Scientists Beat The House At Roulette

Scientists Beat The House At Roulette With Chaos Theory -- Forbes 

Professional gamblers know that when it comes to the game of roulette, the best strategy is the same one that supercomputer Joshua applied to nuclear war in the movie WarGames: “The only way to win is not to play.” But that didn’t stop a group of chaos theorists from trying to beat it anyway. And according to new research published in the journal Chaos, it looks like they may have found a way to beat the house. They were able to model the motion of the wheel and ball and were able to confirm their predictions both in simulation and using an actual roulette wheel.

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My Comment: Their analysis makes sense .... but .... I suspect that the House knows about these "tricks".

The Psychology Behind New Casino Designs

The Psychology Of Casinos -- Frontal Cortex

In a recent New Yorker, I profiled Roger Thomas, the head of design for Wynn Resorts. Thomas is a remarkably talented interior designer – he’s received nearly every accolade in the field – but I was most interested in the way Thomas has reinvented the modern casino, creating lovely and relaxing spaces that encourage people to squander their cash. (I’ve long believed that success in Vegas requires an intimate understanding of human nature – it’s not easy getting people to enjoy games that are stacked against them.) Here’s the lede:

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My Comment: This is more evidence that the house always wins

Meet The Man Who Broke The Bank At Three Casinos

Wilk

The Man Who Broke Atlantic City -- The Atlantic

Don Johnson won nearly $6 million playing blackjack in one night, single-handedly decimating the monthly revenue of Atlantic City’s Tropicana casino. Not long before that, he’d taken the Borgata for $5 million and Caesars for $4 million. Here’s how he did it.

Don Johnson finds it hard to remember the exact cards. Who could? At the height of his 12-hour blitz of the Tropicana casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, last April, he was playing a hand of blackjack nearly every minute.

Dozens of spectators pressed against the glass of the high-roller pit. Inside, playing at a green-felt table opposite a black-vested dealer, a burly middle-aged man in a red cap and black Oregon State hoodie was wagering $100,000 a hand. Word spreads when the betting is that big. Johnson was on an amazing streak. The towers of chips stacked in front of him formed a colorful miniature skyline. His winning run had been picked up by the casino’s watchful overhead cameras and drawn the close scrutiny of the pit bosses. In just one hand, he remembers, he won $800,000. In a three-hand sequence, he took $1.2 million.

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My Comment: My pockets are empty and my luck is not that great. Sighhh .... best stick to buying my weekly $5 loto ticket.

Depressing Lottery Simulator Lets You Play 1000 Times a Second, Shows All The Millions You Didn't Win

Big Pile O' Cash, But Not For Me aresauburn on Flickr

From Popular Science:

Thanks to one man, I don’t need to play the lottery. I already know that if I play twice a week every week for the next 10 years, I will win a staggering total of $93 by 2020. Or, put differently, I will make back eight percent of the $1,040 I'll spend on the tickets.

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Genetic Disorder Turns Risk-Averse Into Gamblers

The study found that people with a damaged amygdala had a higher inclination to risk losing money as a result of reckless gambling. Alamy

From The Independent:

The brains of people who risk everything when gambling may be wired up differently to those of the naturally cautious, according to a study that appears to have discovered a neurological basis for reckless behaviour.

The research found that people were far more gullible to high-risk gambling when a small but distinct part of their brain had been damaged as a result of a rare genetic disorder. They showed little of the natural aversion to losing something of value that most people are born with.

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Why We Gamble: The Enticement Of Almost Winning

From Live Science:

Betting on the Super Bowl, roulette, or even online poker can be thrilling, and with the advent of online gambling, it's easier than ever before. Yet winning and losing can have unexpected effects on the brain that keep people coming back for more, scientists are finding.

Gamblers sink an increasing sum of money into their efforts to win. Over the last 20 years legalized betting has grown tremendously; it's now a $100 billion industry. More than 65 percent of Americans gamble, according to Gallup's annual Lifestyle Poll conducted last year, and up to 5 percent of those betters develop an addiction to the activity.

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Poker Paradox: The More Hands You Win, The More Money You Lose

From Science A Gogo:

Analyzing more than 27 million hands of No-Limit Texas Hold'em, a Cornell researcher has found that the more hands players win, the less money they're likely to collect - especially when it comes to novice players. The study was published in the Journal of Gambling Studies.

Cornell's Kyle Siler hypothesizes that the multiple wins are likely for small stakes, and the more you play, the more likely you will eventually be walloped by occasional - but significant - losses. "[The finding] coincides with observations in behavioral economics that people overweigh their frequent small gains vis-à-vis occasional large losses, and vice versa," Siler explained. In other words, players feel positively reinforced by their streak of wins but have difficulty fully understanding how their occasional large losses offset their gains.

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How Winning Can Mean Losing In Poker And Life

Karen Bleier / AFP / Getty

From Time Magazine:

You can learn a lot about gambling if you're willing to analyze 27 million hands of online poker. Don't have time for that? No worries; sociology doctoral student Kyle Siler of Cornell University has done it for you. His counterintuitive message: the more hands you win, the more money you're likely to lose — and this has implications that go well beyond a hand of cards.

Siler, whose work was published in December in the online edition of the Journal of Gambling Studies and will appear later this year in the print edition, was not interested in poker alone but in the larger idea of how humans handle risk, reward and variable payoffs. Few things offer a better way of quantifying that than gambling — and few gambling dens offer a richer pool of data than the Internet, where millions of people can play at once and transactions are easy to observe and record.

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Vegas Uses Computers To Nab Card Counters

From Yahoo Tech:

First they start paying out 6 to 5 on natural blackjacks, and now this? The little guy gets the short end of the stick once again, as UK researchers say they've developed a computer algorithm that can analyze how Blackjack players manage their chip stack and bet on each hand, sniffing out card counters inside 20 hands of the game.

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