BadB
Professional
- Messages
- 1,677
- Reaction score
- 1,594
- Points
- 113
HOW SCAMMERS RUINED LAS VEGAS.
This topic is about people and entire gangs who robbed, stole and cheated casinos without firing a single shot. The greatest swindlers, mathematicians and crooks, about whom films and TV series are made, but whose experience you don’t want to repeat. We will analyze their cheating techniques down to the molecule, try to count cards and find out how people made millions using ordinary wire. And you will also learn about the tricks that casinos use against us.
Contents:
14 years since the liquidation of casinos.
It has been 14 and a half years since all casinos and gambling houses closed in Russia. In an instant, making money on luxurious halls with green cloth and cheap slot machines near the metro became illegal, unless you do it in specially designated gambling zones. But even if you are not a gambler and do not like casinos as a form of leisure, you have definitely seen famous films on this topic. The theme of such films is as simple as a colorful chip. Where there is huge money, there is a great desire to steal it.
The idea, on the one hand, is crazy. Smart people probably work in casinos who definitely care about the safety of their establishment. After all, well, how can I say it? Today, it is much more difficult to cheat a casino than a hundred years ago. But there are still ways. Every year, hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of dollars disappear from behind mountain houses. This topic is about people and entire gangs who robbed, stole and cheated casinos without firing a single shot.
The greatest swindlers, mathematicians and crooks, about whom films and TV series are made, but whose experience you don’t want to repeat. We will analyze their cheating techniques into molecules, try to count cards and find out how people made millions using ordinary wire. And if you watch to the end, you will learn about the tricks that casinos use against us. I hope that after this video I will not be blacklisted by casinos around the world.
Therefore, just in case, I will say that the topic is strictly entertainment, and passion for gambling, especially online, is dangerous for your financial and mental health. You are on a forum where interesting stories are not only told, but also tried to be explained.
How gambling works.
Before we dive into the stories of specific swindlers and gambling adventurers, let's start with the foundation. What is gambling and how it is technologically implemented in casinos. Without this base, the adventures of swindlers in the casino, further in the video, will be perceived much more banal than they are. So, you can get gambling in a casino in different ways. Slot machines, roughly speaking, gaming machines, are the most primitive in this regard, nothing depends on the player at all.
You make a bet, press the button, stare at the screen and pray that five crystals will line up in a fancy combination and give you money. In roulette, it's about the same, experts have calculated the mathematical chance with which you can win or lose. You bet on red or black 47%, you bet on a row 31.5%, Zero almost 3%, and all hopes, of course, are on the ball that the dealer will throw. The same story in horse racing, bingo or the wheel of fortune.
A person is not a player, but a passive observer. Luck, fortune, chance - this is the basis of all these games. A five-year-old child, if someone lets him into a casino, can easily beat an experienced gambling addict. But there is one category of gambling, where at least something depends on the person - these are card games. Luck is also important here, but unlike the same roulette, players can work with risks. Take the same poker. This is not just a game of chance, but a real sport with its own associations and federations. It is
not for nothing that the main chess player of our time, Magnus Carlson, plays it. Why is poker a sport, and roulette is just a risky entertainment? Firstly, there is tactics. Let's say they go all-in against you. You must understand whether it is worth taking a risk and responding or it is better to refrain so as not to lose money. In addition, skill is important. And this is not only an attempt to read people and their intentions, but also working with those very percentages.
If you've ever happened to watch at least one poker broadcast, you've probably seen that the computer automatically calculates the probability of winning and losing for each player. The difference between a beginner and a pro is how well a player can calculate this probability and then work with it correctly. But there is a game in which chance can be taken under control. This is Blackjack or 21.
We'll talk about the essence of the game and cheating techniques later, but what is the main difference between poker and blackjack? In poker, you play with only one deck, and in blackjack with several at once, which are collected in a special box called a shoe. There are usually from four to eight decks. What is this for? That same probability. If you play seven against the dealer, sooner or later you will understand what kind of cards are left in the deck, for example with pictures like queens or kings, or without, but this is if there is one deck, and if there are eight decks, the chances of a rupee even against your big gang increase sharply.
There is such a thing as house edge. This is the casino's profit as a percentage of your initial bet. In other words, if the casino's advantage is 2%, then with a bet of 1,000 rubles you will lose an average of 20, if the advantage is 5%, it will be 50 rubles. You can come to a casino for the first time, hit the jackpot with your first bet and leave immediately, but this is in the realm of fantasy. You
can't argue with the laws of statistics that appeared after millions of games simulated on a computer. The longer you play, the faster you will get closer to the profit that the casino expects. In other words, the phrase "the casino always wins" is not just a catchphrase, it is a mathematical fact. In slot machines, the casino's advantage from 2 to 20 percent depends on the greed of the creators of the machine and the owners of the gambling business.
There are simply no games in the casino where a player can win over the long term. Almost. In Black Jack, the casino advantage is only half a percent. That is, from 100 rubles you will lose only 50 kopecks. Compared to the horse indicator of slot machines, the difference is incredible. But Black Jack is a unique game not only for this reason. With great desire and natural stubbornness, 21 points can be turned against the casino.
Rain Man.
The main character of one of my favorite films, Rain Man, suffers from autism, but this becomes his advantage as soon as Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise find themselves in the famous Las Vegas casino, Caesars Palace. Hoffman counts cards, and does it masterfully, up to six decks at a time. Why is there a shoe with several decks in Black Jack? If there was only one deck, it would be easy to calculate which cards are left in the deck.
Look, the dealer has one card, and all the other players have at least 2-3 more. If you know 20 cards out of 52, then in the next round it’s easy to estimate what’s left in the deck. But wait, isn’t it possible to estimate what cards are left in a shoe with six decks if it’s half empty and there are a lot of people at the table? It turns out you can. This estimation is called card counting in casino language.
The idea is extremely simple. With the help of a special algorithm, you can, as far as possible, predict what cards the dealer has left in his shoe. As soon as the cards start to run out, the chance of predicting the result increases. Plus, the count should be positive. I won’t go into details, but with each deal you assign plus one, minus one, or zero to each card in your head. It’s important to be in the black in the end.
This means that there are picture cards left in the shoe, which means the dealer may soon bust. It seems simple. But the difficulty is that you have to play perfect blackjack, in addition to keeping count. Knowing when to ask for another card, when to fold, when to split. And the hardest part is actually counting. If you make a mistake of even one or two in your balance, you can burn out. All these manipulations so that the casino advantage from the standard plus or half a percent on blackjack turns into a small minus.
This is what the HiLow card counting system looks like, which is used by players today. The very first system appeared in the early 60s, it was invented by an American professor Edward O. Thorp on such an ancient computer. After Thorp published the results of his research, his work immediately became a bestseller and almost the bible of Blackjack. By the way, I am completely sure that Thorp, in addition to the counting system, managed to come up with a remedy against aging. Well, a person at 91 years old cannot look like this.
Now I'm going to break a few patterns related to card counting that we learned from Rain Man. In the story, the main character learns that his autistic brother Raymond, who by the way was based on a real person named Kim Peek, has a phenomenal memory and can count cards brilliantly. He takes him to a casino and together they make almost a hundred thousand dollars in one evening from a couple of thousand. The first pattern break. You don't have to be a genius savant to count cards.
Even a schoolchild can count cards. Plus one, minus one, zero - all that is required is concentration and skill. Of course, if I give you a second to think about it now, you're unlikely to be able to say exactly what number is on the table. However, if you solve such puzzles every day instead of sudoku, then in a month or two you can really improve. The second pattern break is the profitability of this enterprise. If everything in the movie was like in life, then according to the laws of statistics, after a few hours of play they would have left the casino with the same two thousand dollars and won only an extra 20 dollars.
In theory, Raymond and his brother Porshchelyga could have lost all their money. That's the point. People who count cards lose just like regular gamblers. They can play without making mistakes, count cards brilliantly, but they may just be unlucky.
And in those moments when you keep all those numbers in your head for hours, remember all the card combinations and lose a thousand dollars, the likelihood of a mistake increases, which with a gentle lump can lead to another and another mistake. And as a result, you have empty pockets and a domestic scandal. And now the third pattern that will have to be broken. Look at this fragment.
Are there many? There are very, very many. Wait, wait a second. I want to double the bet. Yes, yes, yes.
Do you know what would happen in life? As soon as Dustin Hoffman even pretended to know what cards were left in the deck, he would immediately be thrown out of the casino. Card counting is the main deadly sin in the world of gambling. And the most famous gang of math bookkeepers learned this from their own experience.
MIT students.
The biggest problem with card counting is that you have to do it discreetly.
You have to talk nicely to the dealer, to the players at the table, and to your friends and companions. You have to drink from time to time, like everyone else. Get drunk, but don’t lose focus. And most importantly, don’t let on that you’re counting anything. What happens if you get caught? At best, your bet will be fixed. That is, at the moment when the deck has become thin and only pictures are left, you won’t be able to place a double or triple bet.
I know you’re counting cards. I’ll let you play, but if you start with $5, you’re playing with $5. The whole shoe.
In the worst case, you will not be allowed to cash your chips and will be banned forever from playing blackjack or, in principle, visiting this gambling house. The main thing is that the director is not the same as Robert De Niro in the movie "Casino".
No. I wanted everyone to know. We have different rules now. It was necessary to make it clear, for example, to these cheaters that the easy life is over. Stop.
But do we break any rules or laws by counting cards? We do not use any computer to count. We do not peek into the deck, do not leave any marks on the cards, no cheating. We are just professionals who feel the game better than the average player. You will not fine grandmasters for calculating 10 moves ahead in chess. Think what you want. The casino thinks differently and sets its own rules. For them, counting cards violates the key principle of the casino, which is always winning.
From a legal point of view, cards are considered a completely legal story. For example, in 2000, the Nevada Supreme Court forced the casino to pay the accountant 40 thousand dollars, which they wanted to take away from him after winning at Lack Jack. Five students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT in the mid-70s were also sure that they were not in danger. The story with card counting was known at that time, but only in narrow circles. Gambling dealers also knew about it, but they could not do anything.
Unless they caught loners and kicked them out of the casino. But this only applies to the masters of counting, who could strip the casino, like the hero Papanov in Gentlemen of Fortune. More often than not, everything was exactly the opposite. Not everyone knew about the ideal system of counting cards Hilo then. Most often, gambling addicts and talentless people came to the casino, who thought that they could beat the house, but in fact they lost whole fortunes there. Of course, the casino was only happy to have such accountants.
The MIT students decided to take a risk. They memorized Thorp's book, took $5,000 and, if you believe the legend, made $20,000 out of it in a few months. Today, this sounds fantastic, but with the technology of that time, it was much easier to cheat the system. Then the original group fell apart. Only one student named J.P. Musser continued his adventure. Quite by chance, in 1980, he ran into a guy named Bill Kapan.
It seemed that he was the same accounting student, but from Harvard. They met, became friends and decided to join forces. Blackjack became the meaning of their lives. The first thing they did was unify the card counting system. Now everyone worked on the hailo system in order to minimize the number of errors. Next. They introduced team play. The casino's profit could be significantly increased if you played together.
How does it work? One person sits at the table and works as a scout. As soon as the shoe gets hot, that is, the artificial count is high and there are many pictures in the deck, he gives a signal to another team member, who has been standing aside all this time. He comes up, makes big bets and leaves with the winnings. The third innovation is an approach to the adventure as a business. You understand that even if you play for five-digit amounts, the winnings will not cover unemployment benefits.
Students began to look for investors with millions of cash. They positioned their association as a money-printing startup, but without the permidial principle - annual profit from 4 to 300%. Not a bad spread. Casinos have long been accustomed to lone accountants, but to incomplete teams. In the early 90s, Las Vegas reinvented itself once again. More and more new casinos began to open, and mega-hotels with a thousand rooms, and dozens of small establishments.
It was an ideal time for students. The bigger the casino, the higher the chance of cheating them. If you don't get into one, there are three others nearby. At its peak, the MIT student gang consisted of almost 100 people. Since 1992, they began bombing all the casinos in America and even the world, larger and smaller. At least 30 people participated in the operation every day. Unfortunately, there is no exact figure for how much money they raised.
Some sources say about 5 million dollars, others say almost 50. One thing is clear - the students' long adventure could not continue. Over time, the casinos realized how the collective account scheme worked. They began to block access to members of the organization one by one. For some time, they were replaced by newcomers, but the effect was no longer the same. And these newcomers did not live long either. They were quickly blacklisted. 29 years ago, the association fell apart.
Some people took regular corporate jobs, some quit the game and started organizing leftist rallies, some got a job as a real estate agent, and others took up myth-making. The first big myth is Ben Mezrich's book "Hitting the House." Mezrich is a writer who loves telling stories of successful adventurers, traders, cryptocurrency enthusiasts, and our MIT accountants. There's just one problem. More than half of the facts in the novel are fiction. Although the book didn't position itself that way at first.
After its release, it became a bestseller in the blink of an eye. And they decided to make a movie based on it, with Kevin Spacey in the lead role. When the movie 21 was released, it turned out that the screenwriters had decided to finally move away from boring reality. The names, plot, and scale of the operation were greatly embellished, dramatized, and changed. As a result, a myth emerged that you can make millions counting cards, but only geniuses can do it.
Today, MIT students are a brand and an urban legend in the casino world. But the idea of card counting has not gone away. While preparing this issue, I came across at least five accountants who are ready to teach you this art for free, including those same MIT students. The projected income is from $ 25 per hour. True, counting cards is becoming more and more difficult every year. Casinos use the most modern technologies to overcome accountants.
First, these are electronic shoes that automatically stir the deck. If the establishment is very progressive, then the chips can have an RFID tag installed, the same as in products in stores or intercom keys. With its help, casino analysts can watch in real time how players place bets. And if they notice any anomalies, they immediately begin close observation. The blacklist system has not gone away either.
It works best in China with its facial recognition system. Owners will find any way to get rid of an overly smart client in their establishment. I'll play the devil's advocate and try to explain their logic. The main argument. Gambling is always about luck. The most popular type of game in any casino is slot machines. Do people know that their chances of hitting the jackpot are extremely small? Of course they do. But this does not stop them from spending thousands of dollars on these meaningless machines.
As well as on lottery tickets, where the chance of winning is even lower. This kind of card counting kills the romance of gambling. You cram all the combinations and play like a robot. Well done. But most people go to the casino knowing that they will lose, and at the same time enjoy it. Second. A casino is a private office with its own rules. Don't like it? Go play in a casino where you are allowed to count cards. Spoiler, there are simply no such things.
Well, and the last argument that the casino does not like to talk about. Naturally, it is extremely selfish. Let's look at the numbers. According to the official count of the Nevada Gaming Commission, Vegas casinos made a billion dollars from Blackjack players last year alone. With an advantage of half a percent, to make that kind of profit, the turnover would have to be 200 billion, more than the entire GDP of Hungary. Now imagine that the advantage decreases to 0.4. It would seem like a fraction of a percent, but in fact the casino lost 200 million dollars.
If all players practice counting cards, that is, the advantage of half a percent decreases to minus one and a half percent, the casino can basically close. Counting cards is not as difficult as many people think, but it takes practice and years of experience. It will no longer be possible to beat the casinos like they did 40 years ago. And the key. Counting cards is not a gold mine, but a long, tedious and laborious work to outwit the casinos in a much more effective way.
Why spend hundreds of hours on ridiculous percentages when one metal paper clip can bring you millions of dollars.
A paper clip for a million.
As we have already understood, slot machines are the worst way to spend time in a casino in terms of your benefit as a player. The probability of a jackpot varies from 1 in a million to 1 in 70 million.
Madness. At the same time, the owners of gambling businesses love machines. They do not require any human resources from the establishment. You put a few rows, plug it into an outlet and they begin to generate fantastic profits. Why do gambling addicts from all over the world love slot machines? First. Low stakes. Slot machines have the lowest entry threshold. One spin, that is, one move. One dollar, and sometimes you can generally bet mere cents. Second. Instant pleasure and quick results.
A person makes a spin and in a second finds out whether he won or lost. No tactics, strategy of these your calculations, calculations, calculations, like Black Jackie. Third. They are exciting. The player can touch the machine, its buttons or levers. This is how a tactile connection is formed. What can we say about crazy animations, shiny bright numbers, cartoon characters, crystals, screen animation. It seems that anyone can find a slot machine that suits their taste and launch a game with a beautiful design on it.
And no annoying dealers for you. A game without intermediaries. Fourth. Working with the psyche. There is nothing more offensive than when you lack just a drop to win. If only this monkey had stood one position lower, there would have been a jackpot. But then the next spin will definitely be lucky. Slot machines use this and other psychological tricks to literally zombify people for an endless game.
As a result, every casino player sooner or later slips into the so-called gambler's fallacy. If I lost five times in a row, then I will definitely win on the sixth. This is the theory of probability, thinks a naive player who has not studied statistics. And never mind that the probability of winning does not depend on past results. But what if this outcome could still be changed? Get ready. Now there will be a story even more exciting than that of the real wolf of Wall Street from our video.
Let's go back to the early 80s, to the state of Oklahoma, which is north of Texas. We are in a TV repair store run by Tommy Glen Carmichael. Since childhood, he loved to understand technology, so for him the store is not just a job, but also a shower. By the end of 1980, Tommy's business was going badly. There is fierce competition in the market, discord in the family, his wife filed for divorce. And the police are forcing him to do community service for drug possession.
They go to visit him, his school friend Ray comes in. He shows him a piece of guitar string and a paper clip, with which he supposedly could beat any slot machines. Tommy decided to take a chance and was right. The system worked on the same principle as that of car thieves. If the contact in the machine that was responsible for issuing the jackpot closed, then on the next spin you were guaranteed to get money. The first day Tommy won 35 dollars, the next weekend several thousand at once.
But it turned out that Tommy's friend had cheated him after all. The casinos were already well aware of the trick with the paper clip. Within a year, slots all over Vekus began to be equipped with additional protection. Tommy had no choice but to go rob machines in small gambling houses. That's where he was caught red-handed. Casinos complained about a suspicious man who rummaged through the machine and then caught jackpots. The police tracked down Tommy, detained him and found the paper clip in his pocket.
Because he was still on probation, he was given five years in prison. Many would have given up, but not Tommy. In prison, he was lucky to find a man who was there for the same merits. His name was Michael Balsama. You could say that prison became not his second, but his first home. Every time this crook was released, he went straight to the casino. There, something went wrong again, and he returned to his native latticed penates with security along the perimeter.
Tommy and Mike found each other. As soon as they got out of prison, they set themselves a goal - to come up with a new way to rob slot machines. While they were in captivity, the world was taken over by computers, including slot machines. The trick with the rivet no longer worked. So Mike registered a fictitious small business in his name and ordered the most modern machine in his name. For over six months, he had been figuring out its internal structure, delving into the electronics and wiring.
And, finally, success. Here is a monkey paw. Just stick it into the coin acceptor, and when the machine starts giving out money, it won’t be able to stop. For the system to work, they needed cover. That’s why they always went to play with gorgeous tall ladies who shielded Tommy and Mike from the cameras. Every hour, these swindlers could take $1,000 from the machines. The downsides of restraint on support and a luxurious lifestyle.
The cold war of casino scammers has reached a new level. Casinos have come up with slots with optical sensors that exclude any physical impact on the machine’s contacts. It took Tommy a year and 30 prototypes to come up with a new hacking device called a light stick. The principle of operation was slightly different, but the logic was the same. The stick illuminated the machine’s sensor, the machine went dumb and started showering Tommy with coins again. It was the breakthrough of the century. Tomi became the first person in the world to figure out how to rob vending machines with optical sensors.
The biggest success was in something else. Naive casino owners thought that it would take, I don’t know, a decade to hack optical slots. So they actively updated old machines with new ones all over Vegas. The light stick could hack any new machine. Tommy and Mike began hiring new people to put together an organized crime group. Some people were responsible for reconnaissance, others for on-site security, others covered the cameras, and others collected money.
It was possible to make several tens of thousands of dollars a day. At this point, Tommy discovered a new niche, guided by a simple rule. During the gold rush, selling shovels. It took only $2.5 to produce a light stick. On the black market, it was sold at a minimum price of 10 thousand. A markup of 400 thousand percent. And other crooks snatched up these sticks like Christmas trees before the New Year.
It was possible to recoup the investment in just a couple of days. According to various estimates, Tommy caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to Vegas casinos. He had a huge house in an elite area of Los Angeles, a Jaguar, and instead of a boring wife, a young mistress. He declared part of his income to the tax office with a clear conscience, but kept the rest in cash. When the FBI began hunting for Tommy, he went into hiding in the Casino and went to live in a mobile home in the desert.
There, he continued his war with the casino, where he invented more and more new ways to hack machines. One day, he went to a business meeting where he was supposed to sell another invention to other scammers. At the meeting, it was not buyers who were waiting for him, but FBI agents. It turned out that his business partner Michael had had too much to drink during one of his casino parades and got busted. As soon as he was caught, he immediately spilled Tommy's name, phone number, and exact location to the FBI agents.
Tommy was charged with all possible articles of fraud. Only cheating is cheating that is related to gambling, and not fraud, as in the conditional securities market. For all his crimes, he received 11 months in prison. The story is the same as with the wolf of Wall Street. The laws were not ready for a criminal of such scale and resourcefulness. In addition, Tommy himself began to actively cooperate with the investigation and even participated in the creation of a device for blocking new technical profits for hacking casinos.
The only downside is that Tommy was included in the infamous black book of Nevada. A man who devoted his entire life to gambling could never enter any Vegas casino again in his life. Even if he forgot about hacking machines and just wanted to play roulette.
Balls.
"No one can beat roulette unless he steals money from the table when the dealer is not looking."
This quote is attributed to Albert Einstein. It is only partly true. The average player really cannot beat roulette. Of course, there are people who behave like Nikola Tesla. They say there is a way, but they do not want to tell you about it. Others behave like the rats in Skinner's experiment. That is, they interpret completely random events as something not random. Part of a cunning plan.
You need to watch the dealer's hands. Everything depends on the ball, the force of the throw, and so on. If they guess correctly, then the tactic of assessing millions of random coincidences in a hundredth of a second works. If they fail to guess, such characters usually keep quiet. Such people most often slip into a typical gambler's mistake. Well, if red has come up 8 times in a row, then now it will definitely be black. Yes, red comes up 8 times in a row only in one case out of 256.
But nothing prevents the ball from landing on red again. Or even zero. Statistics decides. As with backjack, there are strategies in roulette that allow you to lose less money during the game. But the longer you play, the sooner you will come to that very verified advantage. However, this only works if you are an ordinary player, not a swindler. Let's figure it out. The simplest and most effective way to beat roulette only works in very old establishments.
If the owner does not take good care of it, then over time the roulette wheel begins to wobble and fall to one side. According to the rules, the ball must fall on all numbers completely randomly. But if the wheel is old, you can first stand next to the table and observe if there are any anomalies in the random distribution, and bet more often on these abnormally falling numbers. But this is long, boring and rarely works.
It is much more interesting when you can accurately predict where the ball will fall, and even better, control it yourself. This is exactly the kind of ball that was invented by the Frenchwoman Monica Lauren. Contemporaries said that she was simply incredibly beautiful. That same femme fatale. She was born on Valentine's Day in 1948. We know very little about her fate, so let's get straight to the point. In 1973, Monica's brother got a job at a casino in Daville, a chic old-money resort in Normandy.
He was the croupier who took bets and threw the ball into the roulette. Apparently, he didn't like working in a casino. Or he was just a swindler by nature. But with each passing day, he wanted to rob his employer more and more. He came to his sister with this idea. Monica was an excellent technologist and suggested a brilliant idea in its simplicity. To mount an electrical receiver into a ball.
It could be artificially slowed down by sending an electric signal. To do this unnoticed, Monica came up with a small transmission that could be placed in a pack of cigarettes. How the scam worked. Monica and her husband would approach the table where her brother worked. They would quietly change the balls. Then the brother would spin the roulette wheel and throw the ball in at the right moment. The husband would place a bet on 6 pre-calculated numbers and Monica would use a sensor in her cigarettes to slow him
down. In just one week, they took 5 million francs out of the casino. In our money, that's almost 40 million euros. That's what the scam was called. A French pack of cigarettes. The big money turned Monica's head as a typical gambling addict. She couldn't stop. The owners of the establishment watched her and her husband all week. Almost everything about their behavior was suspicious. The husband always won, Monica stood nearby, always carrying her cigarettes, but never even lit up or placed a bet herself.
The guards surrounded Monica, snatched the cigarettes, everything became clear to them. They were immediately arrested and forced to return all the money they had won. On the other hand, at least none of them went to jail. French newspapers started writing about Monica, and 10 years later a film was made about her story. It is called. Swindlers. Or cheaters. Judging by the ratings, it is a very decent movie.
Monica did not lose her love for the casino after all her adventures. She moved to Las Vegas and got a job as a middle manager in a clothing store. And after work, she would drop in to play a couple of games at the casino. And this time it was not she who was cheating, but her.
How casinos cheat.
It's time to talk about the other side of cheating. Now we will not talk about fraud, as in the previous chapter. Well, there were such cases too. Imagine the situation. You do not know the laws of statistics well and for some reason decide to play slot machines.
You are incredibly lucky and the jackpot falls out. 41 million dollars. But as soon as you go to cash out your winnings, you are told, “Sorry, the machine is broken, no payouts.” There have been several such stories. One happened to a poor 90-year-old grandmother from Illinois. She won the jackpot, the casino refused to pay it, and the court sided with the gambling house.
In 2016, a girl from New York also hit a jackpot of 43 million dollars and even took a selfie with the machine in the background. The casino told her that the machine was broken. If you want, we can pay for your dinner at our wonderful establishment. The girl went to court, but also lost. The gambling house could afford expensive lawyers who proved that there was something wrong with the machine. Such stories are unpleasant, but still an exception to the rule. Not every establishment, especially those that are part of large gambling corporations, is ready to risk their reputation so much.
Moreover, much more money can be made on hidden fraud. Casinos invest billions every year so that people spend as much time in them as possible. The first and most basic thing is clocks and windows. Gambling houses do not specifically hang clocks or make windows so that people cannot determine how many hours they have been playing. Therefore, it is easy to lose track of time there, even if you have a smartphone and a smartwatch with you, but this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Literally every square meter of the casino is made strictly according to proven technology, which is designed to maximize revenue. At the entrance to the casino, there should be slot machines or poker tables. Most often, slot machines. A person should immediately start playing, even if he came there by accident or stopped by for half an hour after work. The layout of the hall should resemble a multi-level labyrinth, and not a long corridor.
This way, people will wander around it more, linger and play. Slot machines not only at the entrance, but also in other corners of the hall. In a prominent place is a bar where alcohol is surprisingly inexpensive, and next to it are even more poker tables. The ceilings should be low, so that an intimate atmosphere is created. Plus an atmosphere of comfort. In some countries, for example in Georgia, even though smoking is prohibited in cafes and restaurants, you can in the casino. Everything so that players can relieve stress, feel at home and continue playing.
And now pure neuropsychology. There should be no 90-degree turns in the casino interior. According to the idea, they force our brain to associatively make bolder decisions. One sharp turn and a person may think that it is time to leave. If the entire hall is arranged in smooth curved lines, the likelihood of quickly jumping out of a gambling trance is much less. This thing works. The author of the idea tested it in practice.
As soon as he softened the angles in the gaming area, after a while the number of its visitors doubled. I think you have seen how people, having found themselves in a casino for the first time, leave there with pupils the size of saucers after 4 hours, having lost track of time and thinking that they have been playing for an hour and a half at most. The same neuropsychology is the floors, carpets in casinos, either quite unpleasant in appearance, such that you do not want to look at them, or with strange hypnotizing patterns. The casino makes you look not at the floor, but up to the machines or to the gaming tables.
Exactly the same trick is used in regular stores. If you have been to one of the new Pyaterochkas, you know perfectly well what I am talking about. But in recent years, another approach has become more popular, which is promoted by designer Roger Thomas. He proposed to change the ideology of gambling houses in general. It may sound strange, but since the early 90s, many Vegas establishments have been betting on family recreation. According to statistics, every fifth visitor to the city last year was there with children.
Nowadays, people go to Vegas not only to get drunk and do bad things, but also to have a good time. The kids go to a Disneyland-style game room, and you and your relatives go for a walk in the lobby of a mega-hotel where slot machines await you. So, the cramped ceilings and labyrinths of gambling halls really work, but only for gambling addicts. If you come to play in the company of relatives, you won’t want to spend long there. Thomas suggested betting on luxury. Huge ceilings, free halls and luxury at every step.
Thanks to this, ordinary blue collars will feel like kings of life. They will get more pleasure and spend more time, spending more money. The designer designed two of the largest Vegas resorts - the Mirage and Bellagio. For his merits, he received many design awards, and the casino - a new model of interior design. There are many more chips that the casino uses against us. I simply won’t have time to tell about some of them in one video, and about others, especially in online gambling, we won’t find out anytime soon. After all, it’s a trade secret.
Our whole life.
I think you now understand well what is behind the phrase “the casino always wins”. The most adequate approach to such establishments is to treat them like a trip to the store. Here you go for bread, spend money and get a loaf of bread. You need to think the same way in the case of a casino. You come for excitement, pay money and get excitement.
Trying to cheat or beat the casino is not worth it, it won’t work. Statistics are against the hope of a jackpot. In fact, modern casino hotels, both in Las Vegas and Macau, make less than half of their revenue at the gaming table. The rest of the money comes from rooms, food, excursions, alcohol, retail and massage therapists from Thailand and Bali. This, of course, does not mean that the casino turns a blind eye to scammers. On the contrary, the level of protection is only growing every year. Cheaters have a hard time in casinos today.
Blackjack has automatic deck shufflers and chipped chips. Casinos are increasingly installing tables with reduced payouts. That is, with a higher casino advantage. Each player is watched by a separate camera. Even in poker, if you win suspiciously much, you will be under increased surveillance. Roulette is not the same anymore. The balls are too bouncy, the edges are ground down. In short, nothing will work with predictions. Slot machines have fewer mechanical parts and more modern technologies and complex algorithms that no one has yet managed to hack.
But there is one exception that I have deliberately avoided throughout the entire topic. This is the world of online casinos. And believe me, there are enough stories in it to fill a whole topic. Hackers, carders, neural networks and new generation cheating. If you want to continue, please leave a comment. This is the simplest quantitative method to understand the level of your interest in this topic.
Video for your colleagues or family. We wanted to make something exciting and not too heavy for you for the New Year holidays. I hope it worked out. And now the traditional competition with a rather unusual prize. This time I will not be giving away a book, but this wonderful poker set. If you have never played, this is a reason to learn the rules and hone your skills. If you are an avid player, add to your home collection.
The main thing is not to abuse it and not to play for money. It can end very badly.
Bye!
This topic is about people and entire gangs who robbed, stole and cheated casinos without firing a single shot. The greatest swindlers, mathematicians and crooks, about whom films and TV series are made, but whose experience you don’t want to repeat. We will analyze their cheating techniques down to the molecule, try to count cards and find out how people made millions using ordinary wire. And you will also learn about the tricks that casinos use against us.
Contents:
- 14 years of casino liquidation
- How does gambling work?
- Rain Man
- MIT students
- Million Dollar Paperclip
- Balls
- How casinos cheat
- Our whole life
14 years since the liquidation of casinos.
It has been 14 and a half years since all casinos and gambling houses closed in Russia. In an instant, making money on luxurious halls with green cloth and cheap slot machines near the metro became illegal, unless you do it in specially designated gambling zones. But even if you are not a gambler and do not like casinos as a form of leisure, you have definitely seen famous films on this topic. The theme of such films is as simple as a colorful chip. Where there is huge money, there is a great desire to steal it.
The idea, on the one hand, is crazy. Smart people probably work in casinos who definitely care about the safety of their establishment. After all, well, how can I say it? Today, it is much more difficult to cheat a casino than a hundred years ago. But there are still ways. Every year, hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of dollars disappear from behind mountain houses. This topic is about people and entire gangs who robbed, stole and cheated casinos without firing a single shot.
The greatest swindlers, mathematicians and crooks, about whom films and TV series are made, but whose experience you don’t want to repeat. We will analyze their cheating techniques into molecules, try to count cards and find out how people made millions using ordinary wire. And if you watch to the end, you will learn about the tricks that casinos use against us. I hope that after this video I will not be blacklisted by casinos around the world.
Therefore, just in case, I will say that the topic is strictly entertainment, and passion for gambling, especially online, is dangerous for your financial and mental health. You are on a forum where interesting stories are not only told, but also tried to be explained.
How gambling works.
Before we dive into the stories of specific swindlers and gambling adventurers, let's start with the foundation. What is gambling and how it is technologically implemented in casinos. Without this base, the adventures of swindlers in the casino, further in the video, will be perceived much more banal than they are. So, you can get gambling in a casino in different ways. Slot machines, roughly speaking, gaming machines, are the most primitive in this regard, nothing depends on the player at all.
You make a bet, press the button, stare at the screen and pray that five crystals will line up in a fancy combination and give you money. In roulette, it's about the same, experts have calculated the mathematical chance with which you can win or lose. You bet on red or black 47%, you bet on a row 31.5%, Zero almost 3%, and all hopes, of course, are on the ball that the dealer will throw. The same story in horse racing, bingo or the wheel of fortune.
A person is not a player, but a passive observer. Luck, fortune, chance - this is the basis of all these games. A five-year-old child, if someone lets him into a casino, can easily beat an experienced gambling addict. But there is one category of gambling, where at least something depends on the person - these are card games. Luck is also important here, but unlike the same roulette, players can work with risks. Take the same poker. This is not just a game of chance, but a real sport with its own associations and federations. It is
not for nothing that the main chess player of our time, Magnus Carlson, plays it. Why is poker a sport, and roulette is just a risky entertainment? Firstly, there is tactics. Let's say they go all-in against you. You must understand whether it is worth taking a risk and responding or it is better to refrain so as not to lose money. In addition, skill is important. And this is not only an attempt to read people and their intentions, but also working with those very percentages.
If you've ever happened to watch at least one poker broadcast, you've probably seen that the computer automatically calculates the probability of winning and losing for each player. The difference between a beginner and a pro is how well a player can calculate this probability and then work with it correctly. But there is a game in which chance can be taken under control. This is Blackjack or 21.
We'll talk about the essence of the game and cheating techniques later, but what is the main difference between poker and blackjack? In poker, you play with only one deck, and in blackjack with several at once, which are collected in a special box called a shoe. There are usually from four to eight decks. What is this for? That same probability. If you play seven against the dealer, sooner or later you will understand what kind of cards are left in the deck, for example with pictures like queens or kings, or without, but this is if there is one deck, and if there are eight decks, the chances of a rupee even against your big gang increase sharply.
There is such a thing as house edge. This is the casino's profit as a percentage of your initial bet. In other words, if the casino's advantage is 2%, then with a bet of 1,000 rubles you will lose an average of 20, if the advantage is 5%, it will be 50 rubles. You can come to a casino for the first time, hit the jackpot with your first bet and leave immediately, but this is in the realm of fantasy. You
can't argue with the laws of statistics that appeared after millions of games simulated on a computer. The longer you play, the faster you will get closer to the profit that the casino expects. In other words, the phrase "the casino always wins" is not just a catchphrase, it is a mathematical fact. In slot machines, the casino's advantage from 2 to 20 percent depends on the greed of the creators of the machine and the owners of the gambling business.
There are simply no games in the casino where a player can win over the long term. Almost. In Black Jack, the casino advantage is only half a percent. That is, from 100 rubles you will lose only 50 kopecks. Compared to the horse indicator of slot machines, the difference is incredible. But Black Jack is a unique game not only for this reason. With great desire and natural stubbornness, 21 points can be turned against the casino.
Rain Man.
The main character of one of my favorite films, Rain Man, suffers from autism, but this becomes his advantage as soon as Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise find themselves in the famous Las Vegas casino, Caesars Palace. Hoffman counts cards, and does it masterfully, up to six decks at a time. Why is there a shoe with several decks in Black Jack? If there was only one deck, it would be easy to calculate which cards are left in the deck.
Look, the dealer has one card, and all the other players have at least 2-3 more. If you know 20 cards out of 52, then in the next round it’s easy to estimate what’s left in the deck. But wait, isn’t it possible to estimate what cards are left in a shoe with six decks if it’s half empty and there are a lot of people at the table? It turns out you can. This estimation is called card counting in casino language.
The idea is extremely simple. With the help of a special algorithm, you can, as far as possible, predict what cards the dealer has left in his shoe. As soon as the cards start to run out, the chance of predicting the result increases. Plus, the count should be positive. I won’t go into details, but with each deal you assign plus one, minus one, or zero to each card in your head. It’s important to be in the black in the end.
This means that there are picture cards left in the shoe, which means the dealer may soon bust. It seems simple. But the difficulty is that you have to play perfect blackjack, in addition to keeping count. Knowing when to ask for another card, when to fold, when to split. And the hardest part is actually counting. If you make a mistake of even one or two in your balance, you can burn out. All these manipulations so that the casino advantage from the standard plus or half a percent on blackjack turns into a small minus.
This is what the HiLow card counting system looks like, which is used by players today. The very first system appeared in the early 60s, it was invented by an American professor Edward O. Thorp on such an ancient computer. After Thorp published the results of his research, his work immediately became a bestseller and almost the bible of Blackjack. By the way, I am completely sure that Thorp, in addition to the counting system, managed to come up with a remedy against aging. Well, a person at 91 years old cannot look like this.
Now I'm going to break a few patterns related to card counting that we learned from Rain Man. In the story, the main character learns that his autistic brother Raymond, who by the way was based on a real person named Kim Peek, has a phenomenal memory and can count cards brilliantly. He takes him to a casino and together they make almost a hundred thousand dollars in one evening from a couple of thousand. The first pattern break. You don't have to be a genius savant to count cards.
Even a schoolchild can count cards. Plus one, minus one, zero - all that is required is concentration and skill. Of course, if I give you a second to think about it now, you're unlikely to be able to say exactly what number is on the table. However, if you solve such puzzles every day instead of sudoku, then in a month or two you can really improve. The second pattern break is the profitability of this enterprise. If everything in the movie was like in life, then according to the laws of statistics, after a few hours of play they would have left the casino with the same two thousand dollars and won only an extra 20 dollars.
In theory, Raymond and his brother Porshchelyga could have lost all their money. That's the point. People who count cards lose just like regular gamblers. They can play without making mistakes, count cards brilliantly, but they may just be unlucky.
And in those moments when you keep all those numbers in your head for hours, remember all the card combinations and lose a thousand dollars, the likelihood of a mistake increases, which with a gentle lump can lead to another and another mistake. And as a result, you have empty pockets and a domestic scandal. And now the third pattern that will have to be broken. Look at this fragment.
Are there many? There are very, very many. Wait, wait a second. I want to double the bet. Yes, yes, yes.
Do you know what would happen in life? As soon as Dustin Hoffman even pretended to know what cards were left in the deck, he would immediately be thrown out of the casino. Card counting is the main deadly sin in the world of gambling. And the most famous gang of math bookkeepers learned this from their own experience.
MIT students.
The biggest problem with card counting is that you have to do it discreetly.
You have to talk nicely to the dealer, to the players at the table, and to your friends and companions. You have to drink from time to time, like everyone else. Get drunk, but don’t lose focus. And most importantly, don’t let on that you’re counting anything. What happens if you get caught? At best, your bet will be fixed. That is, at the moment when the deck has become thin and only pictures are left, you won’t be able to place a double or triple bet.
I know you’re counting cards. I’ll let you play, but if you start with $5, you’re playing with $5. The whole shoe.
In the worst case, you will not be allowed to cash your chips and will be banned forever from playing blackjack or, in principle, visiting this gambling house. The main thing is that the director is not the same as Robert De Niro in the movie "Casino".
No. I wanted everyone to know. We have different rules now. It was necessary to make it clear, for example, to these cheaters that the easy life is over. Stop.
But do we break any rules or laws by counting cards? We do not use any computer to count. We do not peek into the deck, do not leave any marks on the cards, no cheating. We are just professionals who feel the game better than the average player. You will not fine grandmasters for calculating 10 moves ahead in chess. Think what you want. The casino thinks differently and sets its own rules. For them, counting cards violates the key principle of the casino, which is always winning.
From a legal point of view, cards are considered a completely legal story. For example, in 2000, the Nevada Supreme Court forced the casino to pay the accountant 40 thousand dollars, which they wanted to take away from him after winning at Lack Jack. Five students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT in the mid-70s were also sure that they were not in danger. The story with card counting was known at that time, but only in narrow circles. Gambling dealers also knew about it, but they could not do anything.
Unless they caught loners and kicked them out of the casino. But this only applies to the masters of counting, who could strip the casino, like the hero Papanov in Gentlemen of Fortune. More often than not, everything was exactly the opposite. Not everyone knew about the ideal system of counting cards Hilo then. Most often, gambling addicts and talentless people came to the casino, who thought that they could beat the house, but in fact they lost whole fortunes there. Of course, the casino was only happy to have such accountants.
The MIT students decided to take a risk. They memorized Thorp's book, took $5,000 and, if you believe the legend, made $20,000 out of it in a few months. Today, this sounds fantastic, but with the technology of that time, it was much easier to cheat the system. Then the original group fell apart. Only one student named J.P. Musser continued his adventure. Quite by chance, in 1980, he ran into a guy named Bill Kapan.
It seemed that he was the same accounting student, but from Harvard. They met, became friends and decided to join forces. Blackjack became the meaning of their lives. The first thing they did was unify the card counting system. Now everyone worked on the hailo system in order to minimize the number of errors. Next. They introduced team play. The casino's profit could be significantly increased if you played together.
How does it work? One person sits at the table and works as a scout. As soon as the shoe gets hot, that is, the artificial count is high and there are many pictures in the deck, he gives a signal to another team member, who has been standing aside all this time. He comes up, makes big bets and leaves with the winnings. The third innovation is an approach to the adventure as a business. You understand that even if you play for five-digit amounts, the winnings will not cover unemployment benefits.
Students began to look for investors with millions of cash. They positioned their association as a money-printing startup, but without the permidial principle - annual profit from 4 to 300%. Not a bad spread. Casinos have long been accustomed to lone accountants, but to incomplete teams. In the early 90s, Las Vegas reinvented itself once again. More and more new casinos began to open, and mega-hotels with a thousand rooms, and dozens of small establishments.
It was an ideal time for students. The bigger the casino, the higher the chance of cheating them. If you don't get into one, there are three others nearby. At its peak, the MIT student gang consisted of almost 100 people. Since 1992, they began bombing all the casinos in America and even the world, larger and smaller. At least 30 people participated in the operation every day. Unfortunately, there is no exact figure for how much money they raised.
Some sources say about 5 million dollars, others say almost 50. One thing is clear - the students' long adventure could not continue. Over time, the casinos realized how the collective account scheme worked. They began to block access to members of the organization one by one. For some time, they were replaced by newcomers, but the effect was no longer the same. And these newcomers did not live long either. They were quickly blacklisted. 29 years ago, the association fell apart.
Some people took regular corporate jobs, some quit the game and started organizing leftist rallies, some got a job as a real estate agent, and others took up myth-making. The first big myth is Ben Mezrich's book "Hitting the House." Mezrich is a writer who loves telling stories of successful adventurers, traders, cryptocurrency enthusiasts, and our MIT accountants. There's just one problem. More than half of the facts in the novel are fiction. Although the book didn't position itself that way at first.
After its release, it became a bestseller in the blink of an eye. And they decided to make a movie based on it, with Kevin Spacey in the lead role. When the movie 21 was released, it turned out that the screenwriters had decided to finally move away from boring reality. The names, plot, and scale of the operation were greatly embellished, dramatized, and changed. As a result, a myth emerged that you can make millions counting cards, but only geniuses can do it.
Today, MIT students are a brand and an urban legend in the casino world. But the idea of card counting has not gone away. While preparing this issue, I came across at least five accountants who are ready to teach you this art for free, including those same MIT students. The projected income is from $ 25 per hour. True, counting cards is becoming more and more difficult every year. Casinos use the most modern technologies to overcome accountants.
First, these are electronic shoes that automatically stir the deck. If the establishment is very progressive, then the chips can have an RFID tag installed, the same as in products in stores or intercom keys. With its help, casino analysts can watch in real time how players place bets. And if they notice any anomalies, they immediately begin close observation. The blacklist system has not gone away either.
It works best in China with its facial recognition system. Owners will find any way to get rid of an overly smart client in their establishment. I'll play the devil's advocate and try to explain their logic. The main argument. Gambling is always about luck. The most popular type of game in any casino is slot machines. Do people know that their chances of hitting the jackpot are extremely small? Of course they do. But this does not stop them from spending thousands of dollars on these meaningless machines.
As well as on lottery tickets, where the chance of winning is even lower. This kind of card counting kills the romance of gambling. You cram all the combinations and play like a robot. Well done. But most people go to the casino knowing that they will lose, and at the same time enjoy it. Second. A casino is a private office with its own rules. Don't like it? Go play in a casino where you are allowed to count cards. Spoiler, there are simply no such things.
Well, and the last argument that the casino does not like to talk about. Naturally, it is extremely selfish. Let's look at the numbers. According to the official count of the Nevada Gaming Commission, Vegas casinos made a billion dollars from Blackjack players last year alone. With an advantage of half a percent, to make that kind of profit, the turnover would have to be 200 billion, more than the entire GDP of Hungary. Now imagine that the advantage decreases to 0.4. It would seem like a fraction of a percent, but in fact the casino lost 200 million dollars.
If all players practice counting cards, that is, the advantage of half a percent decreases to minus one and a half percent, the casino can basically close. Counting cards is not as difficult as many people think, but it takes practice and years of experience. It will no longer be possible to beat the casinos like they did 40 years ago. And the key. Counting cards is not a gold mine, but a long, tedious and laborious work to outwit the casinos in a much more effective way.
Why spend hundreds of hours on ridiculous percentages when one metal paper clip can bring you millions of dollars.
A paper clip for a million.
As we have already understood, slot machines are the worst way to spend time in a casino in terms of your benefit as a player. The probability of a jackpot varies from 1 in a million to 1 in 70 million.
Madness. At the same time, the owners of gambling businesses love machines. They do not require any human resources from the establishment. You put a few rows, plug it into an outlet and they begin to generate fantastic profits. Why do gambling addicts from all over the world love slot machines? First. Low stakes. Slot machines have the lowest entry threshold. One spin, that is, one move. One dollar, and sometimes you can generally bet mere cents. Second. Instant pleasure and quick results.
A person makes a spin and in a second finds out whether he won or lost. No tactics, strategy of these your calculations, calculations, calculations, like Black Jackie. Third. They are exciting. The player can touch the machine, its buttons or levers. This is how a tactile connection is formed. What can we say about crazy animations, shiny bright numbers, cartoon characters, crystals, screen animation. It seems that anyone can find a slot machine that suits their taste and launch a game with a beautiful design on it.
And no annoying dealers for you. A game without intermediaries. Fourth. Working with the psyche. There is nothing more offensive than when you lack just a drop to win. If only this monkey had stood one position lower, there would have been a jackpot. But then the next spin will definitely be lucky. Slot machines use this and other psychological tricks to literally zombify people for an endless game.
As a result, every casino player sooner or later slips into the so-called gambler's fallacy. If I lost five times in a row, then I will definitely win on the sixth. This is the theory of probability, thinks a naive player who has not studied statistics. And never mind that the probability of winning does not depend on past results. But what if this outcome could still be changed? Get ready. Now there will be a story even more exciting than that of the real wolf of Wall Street from our video.
Let's go back to the early 80s, to the state of Oklahoma, which is north of Texas. We are in a TV repair store run by Tommy Glen Carmichael. Since childhood, he loved to understand technology, so for him the store is not just a job, but also a shower. By the end of 1980, Tommy's business was going badly. There is fierce competition in the market, discord in the family, his wife filed for divorce. And the police are forcing him to do community service for drug possession.
They go to visit him, his school friend Ray comes in. He shows him a piece of guitar string and a paper clip, with which he supposedly could beat any slot machines. Tommy decided to take a chance and was right. The system worked on the same principle as that of car thieves. If the contact in the machine that was responsible for issuing the jackpot closed, then on the next spin you were guaranteed to get money. The first day Tommy won 35 dollars, the next weekend several thousand at once.
But it turned out that Tommy's friend had cheated him after all. The casinos were already well aware of the trick with the paper clip. Within a year, slots all over Vekus began to be equipped with additional protection. Tommy had no choice but to go rob machines in small gambling houses. That's where he was caught red-handed. Casinos complained about a suspicious man who rummaged through the machine and then caught jackpots. The police tracked down Tommy, detained him and found the paper clip in his pocket.
Because he was still on probation, he was given five years in prison. Many would have given up, but not Tommy. In prison, he was lucky to find a man who was there for the same merits. His name was Michael Balsama. You could say that prison became not his second, but his first home. Every time this crook was released, he went straight to the casino. There, something went wrong again, and he returned to his native latticed penates with security along the perimeter.
Tommy and Mike found each other. As soon as they got out of prison, they set themselves a goal - to come up with a new way to rob slot machines. While they were in captivity, the world was taken over by computers, including slot machines. The trick with the rivet no longer worked. So Mike registered a fictitious small business in his name and ordered the most modern machine in his name. For over six months, he had been figuring out its internal structure, delving into the electronics and wiring.
And, finally, success. Here is a monkey paw. Just stick it into the coin acceptor, and when the machine starts giving out money, it won’t be able to stop. For the system to work, they needed cover. That’s why they always went to play with gorgeous tall ladies who shielded Tommy and Mike from the cameras. Every hour, these swindlers could take $1,000 from the machines. The downsides of restraint on support and a luxurious lifestyle.
The cold war of casino scammers has reached a new level. Casinos have come up with slots with optical sensors that exclude any physical impact on the machine’s contacts. It took Tommy a year and 30 prototypes to come up with a new hacking device called a light stick. The principle of operation was slightly different, but the logic was the same. The stick illuminated the machine’s sensor, the machine went dumb and started showering Tommy with coins again. It was the breakthrough of the century. Tomi became the first person in the world to figure out how to rob vending machines with optical sensors.
The biggest success was in something else. Naive casino owners thought that it would take, I don’t know, a decade to hack optical slots. So they actively updated old machines with new ones all over Vegas. The light stick could hack any new machine. Tommy and Mike began hiring new people to put together an organized crime group. Some people were responsible for reconnaissance, others for on-site security, others covered the cameras, and others collected money.
It was possible to make several tens of thousands of dollars a day. At this point, Tommy discovered a new niche, guided by a simple rule. During the gold rush, selling shovels. It took only $2.5 to produce a light stick. On the black market, it was sold at a minimum price of 10 thousand. A markup of 400 thousand percent. And other crooks snatched up these sticks like Christmas trees before the New Year.
It was possible to recoup the investment in just a couple of days. According to various estimates, Tommy caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to Vegas casinos. He had a huge house in an elite area of Los Angeles, a Jaguar, and instead of a boring wife, a young mistress. He declared part of his income to the tax office with a clear conscience, but kept the rest in cash. When the FBI began hunting for Tommy, he went into hiding in the Casino and went to live in a mobile home in the desert.
There, he continued his war with the casino, where he invented more and more new ways to hack machines. One day, he went to a business meeting where he was supposed to sell another invention to other scammers. At the meeting, it was not buyers who were waiting for him, but FBI agents. It turned out that his business partner Michael had had too much to drink during one of his casino parades and got busted. As soon as he was caught, he immediately spilled Tommy's name, phone number, and exact location to the FBI agents.
Tommy was charged with all possible articles of fraud. Only cheating is cheating that is related to gambling, and not fraud, as in the conditional securities market. For all his crimes, he received 11 months in prison. The story is the same as with the wolf of Wall Street. The laws were not ready for a criminal of such scale and resourcefulness. In addition, Tommy himself began to actively cooperate with the investigation and even participated in the creation of a device for blocking new technical profits for hacking casinos.
The only downside is that Tommy was included in the infamous black book of Nevada. A man who devoted his entire life to gambling could never enter any Vegas casino again in his life. Even if he forgot about hacking machines and just wanted to play roulette.
Balls.
"No one can beat roulette unless he steals money from the table when the dealer is not looking."
This quote is attributed to Albert Einstein. It is only partly true. The average player really cannot beat roulette. Of course, there are people who behave like Nikola Tesla. They say there is a way, but they do not want to tell you about it. Others behave like the rats in Skinner's experiment. That is, they interpret completely random events as something not random. Part of a cunning plan.
You need to watch the dealer's hands. Everything depends on the ball, the force of the throw, and so on. If they guess correctly, then the tactic of assessing millions of random coincidences in a hundredth of a second works. If they fail to guess, such characters usually keep quiet. Such people most often slip into a typical gambler's mistake. Well, if red has come up 8 times in a row, then now it will definitely be black. Yes, red comes up 8 times in a row only in one case out of 256.
But nothing prevents the ball from landing on red again. Or even zero. Statistics decides. As with backjack, there are strategies in roulette that allow you to lose less money during the game. But the longer you play, the sooner you will come to that very verified advantage. However, this only works if you are an ordinary player, not a swindler. Let's figure it out. The simplest and most effective way to beat roulette only works in very old establishments.
If the owner does not take good care of it, then over time the roulette wheel begins to wobble and fall to one side. According to the rules, the ball must fall on all numbers completely randomly. But if the wheel is old, you can first stand next to the table and observe if there are any anomalies in the random distribution, and bet more often on these abnormally falling numbers. But this is long, boring and rarely works.
It is much more interesting when you can accurately predict where the ball will fall, and even better, control it yourself. This is exactly the kind of ball that was invented by the Frenchwoman Monica Lauren. Contemporaries said that she was simply incredibly beautiful. That same femme fatale. She was born on Valentine's Day in 1948. We know very little about her fate, so let's get straight to the point. In 1973, Monica's brother got a job at a casino in Daville, a chic old-money resort in Normandy.
He was the croupier who took bets and threw the ball into the roulette. Apparently, he didn't like working in a casino. Or he was just a swindler by nature. But with each passing day, he wanted to rob his employer more and more. He came to his sister with this idea. Monica was an excellent technologist and suggested a brilliant idea in its simplicity. To mount an electrical receiver into a ball.
It could be artificially slowed down by sending an electric signal. To do this unnoticed, Monica came up with a small transmission that could be placed in a pack of cigarettes. How the scam worked. Monica and her husband would approach the table where her brother worked. They would quietly change the balls. Then the brother would spin the roulette wheel and throw the ball in at the right moment. The husband would place a bet on 6 pre-calculated numbers and Monica would use a sensor in her cigarettes to slow him
down. In just one week, they took 5 million francs out of the casino. In our money, that's almost 40 million euros. That's what the scam was called. A French pack of cigarettes. The big money turned Monica's head as a typical gambling addict. She couldn't stop. The owners of the establishment watched her and her husband all week. Almost everything about their behavior was suspicious. The husband always won, Monica stood nearby, always carrying her cigarettes, but never even lit up or placed a bet herself.
The guards surrounded Monica, snatched the cigarettes, everything became clear to them. They were immediately arrested and forced to return all the money they had won. On the other hand, at least none of them went to jail. French newspapers started writing about Monica, and 10 years later a film was made about her story. It is called. Swindlers. Or cheaters. Judging by the ratings, it is a very decent movie.
Monica did not lose her love for the casino after all her adventures. She moved to Las Vegas and got a job as a middle manager in a clothing store. And after work, she would drop in to play a couple of games at the casino. And this time it was not she who was cheating, but her.
How casinos cheat.
It's time to talk about the other side of cheating. Now we will not talk about fraud, as in the previous chapter. Well, there were such cases too. Imagine the situation. You do not know the laws of statistics well and for some reason decide to play slot machines.
You are incredibly lucky and the jackpot falls out. 41 million dollars. But as soon as you go to cash out your winnings, you are told, “Sorry, the machine is broken, no payouts.” There have been several such stories. One happened to a poor 90-year-old grandmother from Illinois. She won the jackpot, the casino refused to pay it, and the court sided with the gambling house.
In 2016, a girl from New York also hit a jackpot of 43 million dollars and even took a selfie with the machine in the background. The casino told her that the machine was broken. If you want, we can pay for your dinner at our wonderful establishment. The girl went to court, but also lost. The gambling house could afford expensive lawyers who proved that there was something wrong with the machine. Such stories are unpleasant, but still an exception to the rule. Not every establishment, especially those that are part of large gambling corporations, is ready to risk their reputation so much.
Moreover, much more money can be made on hidden fraud. Casinos invest billions every year so that people spend as much time in them as possible. The first and most basic thing is clocks and windows. Gambling houses do not specifically hang clocks or make windows so that people cannot determine how many hours they have been playing. Therefore, it is easy to lose track of time there, even if you have a smartphone and a smartwatch with you, but this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Literally every square meter of the casino is made strictly according to proven technology, which is designed to maximize revenue. At the entrance to the casino, there should be slot machines or poker tables. Most often, slot machines. A person should immediately start playing, even if he came there by accident or stopped by for half an hour after work. The layout of the hall should resemble a multi-level labyrinth, and not a long corridor.
This way, people will wander around it more, linger and play. Slot machines not only at the entrance, but also in other corners of the hall. In a prominent place is a bar where alcohol is surprisingly inexpensive, and next to it are even more poker tables. The ceilings should be low, so that an intimate atmosphere is created. Plus an atmosphere of comfort. In some countries, for example in Georgia, even though smoking is prohibited in cafes and restaurants, you can in the casino. Everything so that players can relieve stress, feel at home and continue playing.
And now pure neuropsychology. There should be no 90-degree turns in the casino interior. According to the idea, they force our brain to associatively make bolder decisions. One sharp turn and a person may think that it is time to leave. If the entire hall is arranged in smooth curved lines, the likelihood of quickly jumping out of a gambling trance is much less. This thing works. The author of the idea tested it in practice.
As soon as he softened the angles in the gaming area, after a while the number of its visitors doubled. I think you have seen how people, having found themselves in a casino for the first time, leave there with pupils the size of saucers after 4 hours, having lost track of time and thinking that they have been playing for an hour and a half at most. The same neuropsychology is the floors, carpets in casinos, either quite unpleasant in appearance, such that you do not want to look at them, or with strange hypnotizing patterns. The casino makes you look not at the floor, but up to the machines or to the gaming tables.
Exactly the same trick is used in regular stores. If you have been to one of the new Pyaterochkas, you know perfectly well what I am talking about. But in recent years, another approach has become more popular, which is promoted by designer Roger Thomas. He proposed to change the ideology of gambling houses in general. It may sound strange, but since the early 90s, many Vegas establishments have been betting on family recreation. According to statistics, every fifth visitor to the city last year was there with children.
Nowadays, people go to Vegas not only to get drunk and do bad things, but also to have a good time. The kids go to a Disneyland-style game room, and you and your relatives go for a walk in the lobby of a mega-hotel where slot machines await you. So, the cramped ceilings and labyrinths of gambling halls really work, but only for gambling addicts. If you come to play in the company of relatives, you won’t want to spend long there. Thomas suggested betting on luxury. Huge ceilings, free halls and luxury at every step.
Thanks to this, ordinary blue collars will feel like kings of life. They will get more pleasure and spend more time, spending more money. The designer designed two of the largest Vegas resorts - the Mirage and Bellagio. For his merits, he received many design awards, and the casino - a new model of interior design. There are many more chips that the casino uses against us. I simply won’t have time to tell about some of them in one video, and about others, especially in online gambling, we won’t find out anytime soon. After all, it’s a trade secret.
Our whole life.
I think you now understand well what is behind the phrase “the casino always wins”. The most adequate approach to such establishments is to treat them like a trip to the store. Here you go for bread, spend money and get a loaf of bread. You need to think the same way in the case of a casino. You come for excitement, pay money and get excitement.
Trying to cheat or beat the casino is not worth it, it won’t work. Statistics are against the hope of a jackpot. In fact, modern casino hotels, both in Las Vegas and Macau, make less than half of their revenue at the gaming table. The rest of the money comes from rooms, food, excursions, alcohol, retail and massage therapists from Thailand and Bali. This, of course, does not mean that the casino turns a blind eye to scammers. On the contrary, the level of protection is only growing every year. Cheaters have a hard time in casinos today.
Blackjack has automatic deck shufflers and chipped chips. Casinos are increasingly installing tables with reduced payouts. That is, with a higher casino advantage. Each player is watched by a separate camera. Even in poker, if you win suspiciously much, you will be under increased surveillance. Roulette is not the same anymore. The balls are too bouncy, the edges are ground down. In short, nothing will work with predictions. Slot machines have fewer mechanical parts and more modern technologies and complex algorithms that no one has yet managed to hack.
But there is one exception that I have deliberately avoided throughout the entire topic. This is the world of online casinos. And believe me, there are enough stories in it to fill a whole topic. Hackers, carders, neural networks and new generation cheating. If you want to continue, please leave a comment. This is the simplest quantitative method to understand the level of your interest in this topic.
Video for your colleagues or family. We wanted to make something exciting and not too heavy for you for the New Year holidays. I hope it worked out. And now the traditional competition with a rather unusual prize. This time I will not be giving away a book, but this wonderful poker set. If you have never played, this is a reason to learn the rules and hone your skills. If you are an avid player, add to your home collection.
The main thing is not to abuse it and not to play for money. It can end very badly.
Bye!
