but what IBM will offer.

One might be able to construct a prediction market where the gamblers
incentive is to identify the lowest number the candidate would accept, but
this is not it.

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crablar
The bets are contrived for sure, but that was for the purpose of simplicity.

I believe the LinkedIn profile betting example is something feasible in the
future, that we can't imagine very well by today's mores.

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egeozcan
I know where the name comes from but still, the word Turk being used as the
name of the unit workforce while making automation by using mass manual labor
is a bit inconvenient. We already have an ambiguity with the name of our
country in the English language, give us a break :)

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StavrosK
I thought you were just being a stickler referring to Mechanical Turk, but
then I saw the PDF, and it didn't actually refer to a casino in Turkey. Wow,
this is some next level confusion right there. What were the authors thinking?

~~~
crablar
I was thinking it is a catchy name.

You are turning a casino into a nexus for mechanical turks. What is
complicated about it?

It's also not meant to be offensive, if anything it is a compliment to Turkish
people. They are good at solving problems with no definitive solution.

~~~
StavrosK
What's complicated is that a "mechanical Turk" isn't a person from Turkey, and
a "Turk" isn't an anthropomorphic automaton. "Turkish" means "from Turkey",
not "a place where mechanical Turks operate".

It's like calling Wikipedia "wiki". A wiki is already a thing, using the word
for the set to refer to an element is confusing, although I guess this is the
opposite, and would be a bit like calling MoinMoin a "Wikipedia".

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fastbetshenry
If one can make this work this would be huge. One could offer casino style
games at a house edge of 0% (house edge = the amount that the house wins on
average on every bet). This would not only be a super compelling value
proposition to gamblers, it would be a huge step towards eliminating problem
gambling: A gambling addict that plays at a 0% house edge would not loose
money in the long run.

I run a small bitcoin casino called fastbets.io. We should talk to see if
there is a potential for a collaboration (feel free to email
henry@fastbets.io).

~~~
alexjikim
> A gambling addict that plays at a 0% house edge would not loose money in the
> long run.

This isnt true because the house edge is the average return. the individual
players can have a positive or negative edge depending on their skill. this
would be like playing poker without a rake.

~~~
bobbygoodlatte
Yep. Also this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_ruin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_ruin)

~~~
fastbetshenry
Alexjikim, you are 100% right. I was thinking about classic casino games that
are pure games of chance (where my statement would be correct). However, the
OP crablar wants to offer games of skill where alexjikim's analysis is spot
on. Would still be a huge improvement over the status quo though.

I find that Wikipedia article on "Gambler's ruin" pretty misleading. What is
not mentioned there is that in a 0% edge game, the party with the higher
bankroll has a lower chance of loosing it all, but she'd be losing a lot in
that case. If she wins (very probable) she'd only be winning a small amount.
That's still a fair game.

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0xdeadbeefbabe
The hard part is making work into a game. I think Michael and Jane Banks would
agree this is the foremost reason they prefer Mary to other possible nannies.

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lnlyplnt
Something like this could be extremely valuable inside an organization. A lot
of very valuable knowledge is locked up by employees with no incentive to
reveal it.

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hellofunk
Turning the world's casinos into massively parallel crowd-sourced processing
centers is a great idea.

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KON_Air
And even more wasteful then a Turkish HR department!

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elwell
> These solutions provide no value to anyone.

They provide entertainment value sometimes, and for winners they provide
monetary value. This is like saying watching a movie or playing football has
no value. The particularities of the game may create the value. E.g., poker is
a well balanced game.

~~~
crablar
Entertainment is not mutually exclusive with the utility.

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jabgrabdthrow
The first organization to figure out how to make a proper free-market
prediction market platform will make a killing.

Casinos seem like a perfect way to make it happen as they already have special
regulatory exemption for a transaction type BB doesn't like.

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TY
Something similar but without the gambling aspect has been done before:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP_game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP_game)

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herghost
One potential problem is that instead of assessing problem objectively, since
the payout is based on "most popular" answer, people will choose which answer
they expect to be most popular, rather than the one they necessarily believe
in. This drives down the value of the crowdsourced data - because it's not
real "insight", is already tainted by the very gamification you're looking to
monetise!

~~~
crablar
There is certainly a metagame but there is also metagame between spam and spam
filters.

It's a dynamic equilibrium that can be accounted for.

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m00dy
BTW, Casinos are forbidden in Turkey.

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cm2012
Theoretically, is this idea possible?

1) Make a casino with slot machines/etc. Connect slot machines to a stock
market day trading system that acts at random on each lever pull (I.E. buying
and then selling 10 seconds later, when the price is a bit different)

2) Gamblers will gamble as they usually do, but since the stock market grows
on average by 7% a year, they should theoretically come out ahead.

3) Casino can take 3.5% for setting everything up.

What would make this impossible?

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justzisguyuknow
The whole appeal of a slot machine is that you might put in a dollar and get
back a thousand. The prospect of a huge payoff is what keep s people pulling
the lever.

Since that would essentially never happen on a 10-second buy/sell action on a
real stock, I doubt any actual gambler would care to participate.

~~~
mason55
You can make payout tables similar to what they are now but instead of having
a 1% house edge there's actually a small player edge. The house then covers
the player edge and makes money by the stock investment.

The issues would be

1) If you assume a 7% annual return, the return on the 10 second investment
would be extremely small. 7 percent / 250 working days per year / 8 market
hours per day / 60 minutes per hour / 6 ten second periods per minute = 9.7e-6
percent return every 10 seconds. On a billion dollars play through in a year
you'd be looking at a $97 return.

2) I don't know what commissions are like on the volume of small, short trades
you'd be doing but I imagine they would be more than $0.0000001 cents per
trade which means you're losing money.

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bduerst
You would have to be your own broker and/or build your own HFT system.

It's been a while since I used it, but API trading for laymen was somewhere
between $1-2/trade at the bulk packaging.

