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[llien]

The Hustle remembers how in 1964 a world-renowned medical professor found a way to beat roulette wheels, kicking off a five-year winning streak in which he amassed $1,250,000 ($8,000,000 today). He noticed that at the end of each night, casinos would replace cards and dice with fresh sets -- but the expensive roulette wheels went untouched and often stayed in service for decades before being replaced. Like any other machine, these wheels acquired wear and tear. Jarecki began to suspect that tiny defects -- chips, dents, scratches, unlevel surfaces -- might cause certain wheels to land on certain numbers more frequently than randomocity prescribed. The doctor spent weekends commuting between the operating table and the roulette table, manually recording thousands upon thousands of spins, and analyzing the data for statistical abnormalities. "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...."

With his wife, Carol, he scouted dozens of wheels at casinos around Europe, from Monte Carlo (Monaco), to Divonne-les-Bains (France), to Baden-Baden (Germany). The pair recruited a team of 8 "clockers" who posted up at these venues, sometimes recording as many as 20,000 spins over a month-long period. Then, in 1964, he made his first strike. After establishing which wheels were biased, he secured a £25,000 loan from a Swiss financier and spent 6 months candidly exacting his strategy. By the end of the run, he'd netted £625,000 (roughly $6,700,000 today).

Jarecki's victories made headlines in newspapers all over the world, from Kansas to Australia. Everyone wanted his "secret" -- but he knew that if he wanted to replicate the feat, he'd have to conceal his true methodology. So, he concocted a "fanciful tale" for the press: He tallied roulette outcomes daily, then fed the information into an Atlas supercomputer, which told him which numbers to pick. At the time, wrote gambling historian, Russell Barnhart, in Beating the Wheel, "Computers were looked upon as creatures from outer space... Few persons, including casino managers, were vocationally qualified to distinguish myth from reality." Hiding behind this technological ruse, Jarecki continued to keep tabs on biased tables -- and prepare for his next big move...

If you think, hell, why not do it again, hold your horses:
In the decades following Jarecki's dominance, casinos invested heavily in monitoring their roulette tables for defects and building wheels less prone to bias. Today, most wheels have gone digital, run by algorithms programmed to favor the house.
slashdot

Explanation of how he did it puzzles me. Noticing that certain numbers are more likely to happen is one thing. Noticing a sequence sounds weird, there should be no notable dependency.

 

[#Phonepunk#]

That’s rad

Yesterday my friend was talking about playing poker, how there is all this predictability to everything, that you can really engineer your way to victory w math.

The sequence being modeled makes sense to me, I liken it to fluid dynamics or chaos theory, where patterns are emergent. He is modeling the flaws in a chaotic system that is paradoxically not a random system. There is no way to make the ideal perfect roulette wheel that produces perfectly random outcomes, the tiny variations in make and model, in how it was installed, manufacturing defects, all these measurable things come into play. I guess you could say he modeled how not random the game was.

 

[Xiaoki]

Yeah, that wouldnt work today. Everyone that's smart knows that roulette heavily rigged.

 

[infinitys_7th]

I assume he looked at conditional probabilities (given that it lands on X, what are the chances it will land on Y next, and etc. for sequences).

X would, of course, be the starting point for the ball, and if you trace the sequence you make a repeatable path. If X leads to Y 95% of the time and Y leads to Z 95% of the time, then X leads to Z 90%-some percent of the time.

It would be laborious as hell (from what I read, he had grad students/slaves help him, and I hope they got a bit of the earnings) but doable.

 

[Alx]

I can see how a wheel could introduce a bias with tear and wear, but it doesn't seem logical that it would create conditional probabilities between consecutive results. What matters is the speed and launching position of the ball, and that doesn't depend on where the ball ended on the previous round.

 

[Kenpachii]

Yea sounds like bullshit. He lied before he could lie again.

 

[somerset]

1) American gambling regs today allow all casinos to *cheat* and directly control the outcome of 'random' devices like fruit machines and wheels. This means no electronic random numbers even, but a simple legally defined set of outcomes- allowing the house (and thus the taxman) a *perfect* percentage of the bets of the suckers.

2) No-one has ever proven they successfully beat the wheel without rigging the wheel or exploiting a known rigged wheel. Many have claimed that a long observation of 'honest' wheels gives enough info to design a successful system. Never been proved, tho- and that includes peeps who own their own wheels, simulate wear, and try to find a reliable science based system.

3) most convincing *fake* systems used the more convincing lie of connecting the initial position of the ball with current wheel spin parameters. Even tho this method *seems* a good idea, it never proved to be so.

4) small biases can probably be found in any worn wheel with enough time, but the betting system makes them very hard to exploit without the risk of losing an absolute fortune in the attempt.

5) even in the 50s, B-quality ad campaigns would link *any* product with a computer. Years later, an entry in the famous bawdy british sex comedy movie cycle, Carry-On, had a dating agency that pretended to use the power of a computer.

Yes, the story stinks of a media con- all the usual red flags are present. Many such frauds have been used in publishing history as the basis of a 'true' non-fiction story. They predicate on what the hard-of-thinking thinks is both exciting and plausible. Or put more simply- the usual tabloid trash.

If it's a headline in the mainstream news, it's usually well worth ignoring.

PS casinos have always used fake news stories of 'big winners' who 'beat the house' to bring in the suckers. Now if you *do* manage to beat the house, well then the house would (literally) beat you, and now ban you (and more than likely prosecute you and send you to jail- with the assistance of the corrupt DA whose boss is put into office by casino money)

99.999% of all successful schemes involve the criminality of an 'inside man'.