Cheating At Roulette May Be Legal In UK 226
nuke-alwin writes, "A hidden device that appears to give an advantage to roulette players may be legal in the UK when the gambling industry is deregulated next year. The device — which consists of a small digital time recorder, a concealed computer, and a hidden earpiece — uses predictive software to determine where the ball is likely to land. It has been tested by a government lab, which found that 'the advantage can be considerable.' It will be up to casinos to spot people using such devices."
Legal... yeah (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Dubious article. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Dubious article. (Score:5, Informative)
Casinoes "will" know (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, if you used an asynchronous computer there would be no hash to detect....
Re:How could it be illegal? (Score:3, Informative)
Here in Victoria, Australia it really is illegal to implement a system to beat the casino. People have been charged for doing that. Its silly, but so is the whole casino thing.
Re:Legal... yeah (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, there's a reason why we have some of the best knee surgeons in the world in Northern Ireland.
Re:Oh, casinos will know (Score:3, Informative)
Re:MOD PARENT AC INSIGHTFUL PLEASE (Score:3, Informative)
If it was actually impossible to win, very few people would play. There has to be the occasional big win to give people something to hope for.
Re:Prediction is not cheating... (Score:5, Informative)
Card counting really has little to do with memory. It simply involves assigning a point value to each card value and keeping count as each new deck is dealt out. As such. the only thing you have to remember is the current count.
The most useful aspect of card counting is determining your bet size. When there are more tens and aces left in the deck, you have better odds over the dealer (often this becomes an advantage). At this point, you increase the amount of your bet.
Unfortunately, this does make card counting rather easy to spot, so another aspect of card counting is to determine your playing strategy based on the current count. You then have to memorize charts that tell you what is the best play for a certain combination of cards and a given count. This does involve memorization, but not the kind that most people think of when you mention card counting.
Card counting has never really been about memorizing exactly which cards have been dealt out of the deck. Very few people would have the ability to do that. Card counting as it is actually practiced is not that hard to do... though it is very hard to master it such that you maintain your advantage AND don't get kicked out of the casino.
One of the simplest counting systems involves assigning a +1 to all the tens in the deck (tens and face cards), and a -1 to all the 2s, 3s, 4s, and 5s. Whenever the count is positive, you have a higher ratio of tens to the lower cards, and thus you probably have an advantage. The more tens, the more likely you get a blackjack, and the more likely the dealer will bust if you don't get a blackjack.
The Wheel (Score:2, Informative)
When it comes to the bets being closed before the wheel spins and the ball drops, it won't happen. Part of the excitement of roulette is hopping into a game already in action. It gives the illusion of an advantage, and sadly, with the computer, it is an advantage. They can easily detect electronics like that, and soon it will be standard practice to scan for the computer.
Re:method (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Oh, casinos will know (Score:2, Informative)
A good card counter can have things set up so he wins several hands in a row. Okay, 20 hands in a row was probably facetious on my part, but it's possible to win several hands in a row, and know when to not raise your bet on other hands, so you lose less. Thereby, you give yourself an advantage instead of it being the other way. Blackjack normally only slightly favors the house (but hey, it's a casino... if it didn't favor the house, at least slightly, it wouldn't be there), but a good card counter can reverse the advantage so it's slightly in his favor. Mind you, if you're playing at a table with a small minimum bet, and you're keeping your bets low, the advantage to you (the card counter) is so small that it's not enough where the casinos care, because the advantage is only about 1%. So, if you're playing at a $20 minimum table, you're probably talking about a profit of $10-$15 an hour.
The casinos are more then happy to lose that much to a card counter who could, in theory, be taking them for hundreds or thousands an hour. Of course, if you're blatant and obvious about it, yeah, they'll kick you out.
Re:Prediction is not cheating... (Score:4, Informative)
You apparently have that backwards. If 8 face cards, and no small cards came up the first hand, that would leave you with a +8, but you would be at a disadvantage since more 10's would out of the deck than the small cards. From looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_counting [wikipedia.org] the 10/face cards should be -1, and the low cards +1.
Ken
Re:Legal... yeah (Eudaemonic Pie) (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Oh, well that's OK then... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Easy way out (Score:2, Informative)
If something along these lines is not acceptable to players, it most likely means the eventual end of roulette as we know it. The wheel will end up replaced by some other sort of randomization device, or perhaps by a wheel with four times as many slots and each number appearing four times (and a very tiny ball), so that the scatter effect dominates. The smaller and lighter the ball, the greater the scatter effect. It may add a few seconds to the time it takes for the ball to settle, but that would be a small price for a casino to pay to avoid being calculated out of fortunes.
It is entirely possible to exploit a biased wheel without the help of a computer or any predictive device. It just takes a larger bias that can be spotted by the human eye and mind. Would that be considered cheating? I certainly have to hope not, as I have done it more than once. The results were something like this:
Bahamas: turned $60 into $400, wheel taken out of play after the (losing) high-roller to my left departed.
Las Vegas (Sahara): turned $100 into $600 and was up as high as $800, wheel had been trued by the following day.
Las Vegas (Lady Luck): turned $50 into $400, wheel was in the parking garage the following day.
Sadly, I have lost more than that while trying to determine if wheels were biased or just running "streaky", so a device that could let me know whether a wheel is worth playing or not would be quite helpful -- especially if I could use it while standing around a full table waiting for a spot to open up and NOT have to use it in actual play -- or even use it from a distance by looking at the history board. This would be more of a statistical analyzer than predictive system, however, and is more a software problem than a hardware problem. I would imagine it could run on an unaltered phone, and almost certainly on a PDA.
Mal-2
Re:Oh, casinos will know (Score:3, Informative)