Might be a controversial opinion, but whenever I hear a story like this I feel that the casino owners are getting what they deserve. Casinos make big profits from human vulnerabilities, so I'm not too bothered when a human finds an ingenious way of exploiting a casino's vulnerability. The rules are stacked so far in the casinos' favour that anyone who finds a way to beat them deserves an immense amount of respect.
Illegally? What law are these guys breaking? Just exploiting a loophole...
Casinos are a private business, and can refuse to do business with customers for any reason. Just like any potential customer can refuse to do business with anyone.
thatguy wrote:
Might be a controversial opinion, but whenever I hear a story like this I feel that the casino owners are getting what they deserve. Casinos make big profits from human vulnerabilities.
The key is not to go if you or someone else is prone to gambling more than they can afford to lose. The only time I ever enter a casino is strictly to play poker. That way they can never make money off me.
The rules are stacked so far in the casinos' favour
Of course. It's a business; you pay to be entertained by the illusion of having a chance. Just like you go to a magician's show for the illusion that magic exists.
Illegally? What law are these guys breaking? Just exploiting a loophole...
Casinos are a private business, and can refuse to do business with customers for any reason. Just like any potential customer can refuse to do business with anyone.
Yep, which is why when they find someone who's figured out how to win, they just kick that person out. It's not illegal to win at the casino, just to return there after you've been banned from the premises.
That said, I wouldn't personally want to make a habit out of pissing off people that, as thatguy said, make a living off of exploiting human vulnerabilities. Their only legal recourse may be to blacklist you, but nothing says you can't get conveniently mugged on the way back to your hotel, say.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
The key is not to go if you or someone else is prone to gambling more than they can afford to lose. The only time I ever enter a casino is strictly to play poker. That way they can never make money off me.
It's all too easy to fall into the "personal responsibility trap". I would love to think that we're all in control of our own destinies and only idiots would gamble away their life savings.
As it turns out, some drugs used to treat Parkinson's disease can turn people into compulsive gamblers. (The relevant segment begins around 7:35 of the audio.) If medication can cause this, it's not such a leap to imagine that there are some people who are born without certain inhibitions. Should we say "tough luck, some people have to draw the short straw"? Maybe. I know some will. But I at least say we should frame the discussion around the uncomfortable fact that we all perhaps have less free will than we'd like to imagine.
Illegally? What law are these guys breaking? Just exploiting a loophole...
When money is involved, using technological forms of cheating may be considered fraud.
For example, if you participate in a chess tournament and surreptitiously use a computer to cheat your way to the first place, and get caught, if there were no money prices involved, you would probably just get banned from that event for life. However, if the first place price was $1 million, you might be charged with fraud.
Of course the distinction may sometimes be fuzzy. For example card counting in blackjack is not illegal, because it's not possible to criminalize thought. However, using electronics to help you in the card counting might be seen as such.
It's not even necessary to use electronics to cheat in this way, and get convicted. See for example the case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ingram
Just pointing this out, but "Russian Slot Machine Hack" in the wired.com title bar here means "Russian hack of slot machines", not "hack of Russian slot machines". The slot machines mentioned in the article are in other parts of the world, and there isn't a lot of gambling in Russia in the first place.
News headlines can be quite silly.
When money is involved, using technological forms of cheating may be considered fraud.
But again, why is this considered "cheating"? Yes, the casinos won't want you to do it, are perfectly allowed to blacklist you, and may take you into the back rooms for an informal scrap, but I don't see what here is against the casino's rules. You aren't damaging or tampering with the machine. You're just playing the game, following an algorithm that gives you better than random chance. Unless "cheating" is defined to be anything that allows you to beat random chance, in which case the casino always wins by definition because any method of beating the casino is ipso facto cheating.
The Charles Ingram case is quite clearly different. It's clear that in Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? the contestant isn't allowed to be passed outside information. Someone watching the show, Googling answers and feeding them through an earpiece, for example, would clearly be wrong. But slot machines are different - there is no "outside information". The only "information" is the machine's PRNG, very clearly "inside information" - and even this was not stolen, it was merely deduced from careful observation.
Would you consider using a computer to predict the result of a roulette wheel cheating? (IIRC bets can still be placed for some time after the ball has been to roll in the wheel.)
Using a computer to help you card count, or track balls in roulette would be the same as using a calculator in non-calculator maths exam. However learning how to control dice in order to create favourable results like shown in the following documentary isn't. I tried it myself at home once thinking it would be easy, but realized it would most likely take me hundreds of hours of practice to achieve.
