Re: Amazing story - Roulette Scanning

From: Virgil (ITSnetNOTcom#virgil_at_COMCAST.com)
Date: 12/05/04 

Date: Sun, 05 Dec 2004 15:02:48 -0700

In article <9c1b39be.0412050352.531832fc@posting.google.com>,
 eleatis@yahoo.gr (Mike) wrote:

> Read this:
>
> "The casino at the Ritz hotel in London had a trio of Eastern European
> gamblers were arrested on suspicion cheating at roulette using a laser
> scanner attached to a cellphone (they'd manage to win 1.3
> million pounds, something which quickly aroused the attention of the
> casino's management). There's only one problem: no one is
> even sure that it's possible to cheat at roulette using a laser
> scanner. Actually, there are two problems: cheating a casino is
> apparently not against the law in Britain. How come we're only
> just learning this?"
>
> http://www.engadget.com/entry/2364827625072350/
>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/3558273.stm
>
>
> Apparently the scoop is they used a laser scanner to esteimate the
> initial state of the ball and then passed that to a mainframe via the
> cell phone to compute the trajectory and the probability for the
> number to show up.
>
> Does this sound like a hoax to you or it is something that is possible
> to do?
>
> It appears to me there are several random factors, like the ball
> bouncing on the metal edges of the number slot seperator and then
> landing on another number, an empirical fact, that would make the
> output of any deterministic algorithm useless, although that is
> something they might have accounted for given the initial momentum of
> the ball.
>
> Comments?
>
> Mike

Since the house "edge" in roulette, particularly for European roulette
with a "0" but no "00", is very thin, even a modest counter edge, like
knowing which slots are slightly more or less probable than others,
would likely be enough to allow the cheaters to win over the long run.

Actually this pattern would be better for the,cheaters since it would
produce what appeared more like a mere run of better than usual luck,
and be much harder to detect.

If the cheaters could accurately predict the outcome each spin, it would
be very hard for them to produce a pattern of winning that looked like
mere good luck, and they might be detected quite rapidly.

Since they were not detected until they had won over a million pounds, I
suspect that they only were able to change the odds to moderately in
their favor.