Two Years In Prison For Using Infrared Contact Lenses To Cheat At Poker 320
dmfinn writes "It was back in 2011 when Stefano Ampollini and two accomplices cheated a French casino out of over €90,000 thanks to the help of Chinese-made infrared contact lenses. According to French authorities, Ampollini and two casino workers marked cards using an invisible liquid that would be picked up by the infrared lenses, which Ampollini then used to read his competitors' cards. Though the contacts themselves cost over €2,000, the crew managed to take €71,000 in their first night. However, the trio was finally caught when a lawyer working for the casino became suspicious after Ampollini folded with an unbelievably good hand, which suggested he knew the croupier's cards. This week, a French court sentenced Ampollini to two years in prison and a €100,000 fine. His main accomplice was handed an even harsher sentence; he was forced to pay the same fine and given a 36-month sentence. It appears, despite their best efforts and advanced tactics, that the men were still unable to beat the house without raising significant alarms. So, at least for now, it seems modern technology still can't simulate good old 'luck.'"
They were greedy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They were greedy (Score:5, Interesting)
The only surprising thing in this story is that casinos don't have infra-red cameras.
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Which would bring them what precisely?
Casinos are well lit and have thousands of cameras viewing the floors from different angles. What benefit would it bring them to drop back to black and white where the only practical gain would be they can see in the dark? And if they did have IR cameras would they have sufficient resolution to detect a small dot on the back of a card?
Re:They were greedy (Score:4, Informative)
Re:They were greedy (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes actually.
Currently most casinos have 1080P 120fps broadcast quality security cameras on the tables. They can see the slightest thing and zoom in to check the sex on the fly that just landed.
They also have cameras UNDER the table edge watching you if you try to hand off something to someone sitting next to you.
Re:They were greedy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They were greedy (Score:5, Insightful)
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You could get an amphibious vehicle.
They don't always catch fire. [bbc.co.uk]
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This whole story reminds me a bit too much of the finale of God of Gamblers [youtube.com]. I was always more interested in his jade ring than in his cheating contacts.
Re:They were greedy (Score:4, Interesting)
By definition, people can't see infrared. If they could, it would be "red".
Re:They were greedy (Score:5, Insightful)
This. Every cheater knows that to stay undetected, you can't win too often. Even aimbots quickly included code to intentionally miss a shot every now and then.
There are only two ways to get away with stealing money at a casino. One is to remain within the margin if probability - appear to be lucky, but not impossibly lucky. Either win some, lose some, with a total just slightly in your favour, or lose mostly, but then get the jackpot and stop playing after that. Make it a huge thing. Celebrate, rent a limo, marry a stranger, whatever. Don't pocket it and vanish, that'll be crazy suspicious.
Oh, the second way. That is, of course, to own the casino.
Re:They were greedy (Score:5, Interesting)
Even aimbots quickly included code to intentionally miss a shot every now and then.
but that's a terrible method of hiding an aimbot.. what gives them away isn't high accuracy, but inhuman movements.. the best way to hide it is to not have it aim for you, but only to have it shoot for you when you mouse over a target yourself.
source: i wrote hacks for cs and cheated in the highest ranks of CAL without ever being suspected let alone caught.
Re:They were greedy (Score:5, Insightful)
That sounds very plausible. I bet a real player has a firing solution on a target far more often than he actually realizes it. Though knowing the technique does give some ideas on how to catch it.
> source: i wrote hacks for cs and cheated in the highest ranks of CAL without ever being suspected let alone caught.
Which I think brings up one of the reason casinos attract cheats beyond the money. Cheating and winning is a game too. In fact, its really no different from a bluff, you are not playing by the same rules, but you want to look like you are. However, in a casino, you have to do it while sitting in front of real people. I have to imagine that is a rush and a half....which like bluffing.... is also why so few can really do it well consistently.
If your motivation is being the best cheater.... then no amount of bitching about how it ruins the game for the rest of us is going to help.
Amusingly, I have a relative who is um I think almost 14 now. He started running cheats in games a couple of years ago after some cheater did something and convinced a bunch of other people he was the one running cheats. So they banned him and he started googling to figure out what they were talking about! Next thing you know, he is griefing himself.
Ahhhh kids.
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But there is a huge huge huge gap between 96% and 100%
That last percentage point is a bigger gap than pretty much all previous 99 percentage points.
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Oh and on that 'Make it a huge thing.' I will then be very suspicious if I would win anything. I would want to get out as quietly as possible. I would not celebrate. I would not rent a limo. I would check out and leave. But then I am not a gambler.
If you cheat then you want to look like you didn't cheat.
Anyone winning big through actual luck would make it a big thing, celebrate, rent a limo, whatever. If you don't act that way, you'll set off alarm bells.
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nonsense.
i'm sure you have heard about standard deviation, haven't you? without it, *no one* would ever win at a casino and then, hopefully, no one would then be foolish enough to ever try. casinos would be out of business.
people win at casino's all the time...certain people even go on week long lucky streaks and defy the odds for days...without cheating.
i read the original story...there is some odd things about it. it reports that "two casino employees" marked the cards ahead of time and then "put the ca
Re:They were greedy (Score:4, Interesting)
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right...we agree on this...but again, the article states that they became suspicious AFTER ONE SESSION. that just doesnt really makes sense, to me at least.
i'll say again, people can easily win for a couple of hours playing really really badly. it happens all the time. of course, even more people lose during this time too.
it's in the casino's interest, in order to prevent future attempts at cheating, to make up cover stories as to their prowess at catching cheats and to how complicated and difficult it r
Re:They were greedy (Score:5, Insightful)
Greedy? I suppose so. But it has always struck me as a funny way to look at things, when casinoes call people cheaters; they are the ones who invite people to come and throw their money out against overwhelming odds: "You MIGHT win" - yeah, and all the air molecules in the room might suddenly end up in one corner. After all, it is only probability that keeps it from happening.
The standard argument one always hears is that "Nobody forces people go and be stupid". All that means, IMO, is that some people don't have the backbone to stand up for decency.
Re:They were greedy (Score:5, Insightful)
The standard argument one always hears is that "Nobody forces people go and be stupid".
Yep. It pretty much is a discussion ender.
All that means, IMO, is that some people don't have the backbone to stand up for decency.
Or that "decency" of your sort is worthless. As I see it, I live in a mostly free country. That means people have the freedom to make bad decisions. And lo and behold, they do indeed make bad decisions. Maybe you should do something about the weather while you're at it.
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Casinos sell a product - entertainment. In particular, the thrill that you might win some (a lot) of money. People go and pay to experience that thrill. If you want to be entertained by something different, that's fine, but it's not stupid to like a little thrill and be willing to pay a little for it.
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Anyone who wins more than once at a casino is under suspicion. The odds are against you. Winning big once is luck, twice is cheating.
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Anyone who wins more than once at a casino is under suspicion. The odds are against you. Winning big once is luck, twice is cheating.
Anybody who walks into a casino is under suspicion. The casino thinks everybody who walks into a casino is a sucker and rightly so. Someone once said "Of course the game is rigged, but you can't win if you don't play."
Besides, the casinos are sanctioned by the government which doesn't like cheaters and theives, too much competion.
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"Be greedy and you raise suspicion."
Win and you raise suspicion.
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Right here.
He got himself caught by being greedy. If he would LOSE often he would have gotten away with it.
Just avoid being stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand, how did the "lawyer working for the casino" know the hand that the crook folded with? That sounds like we are talking about crooks on both sides. An important part of poker is that folding does not expose your betting strategy.
Glass tables (Score:2, Informative)
Large televised poker games use a glass table [youtube.com] so that viewers and commentators can see the players' cards. This may even be true of all large games regardless of whether they're televised to try and catch unusual betting behaviour (as was the case here).
Re:Glass tables (Score:4, Interesting)
Also of note is that high limit casino poker games are often filled with players that are playing quite badly. The phenomena is sort of based on the players "threshold of pain" when it comes to what limit they are playing. There are several common types of players that sit in the highest stakes game in a public poker room but cannot play well for long period of time precisely because they are in that particular game.
The first common type is the player with a very big ego that cannot admit to themselves or let others know that the game is too large for their bankroll: Every time they lose a pot it hurts like a motherfucker because they cannot afford it, leading to them going on tilt or otherwise making decisions that arent even an approximation of optimal.
The second common type is the player that has an obscene amount of money in the bank. They are in the largest game in the room because there isnt a larger game in the room. Nothing that happens in the game will meaningfully effect their lives in any way, so sooner or later they start gambling-it-up because thats a lot funner than trying to play a solid game of poker when the results dont really matter.
As far as this story goes.. these guys werent playing actual poker.. they were playing a house game.
Re: Just avoid being stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
How about this: RTFA and as usual it answers all of your questions and more...
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Don't be so harsh on them. They read 2-3 lines of information on the internet. Not only are those lines absolute truth but no more information is needed before wild speculation and drama can be generated.
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Re: Just avoid being stupid (Score:4, Informative)
My other question is how did they figure out he was using special contacts? I feel like he could have easily bluffed his way out of this.
(According to the article) once the casino got suspicious, they called the betting police (whatever those are), who used telephone surveillance to figure out how they had cheated.
So once you raise suspicions, you need to avoid surveillance.
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Depends on the form of the game. In the televised Texas Hold'em games, some of the cards are exposed, others are held covered for the viewers. A decent croupier would have a gut feeling about how the game is going and roughly what hand the players have.
He did confess, and impressed the judge with it. Given the chap's age and location, he probably was an honourable gentleman who decided once he was caught, not to drag out the obvious, I guess to save his honour.
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Yes, there are cameras everywhere in a casino. Yes, they can see everyone's hands. No that doesn't have to mean they are cheating. The people who can see the camera monitors are not in communication with the dealers. They go straight to the lawyers apparently.
Wow, lawyers as security guards? That'll cost a pretty penny. I'm surprised the casinos haven't negotiated down to lesser sworn officers-of-the-court... like bailiffs and bounty hunters....
Outliers and out and out liars... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you find a way to game the gaming system, you will appear as an anomaly.
And, anomaly detection will highlight you as such.
Winning at a game of chance over a long enough sample period? Cheating is more probable than an improbable string of luck.
The only effective way to steal is to steal from people who are powerless to detect it, powerless to stop it, or weak enough in both areas.
Can you win the day at a casino? YES.
Can you win during your entire life? YES, considering your life will probably be forfeit when you've stolen too much from the wrong people.
Re:Outliers and out and out liars... (Score:4, Informative)
Poker is a bit more than 'a game of chance'. There's a chance element, of course, but skill is a major factor. The most important aspect is you're not playing against the house. There's no such thing as 'winning the day at a casino' in poker. 'It's all one big session.'
It's not a typical casino game like roulette or craps where you're playing against the house and the payouts are structured such that every bet has negative expectation. If you consistently play against people who make worse betting decisions than you, you will be a consistent winner in the long term.
So your assertion that winning over a long period in poker is cheating is false (although, it is true that most players are long-term losing players).
The reason the casino went after them is that it's in the casinos interest to run a fair game. The casino takes a cut of each pot over a certain amount, and some also collect an hourly vig from sitting at the table. Players won't play in an unfair game though, so the casino has to protect this model or lose its players. It was the threat of an indirect loss of money that necessitated action, not that the players were taking directly from the casino.
And the reality is - these guys got caught because they were greedy. There have been several highly publicised (within the poker community anyway) cases of cheating, and its always the same. The cheater makes some ridiculous reads, bets / bluffs consistently at the right time with very marginal holdings, or folds big hands in big pots when they are beat. Once that suspicion is triggered, anyone who understands the game will spot it easily.
If they were smart, they would be much more subtle about it, losing their fair share but making sure they get the big pots. Once the cash starts rolling in though, I guess it's very hard to resist pushing it just a little too hard.
Casinos take this shit very seriously. From a purely academic point of view the IR contact lenses are an interesting concept, but you have to be pretty damn stupid to try it so brazenly.
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Interesting - but they weren't playing poker against other players ...
Re:Outliers and out and out liars... (Score:5, Informative)
Where does the article say that? It mentions "the cheater knew the croupier's cards" - are you suggesting that the croupier participates in the action in a standard poker game like Texas Holdem?
It seems that they were playing Caribbean Stud Poker, which is a game where the players compete against the house, and where the croupier does indeed have a hand representing the house.
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Winning at a game of chance over a long enough sample period?
FWIW poker is a game of skill.
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...when you've stolen too much from the wrong people.
So it's stealing when you control the odds but it's not stealing when the 'wrong people' control the odds?
Just who is stealing from whom here?
They got off easy (Score:4, Insightful)
Two years? For cheating at cards? That's nothing. Lots of people are killed over cheating at high stakes gambling. You cheat the casinos and they usually take it up with the police and lawyers. They can't break your legs and keep operating a legitimate business.
You cheat a private game? You deal with individuals who might smash your fucking face in and throw you in a six foot feet hole in the desert. At the very least you get beaten within an inch of your life and then they take back all of your 'winnings'. Those guys should have tried to get into a private game where high rollers in organized crime or even professional sports play.
The most hilarious part about this story though. Is that there are bankers that make billions cheating the system. Insider trading, fraud, embezzlement, Ponzi scheme, and so on. And those guys get a free pass as long as they throw the occasional six-figure-pass to the politicians. These morons get two years for cheating the casinos.
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You cheat a private game? You deal with individuals who might smash your fucking face in and throw you in a six foot feet hole in the desert.
I am kind of worried about the kind of people you play poker with.....For me the worst that would happen is they'd make me buy donuts for the next poker-night....
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If you're going to allow illegal killing of people as a valid penalty things, then you might as well say that anyone who isn't killed gets off easy for /anything/.
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Well, yes, killing people is illegal, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. This case springs to mind [wikipedia.org], Akio Kashiwagi was winning big against Trump's casinos. Trump managed to tempt Akio into playing a high stakes game that he lost big time. Before Trump got his money the Yakuza murdered Akio, presumably because they were bank-rolling him.
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That is actually a good question. Sounds like more of a civil case than a criminal one. Cheaters can be forced to pay back the winning and banned for life in all casinos, but go to jail??
Cheaters are bad poker players (Score:2)
and this is on slashdot because...? (Score:2)
Just not careful ... etc... use data and analysis (Score:2)
OK, point looks to already have been made (-1, redundant?)
They weren't careful. A careful strategy, would not raise alarms by taking extraordinarily high wins, and would accept reasonable losses, ie, not fold with a great hand *even if* you know you'll loose.
What you'd want, is to scrape in marginally better positive wins, not great hits, -- and then move on. Heck, just in case, take some more-than-usual losses at some casinos. Build a data model; speadsheet it; look for a reasonably higher
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Information missing from summary and articles (Score:5, Informative)
Most people associate "poker" with games where the players compete against each other, rather than the house. Texas Holdem and Draw poker are two well known variants. Many casinos have poker tables now - they provide a dealer, and make their money by taking a small percentage of each pot.
The article talks about Stefano Ampollini knowing which cards the croupier had. The croupier would not have any cards in a normal game of poker.
Looking at their website, it appears that the Les Princes Casino in Cannes does not have any normal poker tables. Instead, they run a casino game called "Casino Stud" or "Caribbean Stud Poker". It is a normal casino game that gives the house a 5% edge if the player uses the best possible strategy.
The players must ante before each game. After they have seen their cards, if they want to continue they must place a "raise" - a bet which is double the ante.
When the cheat decided whether or not to raise, he looked at the dealer's face down hand. He knew if the dealer would win or lose before he made his "raise" bet.
It's likely that the casino knew the cheat's cards from the video surveillance footage.
Infared Contact Lenses? (Score:5, Interesting)
Shut up and take my money!
How do you make these? You need something that will convert a frequency our eyes can't detect, in your focal plane (it's a contact lens) into something you can detect without changing direction of the light wave. Never mind they cost allegedly $2000 I want to know what the science behind them is.
Re: Infared Contact Lenses? (Score:2)
Well actually it's not in the focal plane, that would be the retina, but your point is valid!
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maybe the lenses are actually a very precise notch filter for a color of ink matched close (but not quite) to the color of the design on the card backs? by applying this ink very carefully you could, in principle at least, add what appear to you as dark markings that way. seems pretty tough to pull off, but i have no other idea.
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http://www.instructables.com/id/Homemade-Infrared-Goggles!-For-Under-$10/
I think this is how they did it. This isn't true IR, but near-IR. The ink would need to be near IR but I think you could find something that would work and it would be all but invisible under brought lights at a casino.
For those to lazy to follow the link. Someone makes near-IR goggles using welding glasses and two theatrical movie light gel sheets. Am guessing someone in china would be willing to make this into contact lenses. With th
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Most probably, these lenses are simple polarizing filters and the invisible paint is an optically-active liquid. Alternatively, it can be a highly-refractive liquid - it'll be visible because it polarizes light a little bit differently than the reflection from the card's surface (different Brewster angles). Bonus points: it'll be visible only at a certain range of angles.
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They probably hid a pattern on the card using visible colors, so a lense tinted with the right color would make the pattern visible to the human eye.
What's so nasty here is the degree of the penalty.... they cheated the Casino out of 21,000 EUR, so they don't get to keep the 21K and each of them has to pay a 100,000 EUR fine, plus two years jail.
Now if instead; the Casino was cheating, the Casino could have to pay a fine or damages that would be some miniscule fraction of the casino's revenue.
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Well actually the penalty for a casino cheating is to have their gaming license revoked, at least in civilised countries where they don't just kill you for cheating the casino. Having your gaming license revoked shuts down your casino, potentially for ever. Even a new owner may not be able to get a license so even the property itself isn't necessarily worth anything to you.
Given how much revenue a casino generates, that's one hell of a fine.
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That's a reasonable explanation, but I would generalize it to any filter.
For starters, the only meaning of infrared lenses I know is lenses that are transparent for infrared, which is rather useless in this case since you can't see them.
A step of frequency conversion is also pretty hard since you've got to increase the frequency and using low energy photons to release high energy photons is a nontrivial undertaking.
But then we think of the fact that we are in fact extremely colourblind. If we take a bundle
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It's near-infrared - not infrared - whoever wrote TFA probably does not understand the distinciton. Essentially, the near-IR markings on the cards are too faint to see in normal light. You then wear lenses that diminish all light, except near-IR, by a factor 100 or so. The eye compensates for this, and as a result the markings become visible.
I found this by googling: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCO2y0zszyE [youtube.com]
Re:Infared Contact Lenses? (Score:5, Informative)
For the naked eye, the ink would appear as a very pale cyan color. With a proper filter, everything would look very dark due to the filter removing 99% of the visible light, but the ink would show up with much more contrast. Effective long-pass filters do exist, e.g. Schott RG695 or RG715 for a 695 or 715 nm cut-off [schott.com], respectively. There are plenty of suitable dyes [sigmaaldrich.com]. Probably you would want to have this filter only on one eye, otherwise the world around you might appear very dark.
The other theories that have been posted here make no sense.
Frequency-doubling needs extremely high intensities (like a high-power or focused low-power laser beam), which would render you blind. Moreeover, frequency-doubling requires proper phase matching, which boils down to the requirement of an exact combination of angle and wavelength.
Polarizers: it is not possible to turn unpolarized light into polarized light without throwing away half of the light. Once the light is polarized, the polarization direction can be manipulated with optically active materials, though.
A high-refractive index coating would not only change at the Brewster angle, it would make the cards much more glossy as seen from any angle. It is not possible to make the refractive index change dramatically within a short wavelength range without changing the absorption as well, so the glossiness would appear in visible light as well.
A phosphor coating would not work for several reasons: phosphors do not emit the phosphorence in the same direction as the absorbed radiation; they always convert from short wavelengths to long wavelengths, and the phosphorence light would be completely out of focus.
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That is not frequency doubling, but a special form of phosphorence. Visible/blue light is used to generate long-lived excitations in the molecules. Infrared then excites them further to a slightly higher level with a short excitation lifetime; as that excitation decays, it emits visible light. It shares the disadvantages of common phosphorence: it is not directional.
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It was an inside job, too (Score:2)
It must not be forgotten that two casino employees were involved as well. That were the people who arranged for the cards to be marked, so the cheats could play their game.
No mention on punishment for those two. Not only were they accomplices, without whom the scheme would not have worked to begin with, they also breached the trust their employer placed in them. The latter is also a serious issue.
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"Employer trust" hahahahaha.
The only way an employer can put "trust" in an employee is to share ownership of the business, as in a partnership or co-operative. Anything else is just sleight of hand to get your employer to accept worse remuneration.
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Dunno in what kind of backwards country you live, but where I live I have seen employees getting harsher sentences as breach of trust of an employer was involved.
Here there is the expectation of honesty of an employee. So that you can e.g. have an employee work with customers, without expectation that said employee is trying to cheat the company using their position. Or that you can expect that a casino employee is not out to help customers cheat on the casino.
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My point, unnecessary as it seems to repeat it, was that you're not putting trust in your employee unless you give them an ownership stake.
IOW, trust is something which leaves you fucked if someone breaks it - as in trust in a personal relationship. It's not trust if you have a well-established legal framework to run to if things go wrong. Make sense?
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Well I read the article, which mentions at least two people on the floor (the player and an accomplice giving signals), plus two casino employees. Total four people. Summary involves only two.
IR contact lenses can be bought here (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.gambleromania.com/5-sets-ir-contact-lenses
Not exactly a new idea (Score:2)
This is a story right out of the old Mission: Impossible TV series. An episode used this exact premise in at least one episode I can think of to cheat a guy who was using the same trick at his own game. They way they beat him was by remarking the cards and then remarking them using a different technology. In that show, the game was baccarat instead of poker. Of course, this was television and rather fanciful, yet I'm glad to see that someone actually has done it.... and even happier to see that they got
Croupier? (Score:2)
What kind of poker games are they running over there that the house plays a hand?
Incompetent hacks (Score:2)
They might have been able to buy an expensive gadget, but they did not have what it takes to understand the game. Folding with a really good hand is an absolute beginners mistake in this type of games.
Aw hell (Score:2)
I was hoping they'd have done something cool with those lenses, like looking at the other players' face and body heat to determine their level of excitement/stress. Instead it's just a regular card marking fraud.
Out of curiousity... (Score:2)
Out of curiousity, how did the casino know that he had "folded with an unbelievably good hand"? Everytime I've been to a casino, if I've folded, I didn't have to show my hand.
There should be no crime in gambling (Score:3)
Let the gamblers game in every way. Gambling is a stupid thing and let them all have it. "Cheating"? Really? We have gamblers losing the world's economy and at the expense of the rest of the world, the gamblers are getting bailed out so they can do it some more.
Let actual gamblers do what they want. It doesn't harm the world. And let their continued operation go on as it is.
There's a law against this? (Score:3)
If these laws had been applied in another era, two well known scientists would have been jailed for cheating at roulette [engadget.com] . (Those would be Edward Thorp [wikipedia.org] and Claude Shannon [wikipedia.org])
Marking cards has a pretty long history (Score:3)
Your Bullshit is BS (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Your Bullshit is BS (Score:5, Insightful)
It was not the croupier, but some casino lawyer who got suspicious. For all we know this lawyer could have been in the audience, just standing behind the player looking at the player's cards.
Besides, the casino's play is usually bound to fixed rules, and the croupier has no influence on it.
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get real (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's an interesting theory, but the casino in question doesn't have any "player vs player" poker tables. [lucienbarriere.com]
Instead they play a house game where each individual bets against the casino, as per the link above. The croupier's actions (on behalf of the casino) are predetermined by the game's rules, so it doesn't matter if the casino can see the player's cards or not.
The most common variant of this game is called Caribbean Stud poker. [wikipedia.org]
Glass tables (Score:2)
If it was a big game then it may have been televised, as they have glass sections on the tables [youtube.com] to allow viewers and commentators to see what cards the players have. This may even be true of all large games regardless of whether they're televised to try and catch unusual betting behaviour (as was the case here).
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Re:Your Bullshit is BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Normal floor staff does not communicate with the security and anti-cheating staff.
What likely happened:
1- anti-cheating staff noticed someone with statistics-defying luck
2- the staff couldn't figure out how he was cheating with their normal monitoring
3- the table was instructed to change decks and save the player's hand (it is a common procedure)
4- the anti-cheat staff looked at the discarded hand, concluded that no normal player would have folded on it under normal circumstances, analyzed the cards and found out about the IR markings
5- anti-cheat staff investigated who handled those decks and put them under increased surveillance
6- next time "lucky" showed up and showcased his odds-defying luck, they busted him and his accomplices to find out what his IR detection method was
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*dislike. Although sometimes "like", because people often treat familiarity with contempt.
You're right, of course. Any good casino can see anything you can see, and these dorks obviously played cockily, i.e. unrealistically. They probably didn't even make an attempt to hide their cards from people standing behind them - and if they had such a run of "luck", people would be very interested. Hiding gamblers' ruin is, after all, important casino buzz.
Gambling against the House should be treated like buying a s
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I know, you're right ...
I hate it when Slashdot covers stories about casinos, poker or gambling. A large percentage of the posters and mods know very little about the gambling industry, but participate anyway.
It makes me realize that the same people must be posting comments about stories where I have very little knowledge of the subject matter. People in general seem more and more obsessed with "sounding" knowledgeable than actually being knowledgeable.
Re:The house ALWAYS wins. (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if it somehow loses. They WILL find a way to win.
If the house loses, it's because someone is cheating. That's how they tell you are cheating - if you are winning in a game of chance with the odds firmly tilted in the houses favour then you must be cheating. It's that simple.
Re: (Score:3)
" if you are winning in a game of chance with the odds firmly tilted"
If you play basic strategy Blackjack (which is easy, because almost all casinos allow you to use a basic strategy card at the table... printed matter the size of a credit card to use as reference to how to play the hands) the house advantage is about 0.44%. Shooting craps and betting the pass line with odds yields about a 0.8% house advantage. I hardly call that "firmly tilted"
In such games it is possible to win for quite some time... of
Re: (Score:2)
So, what you mean is, if you want to cheat, cheat in a way that the people approve.
Everyone knows that capitalism has created institutions too big to fail, and most people were okay with the enabling (de-)regulation of the last 15 years - having voted in all the governments which supported them. So, the bailouts are really with the consent of the people.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, no: It is politicians that created institutions they called "too big to fail".
There was never any danger in large companies going bankrupt. It's not as if when a company fails, their capital resources suddenly vanish into thin air.
Re: (Score:2)
Is it not posible to have one mention of anything related to capital without a dullard walking in and whining about how IT'S ALL DA GUBMINT'S FAULT? It's like bible bashers shrieking every time the Sky Fairy's name is taken in vain.
Companies, or indeed all the law which supports capitalism, wouldn't exist without "politicians". And politicians wouldn't exist without the organisations which support them. It's all one fun dynamic system and you get away with things iff enough of the right people are on your s
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah. If I were caught cheating at high stakes gambling, I think, "I'm reporting you to the police," would be the most relieving thing to hear.