
How 4000 Physicists Gave a Vegas Casino Its Worst Week (2015) - jchanimal
http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2015/09/one-winning-move.html?m=1
======
analog31
When I was a physics student in the late 80s, there was a conference in Reno,
held in one of the casinos. I think it was just one of the divisions of the
APS, and we certainly didn't occupy the entire place.

I recall an amusing anecdote. Of course we didn't gamble. But after the
conference banquet, my friends and I were standing around talking shop, and
another guy accused us of being nerds for not at least trying out the slots.
So he bought us a bucket of quarters and led us into the fray.

After some time spent in sheer boredom, winning little bets and losing little
bets, my friend decided to dispute the result of a machine. The attendant came
over, and we got to see the insides of a slot machine. It was a garden variety
IBM PC-AT with a color CRT, inside a fancy case with buttons and a pull
handle. The attendant pulled the keyboard out of its slot, started typing
commands, and showed us the result of our game. The machine was of course
right, and the attendant smugly shut the lid and walked way.

Eventually we ran out of quarters and all went to bed.

There were some really cool pawn shops in Reno.

~~~
blunte
And I have sat many times beside a guy who has no qualms against pumping
$2,300/min into $100 slot machines, only to walk out of the casino with far
more than he came in with.

He talks to the VIP slot hosts, and to other VIP players. Then he picks the
machines that are "loaded up" and "are due to pay out". I've tried to explain
that this means nothing. But in his mind, it makes total sense.

In the limited experiences observing him, I cannot say his (unfounded) beliefs
are not accurate. That said, I've explained that slots are designed to pay out
a certain percentage in a year, based on millions of plays. One high roller
weekend is just a drop in that bucket, so _anything can happen_.

It's quite a scene to have several machines tied up because they're on the
jackpot, and the slot host is busy working on 1099 forms while you play
another "due" machine.

None of this is near as exciting as the MIT blackjack stories, but it is still
pretty cool to see what $161k looks like in neatly wrapped stacks of 10k.

~~~
Styn
Some of these machines (at least in europe) are actually required by law to
average out to a certain return percentage over a set number of bets. This
means they need to compensate for naturally accuring bad streaks. (And
good...)

~~~
joezydeco
You wouldn't see that in most US jurisdictions that have proper gaming laws
and review (NV and NJ being the big ones).

The software and underlying math is audited by a third party and verified to
produce the desired average result over millions of plays, but _cannot_ adjust
the odds dynamically to make sure that percentage is hit.

~~~
tinus_hn
A proper die doesn’t need to compensate to make sure every side is hit the
same amount of times.

------
notacoward
If they had a convention of HN commenters in Vegas, it would probably be their
_best_ week ever. So many people sure they've found some secret way to beat
the odds. It's a casino boss's dream come true.

~~~
to3m
If you don't have a very high opinion of HN commenters, you'll probably assume
that they get their opinions from Wikipedia. But that means they'll have a
pretty good idea of whether a given game is good or bad in terms of odds.

Besides, casinos will often give you free booze simply because you're sat at a
table gambling. You don't have to actually win money to profit! You just need
to start sensible, and then keep it going long enough to get drunk.

~~~
scythe
Actually this is also a documented form of advantage gambling:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advantage_gambling](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advantage_gambling)

But my personal favorite, as a physics major, is the observation that most
roulette wheels are unfair, due to slight asymmetries. If only you could get
good surveillance of the roulette tables for a few days (hard to do alone),
you could make a killing. On roulette!

~~~
lysp
I have heard that casinos sometimes have balls of slightly different
size/weight.

Basically to throw off anyone who might try this technique, as dealers often
will throw very similarly for each spin.

~~~
singold
My grandfather worked at a casino decades ago, and they interchanged the
roulettes between tables, I can't remember if it was daily or weekly

------
killjoywashere
The only career advice we got in my physics undergrad was when the quantum
professor told us few if any would go on to PhDs, but we could get jobs in
Vegas or Wall Street. It was at that moment that I learned to stick with index
funds and never, ever gamble. There's no way one of me for a few hours can
possibly beat 100s of me working on a problem for decades.

~~~
moondev
Playing craps is a bunch of fun for me personally. I treat it like
entertainment and just play the pass line plus odds. The pass line is just a
1.41% house advantage. And there is 0% house edge on odds. It's actually
cheaper than buying drinks if you are planning to. Also much more fun than
staying in your room and staring at your mutual funds the entire night!

~~~
empath75
You’re obviously going to lose money over time, but what makes craps fun is
high variance. It’s pretty common to double or triple your money before losing
it all and then some. You can definitely walk away a big winner if you’re just
playing for a night or a weekend, though chances are, you won’t.

Slots on the other hand is just a depressing one way money drain and I have no
idea why people enjoy them.

~~~
smoyer
I'm a morning person and so, even in Vegas (or moreso since there's no clock
in the room), I was up at my normal time. Since I'm also normally on EST, this
meant I was awake at 0300 or 0300. The first morning I tried to find breakfast
early and found that the slots were full of disabled and/or elderly people who
were trying to win their way to riches. And it was the slots that they seemed
to think was the best way to get there.

Talk about depressing ... I didn't mind spending a few bucks gambling for the
entertainment and comaraderie but these people definitely couldn't afford even
a single pull of the handle. Talking to a relatively low-level employee at the
casino, she said that the floor was full that day because it was the week that
public assistance checks were received in the mail ... and that the casinos
shooed them out of the building by 0600 or 0700 so that the regular guests
were unlikely to see what was happening.

------
abhv
In 2001, one of the premier theoretical CS conferences, Foundations of
Computer Science (FOCS), held its meeting in Las Vegas at the Tropicana. Only
about 200 people attend, but it was memorable:

(1) The conference hall right next to the FOCS conference room was hosting the
international lingerie trade conference ! Still, the talks were more
interesting and well attended.

(2) I, like many others, didnt gamble, but I watched my office mate from MIT
(now a brilliant scientist who recently won the Godel Prize) lose his 40$ (a
big amount for grad students back then) at the blackjack table in literally 3
hands (35 seconds).

He said, "I cant leave vegas without at least trying" and he proceeded to show
exactly how LV works.

~~~
severine
I'd pay to see that movie!

~~~
prawn
Now's your chance! Also on the HN homepage right now:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16515847](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16515847)

------
jbyers
"The year was 1986 ... ended up settling on Las Vegas's MGM Grand."

This immediately made me think this story is made up: the MGM Grand as
described and pictured opened in 1993. As noted in the comments, the actual
year is more likely 1988 and the casino likely Bally's.

~~~
goodcanadian
A minimum of googling found this:

[http://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2814928](http://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2814928)

It was 1986, and yes, it would probably be what is now known as Bally's which,
at the time, was called MGM Grand.

------
JoeDaDude
"...a documentary I’d seen a while back, where some science-minded gamblers
proved that a roulette wheel could reliably be beaten with a timer and a
pocket computer.."

I suspect those two gamblers were Claude Shannon, founder of information
theory, and Ed Thorp, a physicist who developed a card counting method for
blackjack [1].

[1] [http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/claude-shannon-the-
las-v...](http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/claude-shannon-the-las-vegas-
cheat)

~~~
peapicker
Documented in "The Eudaemonic Pie" by Thomas Bass. Doyne Farmer is the key guy
as I read it. He and other guys went on to Form 'The Prediction Company'
(where they used Chaos Theory to play the stock market very successfully –
eventually bought by Swiss Bank/now UBS).

I interned in his group (the Center for Nonlinear Studies) at Los Alamos Natl
Laboratory between these two events.

------
jacobkg
"It was an unmitigated disaster for the Grand. Financially, it was the worst
week they’d ever had. After the conference was over, APS was politely asked
never to return—not just by the MGM Grand, but by the entire city of Las
Vegas."

------
cocoa19
"but you'd never guess why."

Sigh. People with basic math and statistics skills (physicists) don't gamble.
What a shocker.

~~~
fred_is_fred
Gambling is entertainment, not an investment strategy. I assume physicists
still go see movies, go out to dinner, or read books. Those too are
entertainment.

~~~
tonyarkles
I had a friend in undergrad who would gamble on Friday nights (poker, at the
casino, if I remember right). Gamble, but not drink. I would bug him sometimes
about the money he was throwing away.

Then one day he said "Tony, you know what the difference is between my Friday
night [at the casino] and your Friday night [at the bar]? There's some
probability that I'll have more money at the end of the night than I started
with."

And I quit bugging him!

------
drallison
The "do not play" strategy to win in Las Vegas was pioneered by attendees of
the AFIPS sponsored Fall and Spring Joint Computer Conferences and the
National Computer Conference. Sponsoring organizations included the ACM, the
IEEE Computer Society, and others.

------
trixie_
Everyone knows the house has an edge. Gambling is a form entertainment.
Unfortunately like drinking some people can’t just do it socially. I find an
occasional weekend in Vegas fun. Just budget yourself $x you’re willing to
spend per day. Play a game here and there, drink some, go to the pool, eat at
a buffet, get a massage, whatever. It definitely took me some time at first to
‘get’ Vegas.

~~~
derefr
I feel like I get the reward-value of gambling... but whenever I think about
it, I think about how much _more_ fun it would be to start a casino.

Is there a _good_ one of those "___ Tycoon" business-sim games for starting
your own casino? One where things like comping whales and decide whether to
break cheaters' kneecaps are part of the gameplay? Because _that_ would be an
addictive game ;)

~~~
trixie_
Yea SimCasino would be fun. There is definitely a rush you get in gambling
that is different from video games.

------
KKKKkkkk1
I'm under the impression that the general public understands that casinos and
lotteries are not charities. Do you really need a PhD in physics to figure
this out? The reason people gamble is not because they're dumb.

~~~
Spooky23
People gamble for fun, but they get into trouble because of the dopamine rush.

~~~
brokenmachine
I don't gamble, or find gambling fun, because of the Cortisol rush.

~~~
technofiend
It's more about the pervasive cigarette smoke for me. Even though poker rooms
are now smoke free you still have to wade through the rest of the casino to
get there and no air filtration system is perfect. The result is you leave
smelling like an ashtray regardless.

------
United857
I wonder if relative lack of gambling also holds true for other Vegas
conventions frequented by a generally technical crowd (e.g. Defcon, etc)

~~~
TallGuyShort
I attended a convention with a bunch of probability & statistics experts. A
number of them absolutely cleaned up and it wasn't at all surprising to see
who - but I suspect the casino's losses to them were quickly subsidized by
their less keen peers who were also playing (albeit badly) and the dozens who
were watching and ordering drinks like our plane was going down. Honestly if I
was hosting Defcon, nerds winning at the Blackjack table would be the least of
my concerns.

------
bognition
"The only winning move is not to play"

~~~
analog31
Better still, be the casino.

~~~
quickthrower2
Better still, be a hedge fund.

------
gizmo686
A while ago, I would regularly go to a kink happy hour at a local bar. I was
talking with the organizer and, apparently they were almost not invited back
after the first one; because a significant amount of the attendees wouidn't
actually get anything from the bar. (There is now an entrance fee redeemable
for equal value at the bar).

------
dogruck
Summary: they didn’t gamble.

~~~
booleandilemma
That article wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be.

~~~
jeron
still was a good chuckle

------
TangoTrotFox
Fun factoid. Have you ever noticed how absurdly tacky casino carpet is? This
is intentional. The idea is to keep people's eyes up and looking at the casino
games.

There's also that characteristic smell many casinos have, and I'm struggling
to avoid the really tempting jokes there. That derives from quite expensive
fragrances and oils filtered through the air circulation. Once again, they're
designed to incentivize gaming with a bit of metascience - musk is a popular
component in the scents, for instance.

The games begin when you walk through the door, whether or not you realize
you're participating.

------
erikb
And you don't even need to collaborate on that. Every person with enough
statistical experience (and scientists have to have that) know by intuition
that the odds are stacked against them in a casino. So it's really know fun if
you can estimate with each dice or ball roll how much money you're losing (on
average).

------
gluejar
This article gets its facts wrong. It was the 1986 MARCH Meeting in Las Vegas
where this happened. I was there.

A friend of mine overheard the saleswomen talking in the lingerie shop
(dressed as you might imagine) "I could be stark naked and these guys wouldn't
notice me".

------
tacon
I never play the games, either. Once I took the "learn craps" class where the
casino gives everyone (fake) chips to learn with. That was relaxing and fun,
and they were all gone in ten minutes.

------
rdiddly
This seems to get attributed to a better understanding of math, because that's
the obvious thing about physicists. But how much of it is just flat
disinterest, from either being too smart or too interested in other things, to
find a game of chance remotely interesting? I mean how exciting is a coin flip
for example? Would I bet money on either outcome? No, because who cares? Same
thing for any game a casino offers. It all seems geared for an 1800s or early
1900s attention span. But even a modern slot machine - what is it other than a
very simple, weird, short, boring video arcade game with only one level?

------
superfx
I think the same exact thing happened with NIPS 2011 in Reno.

------
BlackLotus89
tldr; they got a hotel cheap, because hotels+casino outbid each other when
larger groups want to rent rooms and they didn't play so the casino lost
money.

It was exactly as I expected although the article tried to shove the idea that
they gambled down your throat and stretched an anecdote over one page instead
of one sentence

------
crystaln
[1986]

------
xchip
TL;DR:

the week of the '86 APS April meeting found the gaming floor almost completely
empty, leaving the casino with its record-low take by staying at a gambling
hotel but obstinately refusing to gamble

~~~
xchip
Downvoted? Why?

~~~
xchip
Just so I can learn I'd appreciate to understand the reasons for the
downvoting.

~~~
grzm
I suspect because tl;drs are often frowned upon. The article isn’t so long,
and HN members generally strive for substance and more depth (even if they
don’t always achieve it) and tl;drs work against that. That’s my guess,
anyway. Mindreading is tough, and those that downvote without comment tend not
to comment even when prodded (which is one of the reasons comments on voting
is against the guidelines).

~~~
xchip
And how does a TL;DR stop people from getting more substance and depth? You
still have the option to read the article...

------
overcast
Whatever the case may have been, the week of the '86 APS April meeting found
the gaming floor almost completely empty, leaving the casino with its record-
low take; in the (probably apocryphal) words of one casino waitress: "They
each brought one shirt and a ten-dollar bill, and changed neither."

