The whole reason casinos stay in business is because the house "skims" money from the players ... or in games where the player plays against the house, the house has more favorable odds.
The head-line says "steals", but the reality is that he was simply cheating. One is a crime but I'm not sure about the other. If I'm accomplished at counting cards, I can still beat the house because I've changed the odds. The casino may ban me (and I might forfeit the earnings for the day) but they can't charge me with a crime.
Not only that, in Ocean's Eleven they don't just place bets, they break into a vault, so the only similarity with the film seems to be that a camera feed was involved.
One aspect of the ilegality, if you will, of card counting I don't yet understand is the fundamental idea behind it: using your brain to make intellectually sound batting choices is not legal.
I know the casinos would rather have people turn their brains down to "idiot mode" when they play. However, I can't understand why the law supports the idea that I am not allowed to use my brain, memory and deductive reasoning skills when playing.
In the US, and likely most countries, card counting is not illegal. However, casinos can refuse to do business with anybody they want, so they can ban you for it. The exception is Atlantic City where you can't be banned for card counting, but if you are suspected of it, they will use other tactics to negate any advantage you may have (e.g. shuffling after every hand)
There's nothing illegal about counting cards. The law simply allows casinos to choose whom they allow to play, or to visit their premesis, and they choose to exercise this right when someone is playing several standard deviations better than math would predict.
It's really no different from your choosing to walk away from a table after losing a lot of money.
This wasn't about card counting (which is an integral part of blackjack strategy and certainly should be legal in any jurisdiction that allows casinos to operate). Counting takes place in your mind. Breaking into the casino's surveillance feed to learn extra information is outright cheating (and therefore, theft). I'm curious to know what information the player obtained. I can't imagine there are cameras low enough to glimpse the dealer's hole card before it is set down. Perhaps multiple accomplices each watched a table, keeping count and waiting for the count to be high (meaning the chance of drawing a ten-value card or an ace was very high), and then told the player to move to that table?
The article doesn't even say what game he was playing. It wasn't necessarily blackjack, which as you observe doesn't confer a big advantage by knowing the enemy cards since your bet is already set and your strategy mostly is. Poker permits the most leverage for knowing hidden information, but in poker you scam the other players, not the casino (casinos very rarely offer poker games played against the house.)
Maybe it was Pai Gow Poker, which does have strategy that can be exploited by knowing the dealer hand you need to beat, and is often played for high stakes in VIP rooms.
If by "crime" you mean "against the law", then yes, cheating is a crime, but it depends on the jurisdiction. Depending on how silly and/or archaic the laws in the jurisdiction are, just intercepting the surveillance signal might be a crime.
>The casino may ban me (and I might forfeit the earnings for the day) but they can't charge me with a crime
Counting cards has apparently been explicitly ruled not to be cheating in Canada, and while casinos generally call it that, it is not actually illegal. Other forms of cheating are, however. For example, in Nevada, cheating is a felony.
Cheating probably isn't a crime, but I would imagine unauthorized access to someone else's network probably is. (I am not a lawyer, no less an Australian lawyer)
Assuming this wasn't a case where an insider broke into security and installed a transmitter onto a specific video feed, isn't there an argument here as to who owns a presumably unencrypted RF signals?
Also, is there an implied Terms Of Service you agree to when entering a casino? I've been to many and have never seen anything even remotely resembling a TOS.
I was asked to stop playing roulette at a major Vegas casino a number of years ago. I wasn't betting big or making tons of money. I am what one might call a geek gambler: I enjoy devising ways to improve my odds. During my occasional trips to Vegas (example: Once a year for CES) I test the ideas with a couple of hundred bucks. It's purely for fun. If the goal was making money it'd be far more effective to spend four hours coding rather than gambling.
Anyhow, on this particular occasion I had memorized a betting pattern that improved the probability of my bets winning. On average it seemed effective. I got kicked out when I won thirteen times in a row. Fun while it lasted.
You got lucky 13 times in a row. It happens. And since you were only playing with "a couple hundred bucks" you were probably at a $5 or $10 limit table. The casino wasn't worried that you were going to break the bank, it's more likely you were asked to leave because of your behavior.
The numbers on the wheel don't correlate to the numbers on the table, so there is no betting strategy where you can make multiple multi-number bet combinations to offset any risk. Not even with a single zero wheel. Did you consider a win as one of your numbers hitting or an actual net gain? Run your strategy over 5000 or 10,000 spins and you'll see it doesn't work. You got lucky in the short term and it wasn't due to skill. Put the money in your pocket and walk away, because streaks like that are rare.
Are you implying I was behaving inappropriately? Sorry, I am not one of those idiots. I was the only player at the table. I was sitting across the way from the dealer betting. I was actually engaging the dealer in occasional chit chat while running the patterns in my head.
With regards to what would happen over 5,000 or 10,000 spins, yeah, of course, the odds are the odds.
That said, I went across the street to another casino and did just as well.
Assuming this wasn't a case where an insider broke into security and installed a transmitter onto a specific video feed, isn't there an argument here as to who owns a presumably unencrypted RF signals?
No. Most gambling locales have a law against the use of hidden electronic devices to assist play. It has nothing to do with airwave rights.
The security you describe doesn't match current home automation standards let alone high end commercial practices. Casinos live and die by their monitoring systems to prevent in house theft - it's pretty much guaranteed that stuff is traveling on secured wired networks.
I didn't say I improved the probability of the game. I improved the probability of my betting decisions producing favorable outcomes. Huge difference.
Think of it as betting by considering the physics of the game vs. in complete ignorance. Betting single numbers, black, white, dozens, columns and rows is absolutely moronic once you stop to think about how the game actually works.
No you aren't, roulette is not an RNG, it is a PRNG. If you take into account the initial marble velocity and rate of rotation of the wheel, you can seriously reduce the probability space of where the ball will land. Further, this can be modelled statistically pretty simply.
To win at betting with roulette you only need to bet on a set of numbers, where the probability of the marble landing on that set is pretty good, and the payout of winning over time covers the losses from being wrong.
So say you can accurately guess which 1/4 of the wheel will capture the marble. (and there are no greens... the real math is the same but uglier a bit). You put down equal bets on the 9 numbers represented by that. Each beting round will net you a 4:1 payout.
Now say you can only guess that 1/4 of the wheel, 50% of the time. You will still average a 2:1 payout.
Guessing the 1/4 of the board 50% of the time is not that hard, you just need to calculate the linear drift of the time the marble passes a fixed point, and know the frequency of "loops" that is too slow for the marble to stay on the track. Accounting for the rotation of the board is straight-forward, it is almost constant for a given play. The 50% covers the wierd bounces. Just calculate board position for the time that the marble will get below the threshold, and the marble position as well, and you've won. A person can't do it well, but an arduino is overkill for it.
Edit: further notes on this- casinos will be able to detect this easily. All they have to do is look for people on hot streaks that are "too hot", then compare betting placement with wheel positions. And they generally kick people out who are winning too much anyway, even if they can't prove 'chaeting'.
And this is why shoe computers are banned in casinos!
Google Glass will make this hack so simple, the casino's will have to ban them from being anywhere close to a roulette table to reduce team cheating possibilities.
This seems highly unlikely to be practical, given chaos. If this system shows high sensitivity to initial conditions, then we probably can't know the various inputs to enough precision to get any results.
Consider that a 2 link pendulum is chaotic. The tiniest difference in your estimate of the initial kinematics results in divergent predictions.
Some folks published a paper last year or the year before about their roulette monitoring system. You can improve your odds because you're allowed to place bets while the ball is bouncing. Some physics prof claims to have successfully used a device to count the bounces and decide which half of the wheel to bet on. I'd find the citations for you, but I'm sure you could do that just as fast as I.
One thing to keep in mind, always in such situations[1], you don't have to be right, you just have to be probabilistically right -- that is the goals is to just increase the chances of being right in such a way as to have an edge.
[1] Where you are betting, or otherwise working on odds and long term averages.
1) In the age of the smart phones, could one not develop an app to do this calculation for you? It might be tricky to film the wheel, but I'm sure that can be done stealthily somehow.
2) Would this work on online roulette games who claim to simulate the real-world physics of a roulette table?
I won't spell it out here because the fun is in working out these problems, at least it is for me. I'll shove you in the right direction though.
Betting on a single number is foolish. The mathematical probability of hitting any single number is only 2.7%. In other words, the house absolutely loves you.
Dozens and Columns are better, 32.4%. Still, the house advantage is huge.
Even/Odd or Red/Black get you up to 48.6%. Hey, that's a deal, right?
Well, no. The problem with all of these calculations you'll find around the internet is that they are equivalent to picking a random number (or 12 or whatever) out of 38. The problem is that this is NOT how the roulette works.
The roulette has a spinning wheel with numbers separated by fences. The ball spins as well. Along the path of the ball there are also little bumpers that can alter the path of the ball.
Yes, in the long term it is just like picking random numbers. However, if you look at what makes you win or loose at the "micro" level it is a little simpler.
If you bet on a single number the ball only has to move one slot for you to loose. As it lands on the number field the ball has a bunch of excess energy. The surfaces are hard and it bounces around with great efficiency. It can go over one or more number fences very easily.
In fact, if you study every single common bet, single numbers, rows, columns, dozens, color, even/odd, etc. they all share one trait: If the ball jumps over just ONE fence you loose.
If you've played roulette enough you'll eventually run into this stereotype: Big guy. Smells and looks like money. Shows up with piles of cash, gold watch and gold chain around his neck. And starts to place piles of cash on numbers he is pulling out of his anal orifice. Most of the time these guys loose a ton of money. Why? The "one fence" problem.
OK, I think that sets it up. Actually, it is probably beyond obvious at this point. Take a look at a roulette wheel and think about how you should bet to solve the problem that makes every single common bet nearly worthless.
I don't get it, surely if I bet on only one number and win, my return must be higher than if I bet on even/odds. it's not the probability that counts, rather the expected return.
If I drop the ball directly on one of your numbers from, say, 1 inch above the number. Wheel not spinning. How far would the ball have to bounce for you to loose?
Bet on the dozens, columns, rows, black/red and other common ( and convenient) bets. Repeat the exercise.
You have nothing useful to say yet feel compelled to attack what I am saying. Why?
It has been proven that roulette can be beaten through predictive methods. This is nothing new. Not sure I get your angle when all you do is shoot the messenger.
I am going to take you at your word that you aren't baiting me. Yes, you can (and people have) predicted where a roulette ball will land while it is in motion, particularly if you have the aid of cameras. This is more useful in European Roulette and American Roulette - but it can work.
What you can't do, is come up with a positive expected value through any kind of betting pattern.
> "Intercepting them [the surveillance signals] is simple as going down to a local Radio Shack," he told ABC.
Hunh? At my workplace the surveillance room, as in most casinos, is segregated from the rest of the building by a separate entrance. Surveillance staff are not permitted to socialize with other staff and can't work in any job in the casino other than surveillance. The room has restricted swipe access via thick steel double-doors aka a "man trap" with poured concrete blocks and reinforced metal plates in the walls, of course Pelco PTZ cameras covering the outside of the doors.
The camera system isn't accessible anywhere other than possibly in the ceiling of the gaming floor which would be pretty obvious having someone trying to splice in to a cable. Everything else goes to the surveillance room not to the server room other than maybe the corporate LAN and intrusion detection server but still that's a restricted access locked room but to get to that door there are several other steel doors you need to swipe through, not even the big boss has access to some of them, but I do ;)
Our surveillance manager was telling me he trained in Las Vegas at some guy's house who teaches surveillance techniques to people in the industry. This guy has a multi camera setup in his home and tables too. He cheats at cards while on camera then shows it to the trainees but even he can't see himself cheating on camera even though he did it himself and knew he was on camera.
Although I should add most times cheating especially Blackjack is from collusion between player and dealer. There is a reason why staff and patrons don't mingle or why staff can't use public washrooms when on-shift.
Now I wait for the men in black to come knocking at my door I've said too much!
Rather than hacking the video feed, its far more likely remote access to the feed was given to a second accomplice by the casino insider (who later was sacked). This second accomplice then signalled to the gambler by some other method (either physical or electronic).
There's a bit more detail here:
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/crown-casino-hi-t...
Perhaps the words "steals" and "heist" are not the best choice given the man won the money playing cards and the claims that he must therefore have been using a second person to feed him information taken from video feeds is presented without any evidence.
I really doubt they had wireless wi-fi cameras. Any decent installer would never do that for such a large establishment with that many cameras. In fact, it would probably be more maintenance because they are not as reliable. It would be interesting to see how he got the feed but I really doubt they had wireless cameras in a casino.
Yeah after reading some other articles, it really does sound like someone on the inside gave them access to the security system, as opposed to them hacking into it without help.
Hmm. They could still have used a wireless methodology. Somewhere there is a room with a lot of monitors for those cameras, where the security personnel watch the tables. That room is probably not exactly hardened to TEMPEST standards.
I think the chance of recovering the money is higher than zero, close to 1 in fact. All the casino has to do is store the tape and wait for facial recognition technology to take off on the web. In a decade or so we'll just be taping crimes and than the web will tell us which individuals have matching bone structures.
The title of the article is misleading. He didn't steal it, he cheated the casino out of it. This is an important distinction since in the eyes of the law the casino willingly gave him the money when he cashed out. The casino can catch you cheating and prevent you from cashing out, but once you're out the door you're pretty much free (although I probably wouldn't come back).
In fact the article actually says they've identified the man and banned him from the casino. If they had legal backing I'm sure it would have mentioned the manhunt, and not a "near zero chance of recovering the money."
Given that it's an Australian casino, its highly likely that the gambler is associated with a syndicate working out of Southeast Asia (see for example the recent soccer gambling scandal). The problem isn't identifying who took the money, the problem is a) prosecuting and b) identifying and recovering assets in a tangle of opaque foreign legal systems.
For blackjack, he could use the outside accomplice to count cards, then start playing at a table with favorable shoe.
For roulette, I think I've read elsewhere that precise timing of the spinning wheel allows you to model its physics well enough to figure out where it will land.
Since the scam took place in the high roller room and the player was not Australian (read: most likely ethnic Chinese from somewhere in SE Asia), I'd wager baccarat.
The head-line says "steals", but the reality is that he was simply cheating. One is a crime but I'm not sure about the other. If I'm accomplished at counting cards, I can still beat the house because I've changed the odds. The casino may ban me (and I might forfeit the earnings for the day) but they can't charge me with a crime.