> “I [experimented] until I had a rough outline of a system based on the previous winning numbers,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald in 1969. “If numbers 1, 2, and 3 won the last 3 rounds, [I could determine] what was most likely to win the next 3.”
I'm calling shenanigans here. I can believe that a roulette wheel might have biases, and that you might be able to leverage those to beat the house. I have a very hard time believing that a roulette wheel could have a contingent bias such that the next outcome depended on the previous one. What possible mechanism could cause that? I'm also skeptical that even if there were such a mechanism that you could reliably determine it with the number of data points that one person could plausibly collect and analyze, especially in the 1960s.
In fact, let's do the math: 37*37=1369 so you'd need that many spins at a minimum just to see every possible number pair come up once. Let's suppose that a spin takes a minute. It would take a minimum of 22 hours of watching one roulette wheel to see every combination. More likely you'd need 10-100 times that much data to get a statistically significant result. And that is just for one wheel [UPDATE: and a one-round contingent bias. The claim is a three-round contingent bias. Collecting that much data for even a single wheel would take years of constant effort.]
Yep, this is BS. There's no way that the next roulette result could depend on the previous. After the ball has landed, the croupier will give the wheel a new spin and after a little while drop the ball again. So the next result does not depend on the roulette, but on the croupier; how fast does he spin the wheel, how late does he drop the ball.
And this is not the only part of the article that smells fishy.
> In a matter of hours, he flipped his $100 into $5,000
This kind of profit has nothing to do with the kind of edge you can get when you have detected some irregularities in the wheel. Maybe you'll have an edge of a few percent. If he really flipped his $100 into $5,000 he was not only seriously lucky, but was also gambling a far too large portion of his bankroll, risking a 'gamblers ruin'.
The bet sizing isn't totally implausible if the rest of the data is accurate:
The article implies he started out on double-zero machines with a 5.3% house edge. Assume 1 roll per minute and a Kelly-sized bet:
- It'd take on average 87h to 50x your bankroll at a 2.7% edge (half the supposed house edge). You're on average approximately doubling your money with every win, so he _might_ have just gotten a few more wins in the night than expected, but that would be very lucky.
- It'd take 9.5h on average to 50x your bankroll at a 7% edge (1.5x the supposed house edge). That's very achievable in a long night, and you're approximately quadrupling your bankroll every win, so just being a little lucky with a single extra win would drastically cut down the total time.
If he's betting high enough to win 50x his stake over two bets with a winning edge, he's a moron.
A mathematician with a clue and a winning house edge would bet fairly conservatively and bet more as their bankroll expanded and bet less as their bankroll retracted to reduce their risk of ruin. Somebody making 50x their bet in an hour at roulette may sound impressive to many people, but it's obviously idiotic to any gambler worth their salt. It's so unlikely that it suggests incompetence at risk management more than it does genius gambling.
Staking $100 or $1 or $10,000 or 100BTC or 100 widgets isn't the important point. It's that the previous poster is suggesting that he could have made 35x his bet on a single spin, while missing that he would have had to risk over 95% odds to lose his entire bankroll to do that. He would have to bet everything on one spin. If you lose your bankroll, you can't bet anymore, and your edge over the house is worthless.
Now if you take a more conservative strategy, lets say you can lose 1% or win 35% of your initial bankroll, sure it may take longer but if you have an edge in your favor it should take a very unlucky streak of bad luck to go bankrupt and when you win your winnings will compound on top of eachother and the casino still will go bankrupt within a month if they don't ban you from playing roulette. So a more conservative strategy nets you more cash on average.
This is kind of a tangent, honestly I'm not even sure how unlikely it is for a gambler with a reasonably executed winning strategy to double up a few times over a long night if they're running hot. They would be doing this over hundreds of rounds of betting, so a small edge compounds rather quickly.
The "last 3 rounds" part is obviously metaphorical. It says he used teams of observers for a month to record up to 20,000 spins, not that he literally looked at 3 spins to determine the fourth.
It all sounds unlikely in today's data-driven world, but I suppose that in European casinos a half century ago they had roulette wheels that had been in service for 80 years without any real maintenance and would show massive bias without anybody noticing.
> I suppose that in European casinos a half century ago they had roulette wheels that had been in service for 80 years without any real maintenance and would show massive bias without anybody noticing.
Sure. But not a contingent bias. And certainly not a contingent bias that was bigger than any concomitant non-contingent bias.
He didn't say contingent bias, you did. Nothing he's written is in any way related to prior individual rolls.
He said he knew how to place a winning bet, he never said it was because the previous results were exactly 1, 2, and 3 and no other numbers. Those results can indicate something other than a "contingent" bias; because they landed on 1, 2, and 3, the wheel is leaning more towards that half of the wheel, meaning he could therefore assume bets on that half of the wheel were more likely to hit, which would then allow him to accurately say he knew what to bet next (a complex bet) that would pay out (win more than wagered).
You're thinking about this mathematically, when the edge comes from mechanical physics.
You could think of the statement as being about knowing the actual bias as a function of only being able to look at the previous rolls. In other words, it is “contingent” on the specific roulette wheel being observed, not “contingent” on which exact rolls were seen recently, per se. But language and thinking on these subjects has evolved since 1969, so the way to frame it to a layman would obviously evolve as well. It’s been over 50 years, after all! Trying to understand the statement in the context of 1969 makes the framing much more reasonable.
Edit: I can also see how this framing might have been important to funding ongoing research, ie, perhaps you are right that there was some degree of unethical framing here.
> “If numbers 1, 2, and 3 won the last 3 rounds, [I could determine] what was most likely to win the next 3.”
That is unambiguously claiming not just a contingent bias, but a bias contingent on the previous three rounds. My math was based on a one-round contingent bias. That is already in the realm of extremely unlikely. Three-rounds is just flat-out impossible.
I don't think it's unambiguous. I think the parent's interpretation is also quite possible (even probable, given your point that the contingent interpretation is impossible).
> That is unambiguously claiming not just a contingent bias, but a bias contingent on the previous three rounds.
No it isn't, only that three rounds may be enough to predict the bias. Whether the bias actually depends on previous results is irrelevant to the quote.
Wouldn't this be a very simple example (simple to the point that it's obviously exaggerated and wouldn't happen in a real casino): each spin of the wheel takes it exactly one whole rotation plus one number, which if the dealer always picks up the ball and spins starting from the previous winner would mean the next winner is always the next number around on the wheel?
It's pretty clear that you've never actually seen a roulette wheel in action. Introducing a bias intentionally (i.e. trying to control where the ball drops) would take extreme skill. Doing it unintentionally is impossible.
I've played roulette many times, and yes I agree that doing it with skill on a fair wheel would be impossible. I thought we were talking about potentially rigged games, and just as I couldn't roll fair dice to the same number 20x in a row I'm aware that dodgy dice can be made, so why couldn't a dodgy wheel (or accidentally dodgy by being so old that a noticeable pattern emerges) be made?
There was a Spanish family that took advantage of that and won big in European casinos. They recorded a large number of results, found biases big enough to overcome the house's edge, and used them. The casinos responded by moving the tables around and moving wheels between tables, but the family has spent so long observing the wheels that they could recognize individual wheels by the wear and tear they had accumulated over the years.
But this was not contingent biases. The odds of a given number were not dependent on what number had previously come up.
These people were covered in the episode "The Roulette Assault" of the old History Channel series "Breaking Vegas" [1]. You can watch this episode at the Internet Archive [2].
"Breaking Vegas" also did an episode, "Beat the Wheel", on Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard's computer-in-a-shoe that used physics to predict roulette outcomes. These are the people who were the subject of the book "The Eudaemonic Pie" which another commenter has mentioned. You can watch "Beat the Wheel" at the Internet Archive [3].
There's one more "Breaking Vegas" roulette episode that is very interesting. It is called "Ultimate Cheat".
The Spanish family was definitely not cheating. It is not against the rules to gather data--in fact many casinos encourage it because 99.99% of the time someone gathering data thinks they have some foolproof system for winning when in fact they have completely botched it and casinos love these people. They blow a ton of money before they figure out that their system is completely worthless (at best).
The "Eudaemonic Pie" people may or may not have been cheating depending exactly on how the rules of the casinos were written back then.
The guy in "The Ultimate Cheat" was definitely cheating. At first he was cheating using a particular method. He was successful at it, but then casinos installed video cameras that recorded everything at the tables. When he would win, they would detain him while they checked the tape, and the tape showed the cheating. This seemingly put an end to his career as a roulette cheater.
But then he started winning again, and when the casinos checked the tapes they showed the win was clean. They were certain he was cheating and they were scrutinizing his wins in excruciating detail, but they could not find any problems with them.
There was a good reason for that. His wins were in fact entirely legitimate. He legitimately put a stack of his chips on a number, did not influence the wheel or ball or croupier in any way, and if his number came up by chance (which happened just as often as you would expect it to) he collected his winnings.
What he did was take what he had been doing originally, the method he had to abandon due to the cameras, and apply a brilliant twist to it. That method is post roll bet modification. You put down a stack of low value chips on a number, and if that number wins you try to swap that stack for a stack that has low value chips on top and a high value chip on bottom displaced a little so it is not visible to the croupier.
The cameras catch you doing the stack swap and the jig is up.
His twist was to apply it to losing bets instead of winning bets. He would bet a stack of low value chips on top with a high value chip on the bottom. If he won he did nothing. But if he lost he tried to swap the stack for one that only had low value chips.
The casino was only scrutinizing his wins so he got away with cheating on his losing bets for an embarrassingly long time. You can watch "The Ultimate Cheat" at the Internet Archive here [4].
If you are checking out "Breaking Vegas", there is one more I will recommend even though it has nothing to do with roulette. That's the "Counterfeit King" episode, on the Internet Archive here [5].
That's about a guy who was making counterfeit casino tokens. They were good enough that the casinos only knew they were there because their token counts were unexpectedly going up. When the casinos sent tokens back to the manufacturer to check, the manufacturer said they were all legit.
The downfall of this counterfeiter is instructive. One day he was using his tokens in slot machines. He was playing a fairly expensive machine and it jammed. He just moved over to the next machine and continued. A guard saw this on live surveillance and became suspicious because when a machine eats a high value token the gambler is always very annoyed and comes complaining to casino staff to get their token back. The gambler just going "meh" and moving over a machine was just not believable. That got him on their radar as someone up to something which led to them discovering he was the counterfeiter.
Breaking Vegas was a fantastic series. My favorite episode was the one where a programmer working for the Nevada Gaming Commission hacked the ROMs of slot machines and was able to activate a jackpot with a secret combination of coins.
For those who want to see it, that episode was "Slotbuster" and is on the Internet Archive here [1].
It looks like all 14 episodes of "Breaking Vegas" are there [2]. I haven't seen them since around the time they were originally broadcast, but my recollection is that most of them were quite worth watching.
It's legal, but if you're too successful, a lot of casinos will show you the door, sometimes preventing you from converting your chips back to money. See https://youtu.be/rjfLuM-Pqr8
You are right if it was just a simple bet on one number. But I suspect the article is skipping out on the full description. My guess is that it involved a system where multiple bets were placed each spin - Roulette's odds can be narrowed if you place bets on a color, a third, high/low, and a number, making sure to minimize doubling down on any possible result. That puts you in a position where almost every spin, one of your bets wins and offsets some other losses. When the spin lands on the bets with higher payouts, you win more and balance out the spins where you got lesser payouts. All told, you'll slowly lose money all night, and one of two things happens - you one number hits and you win big. Or the zero hits and you've lost. It is a very complex and pain-staking way to flip a coin. But, if you have any way to game that one number, and can afford to just let those bets ride for the hours for that advantage to play out... I could see it working.
Also, back before casinos were computerized, people did spend years learning the specific machines in a specific casino. They would often do it in teams, so each person would take an 8 hour shift, and share the winnings at the end.
I have a very hard time believing that a roulette wheel could have a contingent bias such that the next outcome depended on the previous one
The funny thing about Roulette is not the hardware but the fact that the random sequence begins with a human being.
I can honestly believe that a bored roulette croupier could reproduce an outcome by consciously (or unconsciously) releasing the ball with the same velocity and direction at the same wheel speed. When you do the job for hours on end wouldn't it be plausible that there's some amount of muscle memory that takes over?
Having watched a few a work in my lifetime it sure seems like they even take it as a challenge to try and work up duplicate numbers. Maybe as a 'fuck the house' move, a cure for boredom, or perhaps a way to drum up more business when you get a streak on the tote board? Who knows.
> I can honestly believe that a bored roulette croupier could reproduce an outcome by consciously (or unconsciously) releasing the ball with the same velocity and direction at the same wheel speed.
I can believe that too, but that's not the claim being made here. The claim is that the bias was bound to particular roulette wheels, not particular croupiers. Also, even if a croupier had a reliable contingent bias, you'd still need a ridiculous number of data points to figure that out.
There might be hidden variables. Maybe the previous results are a sign that a particular croupier is working that day, which is why you can count on some specific bias for the next numbers.
I.e. some hidden process is causing both of the events, the first event is not causing the second. What you will observe is a high probably of the second event conditioned on the first.
Ok, maybe the croupier is not a "hidden" variable, but it could be whether he had coffee that day, which roulette wheel is being used, the lighting conditions in the room, whether he was able to park in front of the building or had to walk from the parking lot, etc. Any event that happens some of the time and causes 1, 2, 3 as the first three numbers can very well be causing a specific distribution of the next numbers.
I.e. correlation doesn't imply causation but translates to dependent probability distributions and therefore a "if A then B is likely" just because A can be observed before B.
If a croupier really was influencing the outcome of the spin, consciously or not, it would involve the exact moment when he dropped the ball. E.g. every time he would drop it in the area of the 10, it would end up in the area of the 3.
But in that case there is no point in observing previous roulette outcomes as was described in the article. You would have to observe the croupier instead and the moment he was dropping the ball.
Either the article is not describing accurately what happened or the whole story was BS. There is no way that a croupier or roulette wheel is influenced by the previous drop of the ball.
This is believable to me because I can force the results of a coin toss.
I'm not really sure how, but some tactile awareness of a coin's weight, air pressure, what side is currently facing up, etc. must all factor in.
For context, I am trained as a magician (so there's a degree of mastery of the properties of coins, and fine muscle control), but this is not a magic trick
> can honestly believe that a bored roulette croupier could reproduce an outcome by consciously (or unconsciously)
The fantastic book, The Eudaemonic Pie, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, describes another groups attempts to beat roulette with prediction.
Along the way they encounter a croupier who always bets his tip money on 17. Why? “Because if I do everything just right, I can actually hit seventeen. Not that I can do it every time, mind you, but I can get close to it. I set the wheel going at a steady rate, and then I flip the ball in this nice regular way when the zero is lined up in front of me, and I swear I can hit seventeen with better-than-average odds.”
In the story, they tell the audience that he weaved a false narrative to the public about super computers. There's no reason not to believe that this is also a fabrication.
In fact, the amount of press around the guy seems to work as an invitation for people to come to casinos. I wouldn't discard the whole thing as a total scheme, a fabrication set up between the "professor" and the cassinos interested in attracting naive gamblers in this perfect marketing stunt!
As a pure hypothetical, definitely not saying it's what happened in this case: if the wheel's bias is based on where the ball is initially dropped in, and a human operator is the one that chooses where to drop in the ball, it's possible that the operator does something simple like choosing a spot opposite the number that last won the round and that this human bias affected the result in some way.
1. He explained himself clearly to a journalist.
2. The journalist understood what he was saying.
3. The journalist relayed it clearly and accurately.
4. He or the journalist didn’t exaggerate his success story.
To your specific point I read that as a layman’s explanation of bias, and not at all as actually implying that if a 1, 2, 3 comes up then it’s sure to be a 4, 5, 6 next.
Thomas Bass' book The Eudamonic Pie describes a project by some people from UC Santa Cruz who did computer-assisted timing analysis of roulette wheels, and did pretty well at applying it (for a while).
This was in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and hardware has only gotten smaller and more concealable. I'm not surprised at casinos going to digital "wheels", though it sure seems like cheating when there's no possibility of cheating :-)
I remember reading it and wondering whether they’d have had more chance of making their fortunes building home computers out of their garages given the era! Great story though (I read the British edition - The Newtonian Casino)
They don't ban you, but many casinos, particularly the larger ones, will "suggest" that you might want to take a break if you are losing a lot of money very fast.
A player that goes bankrupt is less likely to return.
Okay sure, the point is that there is no reason to believe a casino would act against its own interest, so I'm not sure what's funny about a casino banning someone who's found a way of consistently winning money.
The casino will serve its own interests and refuse to continue playing with you if you found a winning strategy instead of risking bankruptcy. Nothing really illogical about that.
> The casino will serve its own interests and refuse to continue playing with you if you found a winning strategy instead of risking bankruptcy. Nothing really illogical about that.
Well casino knows of and has a winning strategy for eg. roulette games. While the odds are in their favour (by the design of the game), they let you play, but if the odds are in your favour (by the wear and tear) they won't.
Imagine some national lottery say that you won too many prizes with lotto tickets.
Yes, this is how a casino works by the very design of the game, as you mention. I would be very surprised if someone did not know that.
As for lotteries, they also ban people if they win too frequently. This doesn't happen for random lotteries where you pick random numbers since I've never heard of a case where someone managed to figure out how such a lottery worked without committing a crime, but many government operated lotteries do run sports books and if you win too frequently they do ban you.
> Imagine some national lottery say that you won too many prizes with lotto tickets.
This is exactly how casinos operate. If you are winning against the odds, you are either a cheater or too lucky. In some cases you get put into a black book where that casino and others ban you. Furthermore, if you have a problem with gambling too much, casinos may also ban you, since you can sue a casino for letting you gamble.
>>> “Computers were looked upon as creatures from outer space… Few persons, including casino managers, were vocationally qualified to distinguish myth from reality.”
The first of a great series of wacky live-action films with Kurt Russell and Cesar Romero among others. Back in the 70s it was common to have special all-school events where they'd show 16mm prints of Disney live-action films in the school auditorium. It's amazing how much of these movies I still remember beat by beat decades later.
Back in the day I used to carry around a couple Betamax (yes!) cassettes so when the teachers called out sick we could watch something on tv. The school only owned two movies - The Sound Of Music and Romeo and Juliette (with several minutes of static recorded over a love scene). You can only watch the first 40 minutes of The Sound Of Music so many times. I was a hero for having Bullet and Dirty Harry on standby.
The first wearable computer was conceived in 1955 by Claude Shannon and Ed Thorp to predict roulette, culminating in a joint effort for roulette prediction in Las Vegas
I often played roulette, and the ball came to rest at 28 about every 3rd time. I always won a lot of money. It was toy money and the imperfect roulette wheel was made of plastic and I was about 10. Of course, this effect can also occur in the casino, although weaker.
There's almost no point in playing a casino today. Nearly everything is digital and biased towards the house, even moreso than straight probabilities would tell you. If you ever do win big, "payouts are void in the event of machine malfunction".
Some games like blackjack, roulette, etc still have physical versions.
Obviously, a casino should never be seen as a money-making option but as an entertainment option. Walk in with a set budget you are happy to lose and don’t gamble beyond that. Most will allow you to set a limit and they won’t let you buy chips beyond that even if you tried.
Drinks are very cheap even in high cost of living places so if you can control your gambling (which is more difficult than you imagine - speaking from experience here - that’s how casinos make their money) you can get relatively cheap entertainment. They’re also open until very late (some are 24/7) which is a nice perk.
When I attend conferences in Vegas, I set a $300 budget for craps. I try to find $5 tables (really tough to do anymore) and just play for as long as possible getting drinks and having fun. I make it out ahead about 40% of the time, but I always enjoy myself. I rationalize it that I am just paying to have a unique, yearly experience (even if it makes little economic sense).
I prefer to think of it as a budget I am happy to spend. That way I can place it in the same mental bucket as going out to a gig, or a nice restaurant, or some other form of entertainment. I find I'm also less tempted by the notion to "win it back" if I don't consider it as a loss to begin with. I spent my money, I got my entertainment, it's a fair trade. And if I don't spend all of it (or somehow spend a negative amount) - bonus!
This sounds like people only ever went to casinos with the expectation of winning. You should not ever do this, even before the digital era.
Casinos are places where you can trade money for the hope of maybe winning a larger prize. For a lot of people, that is fun, and worth the expense. Seen from that perspective, there is still a "point".
biased towards the house, even moreso than straight probabilities would tell you.
That's called the house edge, or the vig. Without that, casinos wouldn't make money.
I usually explain it to people by saying that the casino doesn't make money from the losers. It uses the money from the losers to pay the winners, but charges the winners a fee.
American roulette is 38 numbers, but pays 35 to one. Those extra three are the house edge, and they are the same in the digital version. Other digital games like slot machines generally have a much higher house edge. I think the other poster was mostly lamenting that casinos aren't fair.
No, I was saying as ectopod better described, that digital versions have no actual need to hold to mathematical probabilities. For example, a six-sided die could be programmed to result in a 1 more than 1/6th of the time. How would you know?
Nevada Gaming Commission has all kinds of rules about what you can and can't do with your digital games.
Yes you could obfuscate the code, but it's way easier to make the money legally (and casino licenses are worth more than their weight in gold, so why would you risk it).
the house would be shut down in Las Vegas and probably Atlantic City as well. The house makes enough with the 35:1 payout on a 38:1 odds in roulette. enough people bet big 6/8, hardways, and specific die configurations on craps to pay the light bill.
If you play craps perfectly, you can take the vig / house edge / rake to 0.13%, which is 13 cents on $100, as it ought to be. House edge on slots is ~1%, really poor bets on roulette and craps could be 3% or higher.
You can count cards to give yourself a winning edge. Making several thousand per day is feasible. You'll eventually get kicked out of a given casino, but it doesn't matter: they have to give you your money.
Not covered in the article is how casinos deal with biased wheels in the modern era. Are they replaced regularly? Are they engineered from more durable materials? Do they audit the wheels to look for biases?
They collect the data themselves and when a wheel gets biased it gets replaced or fixed. They have a little board showing the last few spins, but that also feeds back into their data warehouse where they constantly check all the data for biases.
This stood out for me. Does anyone know what it means? I’ve seen electronic roulette wheels, as in on a computer screen, but that can’t be what this means.
And if a tiny ball is bouncing around on a real wheel, which is surely what ‘roulette’ still is to the vast majority of people (because the thing on the TV is no fun at all), how has that “gone digital”?
Edit: maybe “most wheels” have gone digital, as in most punters at most places are happy to play the TV. I dare say it’s quicker and simpler than standing round a table waiting for someone to spin a wheel. Sounds absolutely terrible though. Might as well just play what we call ‘the pokies’ here in Australia.
Are you saying that physical wheels are also digital and uses some "magic" (magnets?) to land the ball to a number that's actually been determined by an RNG?
Seems unlikely, especially considering at the local casino it seems like it's doing the total opposite - the physical roulette tables have a "debug" screen for the dealer that looks like it's monitoring and digitizing the roulette's output and I'm suspecting it might actually be using the physical table as the RNG for the computerized roulette you see on machines.
I believe it. It's structured portfolio management. He was likely managing a portfolio of "winning numbers" and adjusting allocations based on micro trends
I won money at roulette. I think I got 5 out of 6 of my almost 50/50 bets.
How? Dumb luck.
I took my winnings and had a nice meal. The hardest part is stopping. It’s fun to play. Generally I loose when I gamble. The thing about gambling is most people only talk about it when they win.
Characters with good luck as power have arisen from time to time. Domino from marvel, recently portrayed in Deadpool and a character in Fred Pohls heechee saga are two I can think of
I'm calling shenanigans here. I can believe that a roulette wheel might have biases, and that you might be able to leverage those to beat the house. I have a very hard time believing that a roulette wheel could have a contingent bias such that the next outcome depended on the previous one. What possible mechanism could cause that? I'm also skeptical that even if there were such a mechanism that you could reliably determine it with the number of data points that one person could plausibly collect and analyze, especially in the 1960s.
In fact, let's do the math: 37*37=1369 so you'd need that many spins at a minimum just to see every possible number pair come up once. Let's suppose that a spin takes a minute. It would take a minimum of 22 hours of watching one roulette wheel to see every combination. More likely you'd need 10-100 times that much data to get a statistically significant result. And that is just for one wheel [UPDATE: and a one-round contingent bias. The claim is a three-round contingent bias. Collecting that much data for even a single wheel would take years of constant effort.]
Nope. Not possible.