Risk of Ruin
Audio documentaries about risk takers.
Risk of Ruin
Casino Schemes
Jamie, Steve, and Kyle are advantage players. They talk about beating casino games including carnival games, automatic roulette wheels, and sweepstakes slot machines.
Support the show: https://riskofruinpod.substack.com/
References from the episode:
Laurence Scott on Gambling With an Edge.
Mark Billings on Gambling With an Edge (related to biased wheels), and also using computers.
Mark Billings on Risk of Ruin.
Bloomberg article on roulette.
A Man for All Markets - which describes Ed Thorp’s effort to beat roulette.
Kyle’s appearance on Gambling With an Edge.
Email the show: risk of ruin pod at gmail
Follow on Twitter: https://x.com/halfkelly
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SPEAKER_04:So there was a parade of, like, at some point, like, this was the biggest thing in the casino because everyone was talking about it. All the pit bosses were all, like, you know, all looking at it, even from, you know, other pits and stuff that always, that come over every few minutes and take a look at it. And the table was sort of on the natural route that dealers would take to leave the break room. And there was a parade of dealers. They would all come by and they would all, it was like a traffic jam. They'd all slow down like they were watching a car accident. And They would just ask our BP, what are you doing? And he'd just be like, I'm playing cards. And at some point, a guy who was clearly woken up at home. he like came in in a suit but like no tie it was all unbuttoned and he had his like a normal like a badge that was in like a plastic sleeve and also like a sticker badge that was sort of like red and white stripes and it said emergency access and it had two ink signatures at the bottom of it and he came over to the table and he sort of like loomed over the table he cocks his head to the left and he looks at our BP he sort of looks at the pay table on the table he cocks his head to the right looks at the dealers all the pit boss and all the dealers and like basically everybody was looking at him like what is this guy and then he's just sort of he leans close to our BP and he just goes what are you doing and the BP doesn't miss a beat he's just like what does it look like I'm doing I'm playing cards probably just melting this guy's face with his tequila breath just I'm playing cards and the guy's just sort of he just kind of stands up and he like looks defeated and he was just like alright
SPEAKER_00:listening to Risk of Ruin. I'm John Reeder. This is episode 43, Casino Schemes. I'm going to start by establishing some helpful facts to know for this episode. Okay, here's a not-at-all comprehensive list of places in the U.S. that have casinos with more than 100,000 square feet of gaming space. Thackerville, Oklahoma. Highland, California. Tampa Bay, Florida. Boston, Mass. Tulsa, Oklahoma. Cabazon, California. Las Vegas, of course. Lawrenceburg, Indiana. Atlantic City, New Jersey. Lincoln, Rhode Island. And Lincoln, California. Niagara Falls, New York. Okay, that's just the town with big casinos. And I have to admit that I skipped a bunch of places that I didn't feel like pronouncing. Well, there are also a ton of places with smaller casinos, or riverboats, or gas station video poker parlors. Alright, and if you go to these places, you are going to find a really wild range of games to gamble on. Stuff like Blackjack, Craps, Roulette, Baccarat, Ultimate Texas Hold'em, Caribbean Stud, Let It Ride, Bingo, Sports, and then slot machines like Buffalo Diamond, Buffalo Gold, or Buffalo Ascension, I'm sure I'm only missing about a thousand buffalo-themed slots, which, if I had time to be pedantic, I would point out that it's a bison, not a buffalo. Anyway, moving on. Then, all of these casinos and casino games have to be administered by real humans that include slot attendants, slot techs, dealers, boxmen... pit bosses, floor supervisors, security, which is in addition and distinct from surveillance, as well as shift supervisors and casino managers. If you kind of multiply the number of casinos by the number of games in these casinos, by the number of humans that have opportunities to make mistakes implementing these games, well, it turns into a pretty big number. Actually, you can see the telltale signs of some of the, let's call them learnings. that casinos have acquired over the years if you just sit down and start playing. For instance, why do blackjack tables have signs that say no mid-shoot entry? I can assure you those signs are not there to protect tourists from a Philistine jumping in and ruining the quote-unquote flow of the cards. Keep in mind that the sign costs the casino money because it throttles new players who could otherwise sit down and start losing right away. But no mid-shoot entry exists because advantage players figured out. that you could put one guy at the table counting the cards betting table minimum and then when the count got high you could send in a big player or BP to bet table max right that idea is 50 plus years old and it was made most famous by the blackjack team from MIT so in an effort to protect the house from this scheme a countermeasure was born. And like I said, if you pay attention, you will see lots of little procedures. Things like covering up the back card in the deck after the shuffle, or shuffling eight decks of cards, but only dealing six of them, or in the case of online live dealer blackjack, only dealing four of eight decks. Sometimes these procedures even require multiple casino staff, like a dealer calling out$100 bets to the pit boss, or in the case of the El Cortez, the dealers might even call out$25 bets to the pit it's kind of fun to look at the procedures and then try to figure out what must have happened for that countermeasure to make sense because all of these little things slow down the game and introduce complexity for the employees involved so when the dealer of a carnival game like three card poker cuts the deck and turns half of the cards 180 degrees then stacks the cards again and puts them in the automatic shuffler why do they do that why do they spin half the deck and And what kind of lunatic figured out the vulnerability that this countermeasure is meant to thwart? And how long did it go on before the casino figured it out? Earlier, I threw out a theoretical combination for what is roughly the opportunity set an advantage player might go after. Also, I did not arrive at this framing on my own, obviously. When I was interviewing the guests for this episode, they said that they have a bingo card of aspirational ways to beat casino games. And the stuff on this list really did sound like it had come from just randomly matching games with the ways they might be vulnerable. Actually, this episode is called Casino Schemes because our guests take a borderline perverse amount of pleasure in coming up with weird, idiosyncratic ways to beat casino games. Okay, and I am not the one who assigned the term schemes to these plays. They did. I should also say that I talked to the guests for hours and we talked about carnival games and beating roulette machines and hitting online casinos. Then when I thought we were done with the interview, they kept sending me more stuff, more stories, more plays, more hijinks, more schemes. We have three guests for this episode. They are Jamie, Steve and Jamie met first, so we are going to hear an entire play that they did, and then we'll meet Kyle and hear about the stuff the group has done together. Here's Jamie.
SPEAKER_04:Uh, because what happened is, like, I was... you know, just kind of being a lazy bum, honestly, and playing online poker for money and not really doing much else. But then Black Friday happened when they shut down all the online poker sites. And so I was like, well, that is like 80% of my net worth and all of my income gone. So a friend of mine who was visiting from Michigan, I live in Florida, he was visiting me and he says, hey, well, I guess we need a job. I can get us a job tomorrow parking cars. Do you want to come be my roommate in Michigan? Because I guess I'm going to need a roommate now. And I was like, well, okay. So I went Jamie told me that he
SPEAKER_00:didn't really see himself as a super serious poker player. He was almost a poker player by default because it was the best way to make money. Then the event surrounding Black Friday meant that he had to become a valet. Again, essentially by default.
SPEAKER_04:Well, the real issue was that all of my money was tied up in the online poker sites. So I didn't really have a bankroll. I didn't have any money. Like 80% of my, or probably even more, like of my net worth was my bankroll. Well, I guess that sounds silly. Like all of my net worth was my bankroll and 80% of it or more was on deposit with full tilts, poker, absolute poker and poker stars. So it's not like I just lost my income. I lost all my I think that you'll hear a
SPEAKER_00:few times during this episode that these guys all came out of the specific moment in time where the movie 21 had made an impression on young, advantage-minded people. And so they were interested in the idea of team play.
SPEAKER_04:LG was a lot more motivated to put this team together. And I was just sort of like, okay, this is cool. But we did go out and, you know, I had just managed to spot some hole cards. So we were going out and playing some low stakes, you know, hole card games, three card poker and stuff like that. But to say, I mean, by no means were we in any way experienced in like a casino environment as advantage players in any way.
SPEAKER_00:Playing whole cards is just a much stronger advantage than counting cards. So that should be better for a bankroll, right? But Jamie says that in the early going, they were still acquiring the underlying skill required to make money.
SPEAKER_04:As far as like the technical aspects of it, like the ability to read the games and stuff like that, I can't speak for everybody. I wouldn't say I was a natural, but I kind of took to it most readily. But there was variance because we just weren't good. You know, we weren't that good. We were sort of learning along the way. So, yeah, I mean, there were bumps along the way for sure. We had some personnel issues and some incentive issues. You know, we were all just kind of figuring things out as we went. So I don't remember anything being like a huge catastrophe, but, you know, it definitely could have been smoother. And our comportment also, you know, again, learning everything along the way. Looking back on it, I can't think of anything that stands out to me now, but I'm sure I'm absolutely certain that our comportment was horrific.
SPEAKER_00:There is no degree track program to become an advantage player. At best, they might be able to look in books and read between the lines as to what's being said and what's not being said on message boards. But eventually, they just kind of have to make it up as they go. Jamie said one of the other players, LG, was really the driving force behind putting this team together. They had a rigorous and selective process for finding their teammates, a.k.a. they just posted ads on Craigslist.
SPEAKER_04:I don't remember exactly, but it was definitely along the lines of, hey, this isn't a computer gig actually. We're trying to form a group of people to legally win money from casinos using techniques such as card counting and things of that nature.
SPEAKER_00:One of the teammates that came from Craigslist was Steve.
SPEAKER_01:So I think I first dabbled in, I want to say, it would have probably been late 2009. Like I said, I saw a documentary on the MIT team. I think it was on Discovery Channel or something like that. So I started doing some internet research, did the whole like, you know, bought six decks of cards, learning, you know, high, low, counting on a deck, things like that. And yeah, for the next couple of years, I was doing, I mean, that was just more of a hobby. And then coincidentally, I was doing a lot of I saw a guy who lived a couple miles from me was actually trying to do the same thing. He was looking to start a blackjack team, go count cards along the Gulf Coast or something. And so we met up like twice and I never heard from him again. And then shortly after that, I then looked on Craigslist and I coincidentally came across this post by LG saying that they're trying to form a team. They're about If you have listened to
SPEAKER_00:other episodes of this podcast, then you have probably heard me say the words uncorrelated to convention, which somewhat describes the guests we have. and somewhat describes their outlook on the world, and also somewhat describes just the process of looking for edges, right? To find an edge, you are unshackling yourself from the way that the rest of the world looks at a problem, and you are choosing your own solution. As an example of this uncorrelation to convention, Jamie and Steve were both into freaking when they were younger, which, if you're not familiar, is like figuring out the operating system that telephones run on, you know, before everything was digital. The phone system operated on tones and frequencies, and so some hacker types figured out how this all worked, and they sometimes commandeered the system for their benefit, and other times just used it to mess around and experiment. Well, when people who are into this kind of thing run across each other, they immediately realize, oh yeah, this other person also looks at the world in this very unconventional way. One of the things that got Steve in with his new teammates is that he had hacked together a physical solution to a problem he was having. And Jamie heard about this and was like, this is our guy. Steve had MacGyvered together a cat litter box exhaust system. Yeah, so
SPEAKER_01:living where I was living at the time, it was a small studio apartment, didn't allow pets, and there was an access hole to an attic. And essentially I had rigged up an enclosed litter box with an exhaust pipe They're like a dryer, exhaust vent, and a computer fan. And that's just kind of filter any odors out to where you wouldn't have any. If you were to walk in, you would not know a cat existed. It's very crude, but it got the job done. And I think it's so hilarious. That's kind of my claim to fame and that there's so much discussion about it.
SPEAKER_00:Three weeks ago, I had also never heard of a cat litter box exhaust system. But since these guys told me about it, I've run into other old teammates of theirs, and they were talking about the cat litter box exhaust system. The funny thing is that no one was really super clear on the details either. In one telling, they actually went to Steve's apartment. to witness the contraption firsthand. And by another teammate's memory, they just heard about it. In any event, Steve's hacker mind was enough to get him on the team. But we should also mention that Steve is basically a self-taught tinkerer. He says that he comes from a very humble background. And so even though he thinks like an engineer, he didn't know that was a thing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So I grew up
SPEAKER_01:in Northern Indiana, very blue collar area, uh, you know, my first job was dishwasher, did like a lot of restaurant work. And then the only real jobs were like just blue collar factory jobs. And I did a couple of those, drove trucks a little bit, but it's, you know, I just didn't know that there was even an option to, you know, be an engineer or you just kind of graduate from high school and you get a job at a local factory, you know, putting RVs together. And, but I've always had this like natural, I guess, just knack for, like I said, taking things apart or trying to figure them out. I mean, as a kid, I remember I took apart the socket in my bedroom just to see how it worked. I think I always shocked myself a little bit. Just random things like that. I always had the mind of an engineer, but growing up the way I did, I didn't even know that was necessarily a thing. And yeah, I've always just been one to somewhat build things, take things apart. These guys were
SPEAKER_00:young when they started, and it wasn't like they knew how to get a hold of the money that they needed to go make a living as gamblers. So they cobbled together what they could.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, definitely started out very slow. We exchanged a lot of messages, and I think you guys would go to your local casino, I would go to mine, exchange information, because they were both in the same tribe and everything. And I was working two jobs, so saving up a bankroll, and once a week got around to actually playing, I'll never forget, after saving up, after working the entire season in Southwest Florida, I had managed to save up$6,000. And I'll never forget, I took out of the safe deposit box at the end of the season, laid it out, took a picture of it. It was like the most proud moment of my life. Like, I'm going to invest this, take this, and we're going to go gamble with it. And that was like a real starting point for me, I think. Yeah, the$6,000, I mean, in my mind, it was like almost if you're going to take it and just dump it into a stock that you know is going to just, I mean, I knew the math was there. You know, I had seen that the numbers added up I was like, this is going to work. We have to make it work. I just knew that there's going to be swings. But at the time, that$6,000 to me felt like, you know, a million dollars or even more. And the amount that it's really funny to look back on now, but because I worked two jobs all winter, and that was just like the defining moment. Like, okay, I have this. This has to work.
SPEAKER_00:The early start of this team was a good amount of just You know, Jamie got bounced out of the poker world, and so he was available. Then LG was the energy behind forming the team. And Steve came in as a player and an investor. I
SPEAKER_01:know early on it was me as an investor and at least one other major investor. So I want to say we started with around$15,000, I'm going to guess. And we set very modest goals to break the bank and pay everybody. And we did get, it was a very... rough start and we definitely had some variance and but we were getting a lot of hours in and a lot of table play our guy in PA at the time was playing constantly because he worked a mile from a place that just had round the clock games I know Jamie he was up in Michigan at the time but I had games near me um LG had games near him. So I would say within probably the first year, we had to have at least doubled it, which in hindsight doesn't sound very impressive, but the time was definitely great. And then that's when we started traveling more to places like Atlantic City,
SPEAKER_00:I don't know if you've ever noticed in a casino that they have a number of types of automatic shufflers they might use. Some might shuffle one deck or two decks of cards. Some might continuously shuffle nearly all of the cards. And it's kind of funny because lots of gamblers are superstitious and they're pretty sure these machines are rigged. Then there's an entirely reasonable response to that idea, which is the casino doesn't need to further rig things in their favor. But then there's a response to the response, which is that It's now pretty well known that these shufflers can be rigged, so you can't blindly assume they're fair. Well, a shuffler also doesn't need to be maliciously rigged to produce non-random results. It could just be not working as intended. Here's Jamie again.
SPEAKER_04:So the backstory is that Steve found this old shuffle machine on eBay for cheap. It was like$400 or$600. I forget exactly what. And he asked if he could use team funds to buy it. He was told no. He said, well, I'm buying this thing anyway. So he bought it, and then he tinkered around with it for a while, and he was like, oh, this is interesting. If the machine is used properly, if it's installed correctly, then... you know, whatever it's, it's random, but if they install it wrong, there's a chance that it could be non-random. And so, uh, he figured out that the way that it would, you know, lead to non-randomness and in certain exceptional circumstances, if they really screw it up, you can actually kind of like steer cards through it. Uh, meaning like you could control what cards are going to kind of show up. So at that point, we just had another thing
SPEAKER_00:on our radar that, Jamie mentioned that when Steve found the shuffler, he had to buy it on his own. He didn't get to use bankroll funds. And I hate to spoil anything, but eventually they found a play where the shuffler knowledge paid off. Although even Steve admits that after he got it and after he had torn it apart and understood how it worked, even then it wasn't obvious how useful the information was.
SPEAKER_01:Pretty much, I just, you know, I checked out every last setting I could. Didn't really come with a manual or anything. It was just a power cord, a shuffler, and a bunch of bubble wrap. So I plugged it in, had a bunch of decks of cards laying around. I took a magic marker, just started, like, numbering the cards, 1 through 52, ran them through, you know, in sequential order, and just to see if there's anything that would be interesting. Then I later took a piece of plexiglass and replaced the front to where I could, like, actually watch it operate and then just try to visualize, you know, how it works and if there's ever a situation where it could be exploited. Because, I mean, for the most part, the machine was random when used correctly, as I said, and the stars really had to align and all the conditions had to be perfect for it not to work. Even when I first got it and had made some of these observations, I was like, well, this is really cool and all, but there's probably zero utility for this. until we actually had stumbled across a game where it's a game we had seen in the past. But then once I made these revelations, it was actually in Detroit. I remember we called our team member who lived down the street and we were like, you know, we need you to go there and just tell us how it's dealt. Because we were all thinking back, like, no, it's definitely dealt this way. And if that's still the case, I mean, we have to just drop everything and fly there now. So we call him, he goes there and he's like describing it to us like, no, no, you got, okay, something's different here. You have to wait until the next shift. And he's like, fine, I'll do that. So he goes home for a little bit, comes back later. Sure enough, the procedure was just how he described it, which was no good. It turns out like a week before we discovered this, they had changed this particular procedure. And sometime later, we'd even seen that there was a bulletin on osn describing that they used to deal the game a certain way however that it could be exploited they didn't know the mechanic of it they just knew like just from observation that if they did x y would happen so basically just warning other casinos not to do the same thing so we literally missed that one by like a week
SPEAKER_00:it might be worth talking a little bit about a subset of games in the casino. Okay, the table games that we call carnival games like three-card poker and similar, these are games that are designed to work more like slot machines. Instead of offering the roughly even money payout, of a game like blackjack they offer a bunch of variants and it turns out that gamblers are often willing to bet into a larger house edge if they can also get more variants this is like the lottery effect and you can see it working in things like same game parlays that sportsbooks offer in terms of advantage play you might look at these games and think oh that's a higher house edge for an ap to overcome so it's probably a dead end except that the high payout multiples also help if you can find something that's non-random. Well, the game that Steve and the group eventually found was one of these carnival games. So it was Memorial Day weekend of, I want
SPEAKER_01:to say 2011. Me and one of our team members from PA had gone down to Atlantic City Memorial Day weekend looking, you know, and we're roaming the boardwalk and we walk into Taj Mahal and I see a new game on the floor under trial. uh, sit there and watch a few hands. And I was like, my jaw dropped. I'm like, this is what I've been looking for. This is like, this is it. So I, you know, call my partner. I was like, drop it. Whatever you're doing right now, come to the Taj. We've got to sit down and just play this for table minimum. So, you know, wait for a couple of seats to open up. Uh, we sit at first and third base and just sit there for like an hour, just playing it, trying to figure it out. The deal doesn't know what they're doing. Like they don't know the game had been installed. I think for two days at this point, um, And so like a lot of, you know, missed deals, things like that. We're sitting there and like trying to give like little school girls as we play this, because we just know that everything that's happening is just the stars aligned. It's everything you could possibly want. Like no, like any small deviation from the method they dealt this would have just killed the game. But for whatever reason, and they dealt this game different than every other game, but just the stars aligned is almost like it was made for us. And like Jamie said, we did not deserve to have this game. We had no, We are going to
SPEAKER_00:spend some time talking about this game because I actually think it's important to underline how much diligence went into beating it. It wasn't just, we found it, then we wrecked these fools and used the money to buy a private island. Steve is going to walk us through how much attention they paid to the way the game was dealt, and also how skeptical the guys remained as to whether or not there was a real edge.
SPEAKER_01:Well, at first we were just trying to play it solely to get a feel for it because it was such a unique game. And even the fact that it was so new also, there was a lot of dealer errors, and we were just trying to figure out which of these are errors, what's the actual procedure, etc. and what's consistent here. So we know what to actually, you know, consider when analyzing this game. And at the time we didn't have, you know, Sims or any type of real like software or a person to do this. So we're doing this purely by intuition. So we were just trying to figure out every little method that could be exploited in this game before we try and take as many notes as possible. Basically, you know, trying to go to the bathroom, jump, sit down on her phone, come back, You know, then we, as time went on, we started making more and more little realizations. Okay, if we do this, that'll cause this to happen. If they make this mistake, that'll happen. Things like that. And just various, you know, aspects of the game that you wouldn't even consider
SPEAKER_00:without seeing it. Lots of our guests talk about this nearly constant thought in the back of their mind, which is, what am I missing? You could call this respecting the market. They know that they have to find an edge to make a living. And they also know that just from a pure numbers standpoint, most of the time there is no edge. In the market, most prices are accurate. Most sportsbook lines are pretty good. And most casino games favor the house. So I went home.
SPEAKER_01:I had some pictures I'd taken on my phone. I basically recreated the entire film. put it on my blackjack table at home. I set up my shuffler, basically trying to recreate to a tee exactly everything I saw. I went online and found the game manufacturer and even found like the rules. dealing procedures, things like that, just to make sure the pay tables correct, all that. And then really just spent hours dealing out, you know, hands, recreating everything I had witnessed as far as, you know, people folding, people staying, raising, things like that, how to collect the cards. But even so, even at this point, we were still reluctant to think that my machine would match this one exactly. We weren't sure if you'd make a different firmware or some type of software change, because of course we can't see inside the shuffler that's at the table. So we're just basically in a hope and a prayer that this thing is exactly the same. But after some further data collection, it became apparent that all the conditions were identical to what we were experiencing in my living room.
SPEAKER_00:There are some very smart programmers in the advantage play world who can run numbers and create strategies for almost any game. But our guests didn't have one of those guys. So initially, all they had was just a theory on the way to play the game. But they took this idea, which required a lot of bodies, and they went back to Atlantic City to take their shot. Here's Jamie. There's that
SPEAKER_04:episode of The Simpsons where I don't remember exactly how it comes to this, but Bart and Milhouse are on a hill with a pair of binoculars or something looking down on some people. And Milhouse goes, well, Bart, what are they saying? And Bart goes, well, I don't know. And then Milhouse goes, you said you could read lips. And then Bart goes, well, I assumed that I could. Yeah. This was very much us at this point, because we were like, oh, this will be easy. All we need to do is just signal to everyone else at the table what we hold, and then following that, we'll all know what to do exactly. It did not work like that, in the beginning at least. We just sort of came up with these signals that were... you know, the signals, the card signals were standard. We'd been using card signals for a while, but then we had to come up with signals for things like, okay, affirmative or negative or a suit for a card or just an acknowledgement that a signal was received. And so what we did is we didn't really think about the frequency of the signal use. We just sort of like came up with stuff in the hotel room and said, all right, that'll be fine. And one of the signals for like, okay, I'm responding in the affirmative to your card information was just to grunt. And some of the suit signals were, the suit signals we used were hell, damn, shit, and crap for hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs. But these signals were really used a lot. So the grunts and the swearing was used a lot. So it was a bunch of young men sitting around a table going like, shit, crap, damn, shit. And it was awful. It was just a real disaster. We changed it after the first, I think, session. Yeah, so it was everyone's job at the table to basically put together a good hand for the BP. And it wasn't that you were just folding good hands. Folding at all in this game was a really terrible strategy. You should never be folding. But, you know, fold we did. And so it would be the BP would be at first base and everyone else would be acting in concert. Although I really, that makes it sound like we were, you know, put together like an orchestra or a well-oiled machine or something. We weren't. But the idea would be all the players would be coordinating amongst one another in order to set up a good hand for the BP. the next hand. These
SPEAKER_00:guys felt good that they were directionally correct, or at least confident enough to start betting real money. But they were also completely uncalibrated. They had no idea about the magnitude of their edge. Here's Steve again. Well, that was the thing.
SPEAKER_01:We were trying to think of how to attack this. Do we, you know, milk the cow or slaughter the bull? And we were trying to also figure out what makes the most sense. What are we trying to, you know, when we kind of had the aha moment that we could almost steer the cards in our way to be in our favor where like do we want to chase you know straights flushes pairs trying to just figure out what made sense because it wasn't a perfect science i mean there was a bit of randomness still but you know when you really took the mechanics it you could definitely steer in your favor we just didn't know to what extent
SPEAKER_00:Even with all of the preparation, you know, scouting the game and dry runs in Steve's living room and getting people to Atlantic City and the knowledge of the shuffler, even with all of the work that had gone into the play, it was still rocky in the early going.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and admittedly, in retrospect, we were very green at this. So we were so excited that we stumbled on this. And now, if I were to do it again today, I would probably do it a lot differently. But at the time, we were just kind of, you know, let's get back there. We have to play it. We weren't quite sure how, but we just knew we had to play it because this game's not going to last, even if nobody else figures it out, because the game just wasn't that popular otherwise. But we had to, you know, we were up there trying to keep this table open as much as possible. You know, just at first we were trying to steer, I think, high cards. And then we realized, no, you know, the money is going to be more in, you know, pairs, trips, flushes, straights, things like that. So there was a lot of trial and error that was probably expensive in the beginning. I mean, there was definitely some sessions where we would be up considerably and then, you And at that point, that could have just been variance because we were just... trying to play this game intuitively and there is no basic strategy for it there's just and even the other players that weren't the big player were just bleeding money because in order for the game to operate how we wanted it to they had they were folding good hands so i mean they were just you know buying in for hundreds left and right
SPEAKER_00:i think you can hear in jamie and steve's voices the fact that today they're experienced players and when they found the game they were not experienced players so there's a That definitely shouldn't have worked going on. We got their
SPEAKER_01:table open probably at noon and we were there until the hour, like 4 or 5 a.m. I mean, they were, until we just couldn't like keep our eyes open anymore. We had just, we plowed through. I mean, we were swapping players in who just, you know, like my mom didn't want to play like long hours. So it was like 10 p.m. and we, you know, she left. And of course we had somebody waiting behind the table to go in. So, I mean, we were just, you know, these six people essentially all sitting at the table all day Clearly miserable. Like, nobody had any joy in the game. Looking back,
SPEAKER_00:it looked so bad. I've heard some AP stories where it sounds like it's SEAL Team 6 or Mission Impossible or something. You know, everyone has undergone so much training that every contingency is accounted for, and this rigorous preparation leaves nothing to chance. But the reason I like this story is that Jamie and Steve are admitting, no, it was not perfection. Steve brought his mom. She had to go to bed early. They were just doing the best they could. Here's Jamie again. If
SPEAKER_04:anybody looked at the table, and a number of people did, they would immediately come to the conclusion that, oh, okay, six people have flown from across the world to do something weird at this table.
SPEAKER_00:If you take a low amount of certainty in the edge you're chasing, then add in frustration due to logistical hurdles, and also sprinkle in a healthy amount of variance, eventually you will end up at a crisis of confidence.
SPEAKER_04:And it had sort of been like simmering for a while. And then the tensions had boiled over. And so they were always, they were just at each other's throats at this point. And so, uh, but the, one of the other guys that we were working with and myself, he was an exceptionally talented programmer. I was not so much, but I kind of, I could, you know, I could make do. Uh, he was like, okay, well you, you come and help because it's always, it's, you know, we're going to figure this thing out once and for all. So we go up to a different hotel room and we, uh, we find out, uh, certainly what the best strategy is. And it's, and so we come in down percent to the group and it's like, Hey, yeah. So on, on these categories of hands, we have like a 450% edge. And, and, That was the end of it. We were like, everyone was thrilled except for the two sort of top personalities that were still butting heads. Even at this moment of clarity, they were still butting heads. And so at that point, we had gathered people around the shuffle machine that we had brought into the hotel room and we were stacking the deck. So it's like, hey, check it out. Watch this. One ace, two ace, three ace, four aces. Our big player just got dealt quads. That's like 300 to one. Why are we arguing with each other? Let's go to the casino right fucking now.
SPEAKER_00:amazingly eventually this all started to work and that meant the attention that comes with winning so we should talk about the fact that these guys had a big player who was the only one at the table betting big if they were going to win it would be because that guy won here's steve uh yeah actually
SPEAKER_01:the teammate who um i had met initially with jamie he was somewhat the organizer of bringing us all together uh he you know it found me uh jamie because they had And the BP actually lived in the same town. And I think they had found each other probably in similar ways on a lot of those Craigslist or other forums. So that's purely just the fact that he lived nearby, you know, counted cards for fun and worked a day job. And yeah, the guy was a bit, you know, he was a character and just, he, he was definitely more of a gambler than an AP, but I mean, for our purposes, we were able to monitor him and make sure that, you know, he played correctly and didn't do anything, you know, that would be disastrous for us. Well, because we had had, we'd switched in a few different VPs, and that particular guy was about 20 years older than us, so he didn't, this is a bunch of young white 20, young 20-something year olds playing this game, and he's, you know, probably mid-40s at this time, you know, complete different accent, he was like, I think of Middle Eastern descent, or Eastern European rather, so very different demographic, so he didn't connect us quite Imagine you're on this
SPEAKER_00:team, and almost everyone at the table is supposed to be losing. On purpose. Except one guy, who's betting$1,500 a hand. And he's also pounding shots of tequila.
SPEAKER_01:So our BP was sitting at first base. He was betting the table limits for$5 to$500. We wanted to be too obvious, so we had our BP betting a spread of$25, well, 3x25, the way the bet structure worked, to 3x500. And our BP at the time, what a great guy, but, I mean, he just kept ordering shots of tequila to the table to the point where he just could not, like... function or so I mean I remember being at second base I was like push it push it so he's like right before the cards came out he's like oh I had to flop his$25 chips around to put up purples and it was just the most sloppy thing ever so I mean he didn't know the game but you know he's in his defense mechanism and this and other plays whenever things get even slightly you know hectic he starts ordering shots he you know It's happened in other casinos. If something gets, you know, he hits any type of heat, things like that, his first instinct is to just, I better order shots. So he's doing, you know, ordering shots of Cuervo, and he's like, every time the waitress would turn around, another shot of Cuervo. Like, I'm just playing cards. So, and everybody just automatically assumed he was from Boston. And it was great. I mean, and like I said, he was having lots of shots of Cuervo, and he... Got to the point where he basically had to sit next to him and nudge him like, no, don't do that. You're almost playing his hand for him because he couldn't function.
SPEAKER_00:If everything went right, then the casino wouldn't be able to figure out what was happening and they wouldn't be able to fix the game. If that sounds like a tall order, keep in mind that not even everyone in the team knew what was happening.
SPEAKER_04:It was like when it worked out, it was like a magic trick. In fact, the BP who was taking all the tequila shots in the hotel room when we were kind of like chopping up and trying to figure out how to catch ships and stuff like that. He was like basically just like sliding off the edge of the bed and being like, so what are you guys doing? Are you cheating? What are you doing? What are you marking cards? You got one of those gaffed arms in your sleeves? What are you doing?
SPEAKER_00:He had no clue. He didn't know what we were doing. It turns out that the same randomness that the casino relies on to obscure the true odds of its games also makes it tough for them to protect those games. They're looking at this table, trying to figure out what's happening, but it may as well just be noise or static. In fact, that creates another problem. Because humans are prone to train themselves on randomness, we don't need real signal in order to learn. If the choice is do nothing because we don't understand, or do something even though we've learned the wrong lesson, because we trained on noise? Well, we will usually opt for the train on noise slash do something combo. Jamie was close enough to hear the confused whispers of the pit bosses and floor supervisors.
SPEAKER_04:I think, and I was kind of closest to the conversation because they were trying to talk away from the guy who was betting the big money and I was on third base and the big money was on first. So my impression is that, because I overheard a few things and I forget what I overheard, but I remember my takeaway was, oh, they're doing this to try to change the procedure because they're not sure what else to do. And so that's, yes, that's what they did. They took the, the hands that were folded or discarded and then put them on the top of this slug of cards that was going into play. And then they would deal from the top of this card of these, of the slug that the cards that had been looked at by the players and then discarded or folded. And so I think after like four hands, they were just like, Oh, no, no, no, no. OK, actually, stop. Stop doing that. Stop. Stop doing that. Don't do that. That's not a good idea. My recollection is because there was a lot of whispering and pointing. My recollection was there like, OK, maybe if we try it like this, because I think that they were. Well, I know because I'd overheard them. They were saying, are they whole carding the game? The guy is like, no, we checked for that. They said, are they counting the game? They said, no, that's not possible. And they said, OK, well, just and they started changing stuff at random. But maybe, I don't know, it could have been just a nervous dealer because all those dealers got really nervous because there was like four, at some point there was like four supervisors like standing behind them freaking out on every, you know, every time. And here's Steve again.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's actually funny because most of the time, we found in our experience with other games, most of these procedures they do are a result of something they don't understand. For example, at a different casino, they were hit hard with Hulk harders And at one point, we were getting heat, hole-carding a carnival game, and I remember the pit boss going up to the dealer and scolding him for doing riffle, strip, riffle, instead of strip, riffle, strip, before putting the cards into the shuffle machine. So it showed how little they actually understand the games they're dealing or the machines they're using. And on the flip side of that, it's incredible to me that they're paying... such large sums of money these machines they clearly don't trust if they feel the need to stop and shuffle the cards before they shuffle the cards and the machine
SPEAKER_00:steve said he's also seen the wake created when another ap hits a casino the advantage player known as rx gamble or miss brown left a big enough mark that the casino employed sort of a belt and suspenders approach to protecting one game but they had a they
SPEAKER_01:call it i think the mrs brown rule at Caesars and Harrah's AC, where they would wash, like in single deck blackjack, they would wash the deck every single round before putting it into the shuffler. So you're getting 10, 15 rounds per hour. So it was one of those where they didn't know what was happening, so they just pulled out everything they could think of to try and fix this game. And they didn't even deal a whole card. It was dealt out of a machine. So the amount of time they wasted far outweighed any money they would have lost to an advantage player.
SPEAKER_00:Steve said that almost from the start, they were worried about how long this game would last. Advantage players always need for their action to be balanced out by recreational players, but this game just wasn't very popular. Yeah, it was, well,
SPEAKER_01:again, the two team members were kind of, they both had varying opinions on how to attack this. And I think we just played it as much as we could. And sure enough, two months later, the game was gone. And we were tracking the table hold online through the New Jersey gaming website. And we saw this game in the first month was great because that was probably us dumping money. But second and third month, especially in the middle of summer, that money just wasn't there. So we knew this was not going to last. So we basically played it until it was pulled. When it was all said and done, uh, probably low to mid five figures. And once you split it all up, it wasn't a great deal. This was more of, I think, a great learning experience than an actual cash cow. This was just kind of opened our eyes that there was more out there than just whole carding, card counting. It made us realize that there's opportunities everywhere you look, as long as you know what to look for. Here's Jamie again.
SPEAKER_04:I kind of almost like it because it's like, that was a, I don't know about you, Steve, but that was like a big growth moment for me in my career was like, wow, you know, we really got our hands on something that we shouldn't have. Does that make sense? Like we should not have like fucked with
SPEAKER_00:these dark arts. It's time. Steve has a hacker mind, but he's not the team's numbers guy or anything like that. He's just good at looking at systems and understanding how they work.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and it's funny too. I know a lot of other APs, they grew up playing games and things like that. That was never my background. I didn't have a background in math. I didn't play a lot of board games or things like that. Like I said, my whole thing was always just trying to tinker and figure things out as a kid and growing up. Just even things that had nothing to do with AP, that was always. And then this was the actual opportunity where I could use that skill set to really, you know, If you're thinking
SPEAKER_00:about going on eBay right now to look for used shufflers, you can probably save the effort.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's definitely not something you can go out and actively seek. You'll drive yourself nuts. It's a nice skill to have in the back of your mind for the very, very off chance that you do stumble upon it in this case. If I was to focus in on a shuffler play and only look for that, I would have been bankrupt a decade ago. It's such a rare thing. And I think the best way to do it is to have a basic understanding. And even I've told my other teammates who don't, fully understand the mechanics of it. Look, if you're ever in a casino and just see, you know, a game dealt in a way that is not what you're accustomed to or a game you've never seen before, just take note of, you know, how they deal it. Just take random notes, even if it seems innocuous. Just, you know, do they do this? You know, how do they collect the card? Just random things that to anybody, any casual observer, they would never think twice about.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, let's move on from this Atlantic City play, because we haven't even met the third guest for this episode. We started with Steve and Jamie just for chronological reasons, but eventually they got connected with Kyle, whose voice you are going to hear next. Kyle's start in Advantage play was, I don't want to say lucky, but I also don't not want to say lucky.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, actually, like, the very first time I went to the casino when I was 19 years old, or I guess my home casino, I went and I was like, I'm going to see if I can count cards. Like, this doesn't seem that hard. And I was literally playing a CSM game, which you can't count. But I was just trying to see if I could keep up or whatever. And what do you know? That dealer is showing me your whole card. Like, the very first one. So yeah, that's changed drastically the game plan. And of course, we never found that dealer again for years.
SPEAKER_00:So just the first time out and Kyle was hole carding. And the thing about Blackjack is that the house edge is small enough that just a little extra information to the player is going to wipe out the casino's advantage.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, just off the top of your head, if you knew basic strategy, you could definitely come up with a half-assed strategy to be better. Like if you see that the dealer has a 20, you're probably not going to stand on a 12 or whatever. But yeah, it was definitely not trained for it. That's for sure. But then right afterwards, then you can start training being like, oh, well, this is a thing. How do I get better at it? So we actually started like a little blackjack team with a few guys that I went to school with. And Obviously, this happened for a lot of people. When the movie 21 came out, that sparked a lot of interest for lots of people, I think. And I was playing at that point, but I wouldn't say well. And so that movie brought a couple friends and they were like, hey, he plays. Maybe we should start a team. So then we actually started taking it serious. And that was probably only a month or two after I started. So... Good timing, because who knows, might have been lost on a pretty lonely path by myself for a while if that never happened. But yeah, and then so we actually started shuffle tracking because it just so happened that the place right beside us had a great shuffle.
SPEAKER_00:So we're back to this repeating theme, which is that casino games can be vulnerable because the humans that work in casinos are humans. and just can't be expected to be perfect. You know, if the players know what the dealer's holding, that's not great. And if the players can just watch a very simple shuffle and follow high cards through that shuffle, again, not great.
SPEAKER_03:To be honest, we just kind of made it up as we went along and did try and do some research, but there's not a whole lot of research to do on... shuffle tracking. Like you can get into the real nitty gritty of exact expectations and stuff like that, but it's tough. And in a real world example, I don't know how well it actually translates. Like you don't need to be sitting at the table doing a whole bunch of complex formulas in your head to be playing a shuffle tracking game to whatever degree you want to play it to. So that was the hardest part was like convincing ourselves that, we did have an edge because we couldn't put like an exact edge on it whereas counting you can just run a simulator and you know exactly what your edge is but something like this we knew it was better than counting but exactly how much we weren't really sure after a few years of doing it though well you when you know that the good cards are coming out and all face cards and aces come out of the deck well it's pretty simple to tell that you're playing a winning game Don't worry about the numbers. Just go get the money.
SPEAKER_00:Kyle didn't start out with a regular job, then get bored with that and leave to become a professional gambler. He started out as an advantage player, then got bored with that and got an office job.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, right after school, it just didn't seem very appealing, I guess, to go and jump right into the workforce. It was still real fun to go on gambling trips and go explore places of the country that you've never seen before. And I didn't have a huge bankroll at the time. I think it was maybe$10,000,$20,000,$30,000, somewhere in that range. And it was kind of like, well, I'm going to make it or break it. I'm not going to sit here playing$5 games. I'm either going to go and actually make some money, or I've got a backup plan. I just finished engineering school, so I know what that wage is in the workforce. So if I can't at least make that... I'm not married to gambling, but let's give it a good honest effort. So I went out and it just kept going, I guess, for about five years until it got maybe a little bit boring. So I was just living on the road basically 100% of the time. At that point, a job was nowhere in my future. But after you spend enough time in dingy casinos, you realize you might want to actually do something with your life. So I broke down and got a day job, mainly
SPEAKER_00:just for something to do. In case you're interested, Kyle was actually on an episode of the Gambling with an Edge podcast about 10 years ago, because at one point he and an old playing partner got 86'd from a casino in Mesquite, Nevada. where they were hole carting, they got kicked out of a room they had paid for, and then while they were packing up to leave, casino security basically wouldn't let them go. This all resulted in a lawsuit for false imprisonment, where Kyle and his partner obtained a judgment against the casino. I asked Kyle if that was one of the things that made him more interested in getting a regular job.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I'm not so sure that it was the exact reason, but it's definitely just one of those factors that adds into like, okay, this isn't as fun anymore. Like if this is the kind of stuff that we're going to be dealing with on a daily basis and like those lawsuits take a long time, anybody that's been involved in one, I don't think anybody's had a good time doing it at the end of the three years. Most people just want their time back. So even if the payoff is okay at the end, it's still a grind. But, uh, yeah, when I was applying, I, uh, I kind of was expecting a call back. I didn't know when, though. And, well, I was going to go playing. So I got a random call from an area code near me. Picked it up. I was on Fremont Street, actually, at the time. And they were like, hey, can you come in for an interview on Wednesday? I think it was a Monday. I was like, uh, not really. No, like, I'm in Vegas right now. Sorry, I'm just on a holiday. They're like, okay, never mind. We'll call somebody else. I go, actually, you know what? Like... Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Burnout is a real thing. Like, if you're
SPEAKER_03:playing all the time, getting kicked out all the time, going to jail, like, certain things... Or maybe you just have a few plays in a row where you immediately, something stupid happens. Like you get backed off or another crew rolls into town and there's competition or a lot of things back to back to back can just kind of sour it a little bit for you. It turns into more of a job instead of that glamorous lifestyle that you thought you were signing up for. So that was probably it. It just turned out at some point I wasn't going as much. And I was like, you know, I should probably look into just getting a job and kind of to balance, like a work-life balance, but like a work-work balance. So the first few years that I worked, I had the winters off. So it was a pretty good position. Like I would work for six months and then I would go playing on the road for six months. For a lot of these plays, things change weekly, monthly. Like say you're playing a whole card game. You can't just walk into a place for a weekend and and assume that you're going to have better information than any competition or know any dealer schedules or anything like that. So you need more than a weekend. So if you get a full six months, well, you can be out there putting a pretty good rotation together, traveling all around the country and not burning games out, but kind of recycling games. And then it's built in cover also. Like you actually do have a job. You can actually talk about realistic things and maybe not show your faces often, because a lot of times if you're just sitting there for two months straight, well, that's a bad look.
SPEAKER_00:I guess when I think of a young guy who spent the first five years of his adult life bouncing around casinos, getting 86'd, sometimes not quite arrested, etc. I mean, I would think of that person as basically feral when it comes to sitting down and doing a regular job. But Kyle says he took to work life pretty readily.
SPEAKER_03:I personally just like going to work some days. I like that sense of accomplishment. So at the start, it's it's a new job, right? It's nice to get out there and start learning. And the job that I had, I didn't really have any experience in the field. So it was a crazy learning curve. So I think that it flew like the first couple of years, you're just always learning something every day. So it's pretty easy to get up out of bed in the morning.
SPEAKER_00:Jamie told me that one time he was at a riverboat in the Midwest and he was waiting for a whole card game to materialize. So he was sitting at one of those automatic roulette machines and Then he started to watch the wheel and he noticed that the same number kept coming up. So he called Kyle and said, you should come to this casino. Here's Kyle again. I
SPEAKER_03:was working. I remember I had to take like a few days off and flew down to Chicago. And that was basically moments notice. So I just, I can take time off pretty easily at work. So I think like the next day I was on a flight out of there and then I came back a week later and everybody's like, so what were you doing on your holiday? Oh, just
SPEAKER_00:playing roulette. We should probably spend a little time talking about why an AP might think that roulette is even beatable. All right. First, basically from the advent of modern computers, gamblers have been using them to try to beat roulette. That includes people like Ed Thorpe and Claude Shannon. Thorpe and Shannon got a prototype of their device working in the 1960s and they had something like a 40 percentage. Then there was also a book, called The Eudaimonic Pie, about a group of physicists that built roulette computers. Actually, I've heard that Netflix is working on a documentary about that effort. Okay, then after the Eudaimons threw in the towel on their roulette project, it was picked up by some blackjack players. You might remember we had Mark Billings on the show, and he talked a little bit about that. Mark also wrote a book about biased roulette wheels, which is a different approach that doesn't require having a computer in the casino. It's just collecting data and using stats to determine whether that wheel favors certain numbers. The idea is that roulette wheels are mechanical devices. Eventually, all mechanical devices break down, and that might happen in a way that would make some numbers more likely. Then, there was also a book about roulette prediction using just naked eye, so this doesn't require a computer, and also doesn't involve recording 7,000 roulette spins. The book was written by Lawrence Scott. I think that Bloomberg had an article about a European guy who is known to be a professional roulette player, and it seems like he probably does it without a computer. The play we're going to hear about also involves just watching the wheel. No computer involved. Here's Kyle again.
SPEAKER_03:To be honest, it's a stupid story. Why would I think that I can go and beat this machine that's in like a hundred different casinos at this point? Like it's obviously not beatable. That's what any sane person would think. But I guess like in this industry, when somebody thinks that they have a game and is passionate about it, it's like you take that and you run with it because they're trained basically to look for these scenarios. There's probably something there. And sure enough, there was. not what we were thinking it was, but there was a way to beat it.
SPEAKER_00:I will point out that thus far we've heard about an exploitable automatic shuffler and now we're talking about beating a roulette wheel. We are well beyond the simple world of keeping track of high cards and low cards or just seeing the dealer's whole card. This all sounds complicated. So I asked Jamie, Shirley, if these are the kinds of things you're willing to go after, you must have times where you expend a bunch of effort or even money chasing something that that turns out to be a nothing. How do you even qualify which rabbit holes are worth going down? I
SPEAKER_04:think I have really because I think one of the benefits to having like a group of friends like this is, you know, that all trust each other is that whenever I have like some big stupid idea, I floated by the other guys and, you know, oftentimes they're just like, that's stupid, here's why. And it's like, oh, okay, yeah, good point. So, I think a lot of the real rabbit holes can be avoided by, you know, this sort of, um, you know, group mindset or this collective mindset. But I think without that, I probably would have wound up down some rabbit holes. I've still got a couple rabbit holes that I think are, like, looking pretty cool to me. And here's Kyle again.
SPEAKER_03:I think the initial thought was that the game was just very easy to beat and there was no countermeasures in place and the slightest little, like, maybe it was worn out or something. Like, it was just old. And we basically just thought that it was like a printing press. That's how it was described to me is that, hey, the ball shoots out of this thing and it hits the same number every time. Like it's free money. That's basically what I flew down there thinking. I should have known that that wasn't going to be the case, that it would actually take a little bit of thinking. But I think the basis of the problem at the end of the day, the part that we exploited was that it was crooked. Like it wasn't level. At first glance, we couldn't really pick up what it was. It seemed to always leave the track at the same spot. And you have to remember, we're not really trained in looking at roulette. So we're coming up with this just off the top of our heads. So we just watched it for, I don't know, maybe an hour or two. Kind of figured out what's happening and what methods the game developer has put in place to thwart roulette. advantage players and then which one of those maybe aren't working correctly.
SPEAKER_00:Lots of recreational gamblers also look at roulette and find patterns in the results. But the thing that separates our guests from the recreational players is that Jamie and Kyle took it seriously. They started with one idea and then they had to move on to another strategy that fit what they were seeing. They didn't just sit there and keep banging away at black 24 because it had come up a lot recently. Here's Kyle.
SPEAKER_03:We were just sitting back at this place just brainstorming all the different ways that you would potentially beat this machine. And then we kind of just dumbed it down into simple principles of like, okay, you have certain variables. Which ones do you know? Which ones aren't actually variables because the machine is broken? And then from there, how do you exploit those? So in this case, we had a very, very good feeling that the ball would land in a certain spot every single time. Given that it's launched from the same spot every time, if it does the same number of revolutions around the wheel, you can be pretty much assured that it takes the same amount of time to get to that spot. So that was kind of the basis for our theory. And the one thing about this wheel that is very tough to find these days or even back then was that you had a long time to bet. So I think you had something like 10 or 11 seconds after the ball was shot out to place a bet. And we found that it only took about 16 seconds, just over, for the ball to fall. So you could watch half of the spin. And we knew that at the halfway point, if I could just pick one number on the wheel at a certain spot, that I knew which one it would fall into, basically. The tough part was keeping your timing for exactly a certain amount of time without using a stopwatch, obviously. The hard part was training your brain to remember not down to the millisecond, but down to the tenth of a second for sure and keep track of that, basically. In the background, Jamie would be watching to make sure that the wheel was still spinning at a constant rate or something very close to a constant rate because the wheels also change velocity as they're spinning around we ended up finding that it would allow you to watch the wheel for long enough that we basically split it in half we knew how many times the ball went around we knew its cycle length and at that half cycle length we knew where the ball would fall off of the wheel so we basically said the ball is going to go precisely double this. So whatever number is sitting right at this spot, it ended up being 8.35 seconds. If you could pick a number that was in your drop zone right there at 8.35 seconds, well, that cycle would double at 16.7 seconds when the ball would eventually fall off in the same spot basically every time. Easy, right? 8.35 seconds. So we basically got really, really good at knowing exactly what 8.35 seconds is because as a roulette wheel is spinning around, a tenth of a second is large. Like that's a pretty big margin for error. And I don't think that's a very tough thing to screw up to be off by a tenth of a second in your counting.
SPEAKER_00:This all sounds complicated, but if you think about it this way, you can see where it could definitely work. The various computer roulette prediction efforts produced very high player edges, you know, over 40%. And then if you just pick at random, it's a casino advantage of a little more than 5%. So by approximating the steps a computer might go through, can you shift off of that minus 5% and turn things positive? It would be great to be perfect, but if you just have a good process that makes your quarter of the wheel relatively more likely, that could work.
SPEAKER_04:So you needed that time, and then you needed somebody to watch the ball. Because not every spin was a good spin, so you had to have a rhythm for how the ball... It had to be a fast ball, and if it wasn't a fast ball, then it just was not going to work. So... I was on the ball rhythm and Kyle was on the timer. He wasn't just doing it in his head. I don't know how he did it. I could never. I was trying different things like measuring the like the intros of different songs and stuff like that to see if any of them landed around the perfect time. And a few of them did, but I was still getting it wrong. So Kyle, who was just able to come up with a way to do that himself, I don't know how he did it, but he did it. And from time to time, we would have to go and take a break. Like once, you know, if if we started getting misses, we you know, he would go to the bathroom and just like recalibrate himself with his phone's timer or something like that
SPEAKER_00:we can view essentially everything we talk about on this podcast through a bayesian framework right maybe your prior is something like the house always wins or to use an example from the stock market the efficient market hypothesis and then it's going to require strong new information and to move off that prior. But if you can look at a roulette wheel and see that it's just not installed correctly, well, maybe you have the basis for a revised belief. From there, you can make a prediction and see whether the unseen data also supports your move away from the house always wins. Okay, and it might not. I mean, you could come up with a system to beat roulette and you make predictions and collect data and it's just buckshot noise. That's not what you're looking for. Although, I should say, that's not what these guys found. When they started betting, the data landed on their side. Here's Kyle.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, like at one point fairly early on, we watched the ball just drop into the exact target number three times in a row. And at that point, that's pretty much impossible to do. And if it's not impossible, well, I'm willing to lose a little bit of money on it. But it just kept working and working and working. And the odd time, like it's roulette, the ball bounces around like crazy sometimes. But it bounced around a
SPEAKER_00:shockingly small amount. At the risk of stating the obvious, being able to predict which number is coming is only useful if you can actually bet that number.
SPEAKER_03:A few settings on the machine actually were very, very helpful, like how long you can bet for, what bets you can make. So a lot of the time, if you want to bet a sector of the wheel, I don't know a roulette wheel well enough to just rattle off the 10 numbers surrounding number one. Some people do know that, some roulette players, and that's very impressive, but I'm not going to learn that overnight. So there's ways to literally bet, like... 10 numbers all right beside each other. Yeah. You would end up, uh, pressing a bet on your target number and then you just hit another button and it would spread it out two at a time in each direction until you hit the maximum that it would spread out, which I think was four numbers on each side. And then every time that you would hit that same button, it would double your bet. So we would, we were using$10 units and so it ended up giving you nine numbers. And then every time you'd hit it, it would go up to$20,$30,$40. Yeah, we would try and stay under the W2G limit because for some reason, even though it's a table game, it's kind of a slot machine. So if you win over$1,200, then they would have to hand pay you and it would take forever. And then now the casino is blotching because nobody plays these for big money. Like people play them for$1.
SPEAKER_00:Kyle said that they tried to avoid W2G hand pays, but their system wasn't perfect.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so when you were betting, you really didn't have a whole lot of time to bet. You would see the number, and you just have to start tapping the screen as fast as you can. But the difference is, if you tap the screen nine times or ten times, well, that's the difference of a W2. So sometimes in the heat of the moment, you would just hit it too many times. And you'd end up having like$50 on each number. And then that triggers a W-2. So it's okay because you won, but you'd rather not win that big. So for the first couple days, I would say there was almost no attention at all. It was in a casino that's not very good. There was almost nobody in there. But once you hit a few W-2Gs... Then people kind of start watching because it locks up the machine. It starts making weird noises. Everybody's looking like, oh, that guy must have won a jackpot. Wait, it's roulette. What's happening?
SPEAKER_00:Eventually, these guys had won enough money and they were getting burned out from watching the wheel. And they were getting a little attention from the sketchy kinds of people that hang out in casinos. So they called it good enough. Here's Jamie.
SPEAKER_04:And it would be like, oh, like four weird misses in a row that were kind of like, And, you know, we didn't really understand. And we were like, well, we don't really know. Like, we're not professionals at this by any means. We don't really know what's going on. But I'm always much more of a nit. So I was like, okay, look, it seems like, you know, we got crazy unlucky like five times in a row or something like that. Maybe that means something too. I don't know. Maybe conditions changed. We don't really know. So eventually, but we certainly didn't lose it all back. We won a bunch of money. But we... went back and we were like okay you know that was a good that was good we just made a bunch of money that was a good uh introduction to the game let's go again tomorrow kind of thing i
SPEAKER_03:think we ended up making right around fifty thousand dollars or something like that in a weekend um we noticed that at the end of the days we would start we weren't on or it seemed like we weren't on and for Jamie and Kyle were aware
SPEAKER_00:of the prior work done on roulette prediction because they had heard one of the authors. Lawrence Scott on gambling with an edge they actually emailed Richard Munchkin and said hey can you put us in touch with Lawrence Scott but they didn't hear back apparently Scott is used to getting all manner of inquiries about roulette from complete cranks although then eventually they did hear back
SPEAKER_04:but what had happened afterwards is we actually did get a response from him from Lawrence Scott and he said something along the lines of So I hear you guys were in Chicago. And what had happened is some people that he knew, just by absolute coincidence, had come in after we had played. Because, yeah, Kyle was like, look, I need to go home. And, you know, I couldn't play it on my own. So the attitude was kind of one of like, well, you know, who's going to come across and hit this game, right? But, of course, in the days after we had played it, a group of players had come in. After
SPEAKER_00:figuring it out for themselves on this initial roulette attempt, Jamie has learned a lot more about the game. To quote him, we've been asked to leave the nicest casino in the world over roulette. And that's because he's become friends with people who know a lot more about it than he does.
SPEAKER_04:built with with lauren scott and everything that i know about the game now except for like the weird way that we kind of did it in our first attempt at it everything else i know now is because of him so it's kind of difficult to um to really say Because it would all be, it's all stolen valor from that point forward, 100%. So I can't really claim any sort of credit for anything except for pretty much just kind of looking at this wheel initially and being like, huh, maybe there's something to it. That is pretty much the extent of my contribution to the entire endeavor.
SPEAKER_00:For the first two plays we've heard about, the entity on the business end of these moves was the casino. Every dollar in our guest's pocket was a dollar the casino couldn't earn. But for this next play, it didn't actually cost the casino anything. I am mentioning this because it's probably relevant to the amount these guys made on the play and also how long this thing went on.
SPEAKER_03:So, like, when, during COVID... Everybody was living online, basically. You'd be having virtual happy hours with your friends and stuff. That's when we kind of really started putting our heads together. We had a group chat of just... I think it was just called schemes. It was just whatever you could think of, like, throw it in the group chat. Maybe there's an angle to it. Maybe we'll make some money on something. And it was more just... Not even like a nailed-down process, but just like a spitballing of ideas. And then, yeah, one day we ended up finding sweepstakes casinos.
SPEAKER_00:Sweepstakes casinos are fantastic. The entire industry is based on a low-effort industry. end-run-around laws that are meant to prohibit exactly the thing that's happening. I mean, it's almost too stupid to believe. You know, a bunch of states have laws barring online casinos, but then there's this weird federal law that allows sweepstakes, and so it creates something of a loophole. And to be fair, there are some massive businesses employing the sweepstakes model, which goes to show that Americans love nothing more than to create regulations that can be easily circumvented, sometimes with just semantics. Alright, imagine you're Thank you for watching. Anyway, these casinos have even gotten attention from credit card folks because you can earn points on your deposits and even earn deposit bonuses and maybe even get some free play. Then after you hit a 1x playthrough requirement, you just cash out. Or anyway, that's how it used to work. These things have tightened up over time. Well, our guests figured out that while the grinders were working for credit card points, there were much bigger edges, sometimes being advertised on the casino's front page. This was really a group effort involving Jamie's wife and another guy they play with sometimes who goes by Rubber Band. Here's Jamie.
SPEAKER_04:Uh, rubber band found the site and he was like, Hey, check this out. They're doing like a half off free play promo basically. And you can pay with a credit card. That's sick. And you know, it was like, okay, cool, whatever. And then, uh, my wife is actually the one who found the specific game. that we were beating because she was like oh look there's a whole list of games that I can just like you know check on and she found this one and presented it to our group chat basically and I think Kyle and rubber band were the first two to realize just how good it was they were like oh we're gonna make a lot of money
SPEAKER_00:if you haven't heard any of our episodes that cover slot machines we can just say that a lot of slot machines essentially work by calling a random number from a distribution that skewed to And that same random process plays out spin after spin. But not every machine works like that. Some slots might go through various states that persist across spins. And so there are times where the machine expectation is lower and other times where it actually exceeds 100%. That could happen if you see something on the screen that's being banked, like free spins being collected. Or it could happen in the case of a jackpot. That's guaranteed to hit by a certain number. If you see a slot machine that says must hit by 1000 and each spin increments the jackpot by one cent or whatever. Well, if you walk up to the machine and the jackpot is at$999 and 99 cents, well, what's the EV of the next spin? This isn't a trick question. So that's the kind of game these guys found. And to get back to a point I made earlier, the casino is paying that jackpot, whether an AP hits it, or a recreational player hits it. So this is a situation where the casino and the APs aren't facing off against each other in the same zero-sum game they're accustomed to. They can actually both win. The recreational players that play the game get absolutely rinsed, but the APs and the casino are both winners in this situation. Here's Kyle.
SPEAKER_03:She just looked harder than most people and ended up finding this game and put it into our schemes chat and said, hey, is there anything here? Like, cause I think at that point I was playing a lot of slots already. So somebody was like, oh yeah, Kyle, like what's that, what's this worth? Can you beat this? And then I said, uh, yeah, that's, that's definitely worth playing it. It actually took almost a month to figure out what the, uh, meter percentage was because you have to find a time during the day where nobody else is playing. And at this point the game was fairly popular, but So you could have a kind of rough idea of what that is. You could just go and bet$100 and kind of drown out some of the noise that was on the game. But the way that the meter moves up, it was tough to tell. It was like, well, maybe it's 1% payback. Maybe it's 2%. Like, it doesn't really matter at that point because it's so high. But I've never seen anything like that either. So maybe I'm wrong because what are the chances I just found a unicorn? So it took almost a month at four in the morning when nobody was playing and we had definitive proof of like, this is the contribution rate. And then from there, you can nail it down to like dollars and cents perfectly, basically. Like, you know exactly what that game is worth then.
SPEAKER_00:There are high school dropouts that have figured out how these must hit by machines work, but Kyle is an engineer. So he has to use that sometimes, right?
SPEAKER_03:It's like a second level differential equation that you have to solve. using calculus so that's to fully optimize it at least anybody with a calculator can probably figure out like hey at this number it's good but they don't know exactly why or if is it optimal it's nice playing online because you can actually play at an optimal time because you don't have to wait for somebody to get off and smoke 400 cigarettes and 30 beers and five days later then they finally get off the machine you can just play whenever you want Yeah, so the one jackpot was$500 and the other one was$2,500. And we would probably get, I think it was about an average of 10 plays a day on the small jackpot. And the bigger one, the$2,500 jackpot, we'd probably get a play on that every
SPEAKER_00:few days. Every two to three days. The guys told me that originally they asked Steve to write a bot. that would alert them when the jackpot reached a level that was playable. But then they were like, nah, we'll just hawk this thing 24-7. Here's Steve again.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we had like almost an unwritten schedule. I'm an early person, so I'd wake up, check it, you know, send in our group chat. Okay, the numbers or the meters are at X and Y. And then later at night, it would be, you know, Jamie and Kyle. And it kind of worked out to where we had somebody almost watching it indirectly 24-7.
SPEAKER_00:Kyle says that they could see there were other users who understood that the game was positive and were jumping into play the higher meter numbers, but our guests went in with overwhelming force.
SPEAKER_03:The more that you bet, the more chances you have to win. So you want more people and you want bigger bets. But at some point, if you don't know that the website is even legitimate, do you really want to go and fire off like... a$500 spin rapid fire and be down a whole pile of money. Well, especially if you maybe don't know that you're going to get paid or there's a long list of reasons that you wouldn't just start max betting right off the hop. But it took about a month until we felt confident. And then we started ramping up our bets from$5 and$10 bets to$100 bets. And if you're chasing a jackpot that's only$500 and you're making$100 bets, Well, that's going to be some wild variance.
SPEAKER_00:Remember that because they're winning, they don't really need to be depositing. But deposits are plus EV due to the credit card points and the deposit bonuses. So a real greedy pig would max those out and probably annoy the shit out of the casino and maybe kill the game early too. Anyway, Jamie says they didn't take it there.
SPEAKER_04:Because... deposits were really seamless and instantaneous and done via credit card and withdrawals were quite seamless as well like it didn't make a lot of logistical sense to keep a large balance on there nobody was keeping like I mean there'd be from time to time would have large balances on there due to the nature of you know the swings of the game but like nobody was holding a large amount of money on there and the deposit options at the time were also like a thousand dollars max and it would only take a few minutes to deposit several thousand dollars and you didn't really ever need more than that for a play. So it was kind of a lot of the times, I mean, a lot of the times we'd get lazy and just keep balances, but you know, it would be like, okay, well, we've got a play coming up. I'll throw a few thousand dollars on there. And then when it's done, if I win, great. If I lose, well,
SPEAKER_00:so be it. When you first find something like this in the early going, it would be easy to stay motivated because you would be sure that it's just not going to last. But as time goes on and it stays good, your relationship with the urgency of the matter would change. Here's Kyle.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I think I just like playing all kinds of games. I like beating things basically where you're not supposed to be able to. So this play in particular was awesome because at the start, it's like, oh, I've never done something like this before. Let's start it. A couple months in, you're like, oh, yeah, this is actually good money. Let's keep doing it. Then it becomes a grind. But now the money's good. So it's like, well, this is a lot easier than my day job. like several times easier than that. I guess I'll just keep playing for a little bit. And at some point you want to keep playing just so nobody else can almost like you want to win. And if you're not playing that game, somebody else is probably going to be playing that game. So I got to play that game. Um, it's kind of probably a bad way to put it, I guess. I think my girlfriend probably hated me for a little bit because like I was basically married to the screen. Like we would have, 10 plays a day on average some days were more busier on the site than others sometimes they would have that specific game like on the splash screen so right when you would log in to the website it would be the very first game or maybe there'd be like a promotion on that game well on those days we never put the phone down like the meter would just be flying i think one day we played almost 100 times so that's that's basically all day but yeah at all points of the night there'd be somebody's checking in your phone's just going nuts and but for the first little bit it seemed awesome because this is the heart of covid everybody's like oh we can just work from our phones now that's the new way of life so it didn't seem that bad until you realize like you're basically becoming a drone on your phone all day every day i still think i have a little mild ptsd of the exact ringtone i had for that group chat like i hate that noise but eventually once we stopped playing it uh as often because the game was changed they basically changed up some payback percentages and it it's no longer what it used to be in the heyday but then the phone was silent for a while and it was weird And it's hilarious when you're out with friends or family because they kind of know what you're doing. You're like, yeah, I have to play this. And they're like, why do you have to play slots at a concert right now? That's crazy.
SPEAKER_00:There's an interesting thing that happens with advantage players or really any edge seeker where it's incredibly easy to get dialed in to the thing they know how to do. And then as a result, they're going to miss other stuff. I mean, I can think of times where people told me about something that was good, and I just ignored it for longer than I'm proud to admit. And I've told other people about stuff, and they go, yeah, yeah, uh-huh, neat. I think it's just a thing where our minds can't keep every possible angle in memory, so we have to make some choices. Here's Kyle.
SPEAKER_03:If you just get in a rut doing what you do, you're probably going to miss something that is right in front of your face. I know a ton of people that are on this exact same website and they've never found it, but they've probably stared at it plenty of times. Another thing is if it's going poorly for one person, especially stuff that's very high variance, would you have kept playing? Maybe you wouldn't have thought it was as great of an edge. Maybe you would have been discouraged and Not even like, oh, I can't make money at this, but just maybe you wouldn't think it's worth as much as it actually is until three other guys are, hey, no, like, let's keep going. We're very confident in this. We have to at least keep giving it a shot because for like one of our group members lost for like an entire year, like there's no way that they would have kept playing. They would have thought that the game was rigged, but it wasn't rigged. It was just another member in the group won for a year straight.
SPEAKER_00:Kyle showed me a graph of the team results, and this thing was up and to the right and smooth. Remember that after the initial math involved, the only thing it required was just watching the jackpot meter and then pressing a button on a phone. So that's good work if you can get it. But importantly, the individual players did not have these results on their own. That was the team graph. The individual results looked like roller coasters. They had one player who won all the time, and then Steve was about the opposite of that. Apparently Steve needs to put in some time practicing his button pushing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I felt so bad. It was almost to the point where I was sending screenshots and everything. Nobody's going to believe that I'm doing this poorly when everyone else is just printing money. It's one of those situations where it's like, I know there's a high level of trust here, but I almost felt the need to further prove myself. Like, guys, I promise you I'm not doing anything sketchy here. It's It was almost like a joke, like,
SPEAKER_00:Steve lost again, you know. You can see that having a team meant that they were able to avoid the variance they would have experienced as individuals. And maybe you're sitting there thinking, who cares about variance if you're plus EV? Okay, all of this stuff involves uncertainty piled on top of uncertainty. Like, did you run the numbers correctly? Or is this some kind of a honeypot meant to draw in APs, but actually it's a scam? EV is about the long run, but volatility makes it less likely you'll ever get to the long run. Here's Steve again. I mean, I definitely
SPEAKER_01:had a few wins, but I mean, we had one player who seemed to just win hand over fist, and the rest of them, you know, did pretty well. And for whatever reason, I just, I mean, I would have given up on that play years ago if we weren't a team, just out of sheer thinking the
SPEAKER_00:game was rigged. Having friends turns out to be a pretty important thing for lots of reasons, so we are going to talk about that. I'm calling this the AP Friends section of the episode. Here's Jamie.
SPEAKER_04:I wouldn't be able to do this on my own, that's for sure. And I wouldn't want to either, like I couldn't imagine. You know, I've taken a few solo trips and they're all just so miserable, you know? I think that a big contribution to my success, I could say certainly, I don't want to speak for anything else, but is the sort of Our guests
SPEAKER_00:have been at this for a number of years now, so they know each other, and they know a slew of other APs as well. Here's Steve.
SPEAKER_01:It just becomes a matter of logistics, really. You think of other people, their strengths and weaknesses, and also, do I need bodies for this? Do I need capital? Would I need a person to analyze this? Do I need somebody who's nearby to... come verify my observation or do I need a person to lock up a seat? What skills would benefit me most for this play? And then really kind of just break out the Rolodex and based on that and availability, just go down the line and say, hey, I have this. I'm not sure if it's good or not, but I think it is. Do you want to fly out here tomorrow and take a look, see for yourself, and we can put our heads together and then go from there.
SPEAKER_00:Steve says that if you can do something with your friends, you might not even be that concerned with how much you're going to make off the play. Since there are casinos everywhere, that means these guys can meet up all over the U.S. and have a trip that's part work and part fun.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, sometimes you end up working really, really hard for what may not seem like a lot of money at the time in comparison to other things. But, I mean, Jamie and I, for sure, definitely just... We should do this for the story. It may just be the most obscure... ridiculous thing where you would look at it on the surface you're like what are we doing it's like we have to do it for the story there's times where Jamie Kyle and I or others we would go if we knew a game that wasn't I mean it was positive but not you're not you know getting rich from it we'll go hang out have some drinks play some cards you know just you know BS and just have fun. It was just our way of doing it and especially it's like we're all coming from different parts of the country or the world even meeting up in a random small town in Minnesota or wherever it may be and this was like our little kind of guys weekend
SPEAKER_00:get together. Kyle says that if you're working with people who bring something to the table then even if you're splitting up the money you're still further ahead than you'd be on your own.
SPEAKER_03:Any type of plays that last for a while. Say anything that's online, we're probably going to split. I wouldn't say that it's like if we find a play, we have to split it with each other. A lot of times we want to split it with each other because it brings in more minds. For a lot of the plays, bankroll isn't really an issue, but it can help. Maybe you have a big play and you want to split it up a few ways. Mostly just having more brainpower to attack a given problem.
SPEAKER_04:If it's something that's going to require, you know, complicated technical analysis, then I'm going to talk to Kyle about it. If it's just, you know, it's just a group chat, right? So, you know, I'd post it in the group chat and hope that Kyle answers. If it's something that, you know, I don't know, most gambling things, I probably do float by everyone just to kind of, you know, keep in touch, really. Like if I'm thinking about banking at the local card room or something like that, I'd probably let everyone know. And I'd just be like, oh, here's what I'm up to. And they'd be like, that sounds cool.
SPEAKER_00:There's another part of the division of labor as well, which is that sometimes it can be helpful to have people who don't mind the stuff that you're not crazy about and someone there to motivate you for stuff you kind of don't want to do.
SPEAKER_01:Or the funny thing about me is that I enjoy just figuring the games out. But once it's figured out, actually playing them is almost just torture. Especially the games that are so mind-numbing, like Shuffler Plays, because you're just, it's kind of like pressing a button on a slot machine for hours on end. You're not really thinking anymore. It just becomes so robotic. It's like the mental stimulation from figuring it out is ended. Now it's just going there to actually play it. And it's
SPEAKER_00:grueling. When Steve got started in Advantage Play, he actually kept working his other jobs for a number of years. Eventually, he did commit to full-time life as a gambler, although not until after he'd also used his day job to help the team out.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so it was spring of 2013, and my now wife and I, we were ending our seasonal jobs in Florida, and I came up with a crazy idea. Like, what if we got seasonal jobs in Atlantic City for the summer? And... She somehow went along with it. So we went up for a couple interviews. Long story short, we were both hired at a restaurant in Golden Nugget. And we started shortly after Memorial Day. Worked there for the better part of the summer. And after about a month, I realized that in the break room, which was shared with the rest of the staff, that they had posted the dealer schedules. And this is during a time when whole card games are just rampant there. And there was many other competing teams. And I was able to interpret the schedules to where we would have one of our players on the right table when the shift started. Because before that, you had just multiple teams just had one of their players basically on each table right before shift change, hoping that their dealer got put on the right table. But once this all happened, Magically, one of our players is always on the
SPEAKER_00:right table at the right time. I think the APs are also happy to look for ways they can cooperate because without other advantage players, it would be a pretty lonely life. The rest of the world just isn't interested in understanding this thing. Here's Kyle.
SPEAKER_03:Most people aren't going to understand on just a general term because casinos are still full of people, right? If people understood, they probably wouldn't be in the casino playing their money. So that's a pretty good basis. Some people do understand though, and they realize that they see what we're betting and they go, yeah, I guess I could do that, but I really hate gambling. I don't want to lose that much money to potentially win a small amount of money. It's just not appealing. Or like some of my good friends would see how often I'm on the phone and And they were like, yeah, that doesn't seem good to me. I'm not going to do
SPEAKER_00:that. So these guys are all very cooperative with each other and they have a network of additional players that might help out from time to time. But what about when they run into other crews in the casino? As in, are these people friends or maybe peers or competition?
SPEAKER_04:I can't speak for everybody, but I am a lot more, uh, I don't want to say friendly because that's going to make it sound like a lot of these guys are mean, not mean, but they're just more competitive than me in terms of, in terms of, um, in terms of games. Like if I see somebody else on a game that I've been playing, my first instinct will be like, if I don't know them, I'll be like, Oh, that's interesting. A new face. Like maybe I could talk to the guy. Maybe I can make a friend. And a lot of times it will be somebody that I know and I'll just text them and it'll just be like, LOL. Hi. You know? And Oh, okay. Yeah. Hey, there you are. Right. But, um, Yeah, I'm not like if there's like another group in wherever I'm playing and they're playing, too. I know, you know, I don't know if I'm an outlier here, but I'll just be like, OK, well, you know, I'm just going to go home because I don't if if it's a group that I know. then I'll already know that they're going to have me outgunned. They're going to have more people than me. They're going to have more this, that, and everything else. And if I know them, I'm friendly with them anyway. If I know them, what I'll actually do is I'll just text them and say, hey, what's up? And if I don't know them, I'll watch them play and I'll try to make contact with them or something. But I don't know what it is they're all about. I don't know what their comportment's like. I don't know how aggressive they are. And I don't know what their past heat is and all this stuff. So, you know, it just would, it could just be like a bigger problem than it's worth for me. And at the end of the day, I don't take huge long trips. I really value my personal time. I value my time at home. I value my time with my family. So to be honest with you, a lot of times when I'm out on a trip or I'm out playing, I'm looking for any excuse to pack it in, you know, because I'd rather be back home.
SPEAKER_00:If someone tells you a story about how one of their first forays into big time advantage play involved a shuffling machine and a tequila drinking big player, you might ask, how long after that did you become a bank teller? But these guys have now had full careers as advantage players and they've been at it long enough. They don't really have to do anything they don't want to. They've reached the stage that lots of APs seem to hit, which is not quite retired, not really killing themselves looking for new plays either. Here's Steve.
SPEAKER_01:It's funny. During COVID, I tried to venture into other things and a few side projects, but it almost seems like I keep getting drawn back into it for whatever reason. You kind of think in the back of your head, okay, I just want to hit X amount and then I'll just do it as a hobby. It's kind of like how Richard Munchkin says, retiring is great. I've done it many times. It's so relatable because once you really get into it, especially full-time, you can't really go back and you can try to do other things, but you're always on the lookout for an AP move, whether it's in, you know, casinos, travel, everything you can think of. You just always look at it, my mindset. So you always get just drawn back or you get that phone call from a teammate or, you know, acquaintance who's like, Hey, let's go play this game. I just found it. And you're like, okay, I'll be right there. So there's no actual retiring this far. I don't, I've thought about what my end goal is, but right now I just keep playing as the landscape keeps changing with online gaming and just sports and everything else. It seems like I don't think retirement's anywhere in my near future. I mean, I've definitely backed off some and work primarily during the seasons and take the summer off.
SPEAKER_00:I asked Kyle what he thought he would be doing in five years, and he basically said, No idea, but he knew what he didn't want to be doing.
SPEAKER_03:To be totally honest, I don't really think a whole lot about my five-year plan. As long as it's still fun and not a complete grind, some days are obviously going to be a grind. That's just life. You're not going to have perfect days every single day. But would I be hoping to be sitting on my phone playing online slots? In five or ten years? No thanks, I probably have something better to do with my life.
SPEAKER_00:Jamie is also coasting into this not-retired, also-not-killing-himself state. But I thought it might be interesting to hear how that manifests for Advantage players.
SPEAKER_04:Oh, I've slowed way down. I've slowed way down. I mean, yeah, I think everybody kind of pretty quickly gets to a point of sort of quasi-retirement. You know, I'd probably basically be quasi-retired now, but I've got, you know, a young child and another one on the way, so I can't just, you know, behave that way. The thing is, is that this is my job. I don't have any other source of income and my wife doesn't have a job. It's not like I'm just sitting around all day doing nothing. The only thing that I think about in a professional capacity is this sort of stuff. And that is just going to occupy a certain number of hours in the week. And I have a lot of different vested interests and stuff like that in various different projects that are all kind of going at the same time. So I just sort of have a baseline income that's pretty decent. I just feel like if you do this for long enough and Over time, Advantage
SPEAKER_00:players collect contacts who can put them into games, and they also just learn where there will be opportunities. They've seen so much that they can identify positive games with much less effort. Actually, Jamie found a game near his house, and he and his wife just milked it for a while. Where I
SPEAKER_04:live in Florida, there's a certain number of banked games that are sort of, I think they're pretty much just tolerated by the powers that be. And so these are, some corporation banks the game and the card room collects the rake. But it has to be a poker game is the rule. So there has to be some type of showdown between the banker and the player to where a poker hand is evaluated and a pot is awarded. But not all carnival games have that structure. And to get around that, what they do is they modify the pay tables because, hey, oh, well, you know, you have three of a kind or whatever, so you should win X, Y, and Z, but the banker has... three of a kind is a better kicker. So you actually just lose. And, you know, that's obviously going to piss everybody off. Um, so they, they went, they, they changed the payouts to sort of account for that. And so they kind of went around in circles with this game until they finally, they first saw the game years and years and years ago. And I mean, I go in there and I'm playing it. I'm like, this is, this is terrible. You know, you should just make a$1 side bet. That's just like who has the better poker hand and who cares what happens with that. And, um, Eventually, that's not because they took my advice or anything, but eventually that's what they did because that was just the obvious thing to do. And so they changed the rules of the game, the payouts and everything back to normal, except that they forgot one. They just forgot to change one payout from four to one to three to one. And that conferred about a 9% edge on a game. And so my wife and I just became regulars there. I think it lasted for a couple months, maybe three months. And on the last day, my wife and I were playing there and we see a guy, we were very, we had a great relationship with the card room and they knew that we were winning because there just wasn't any way to make it seem other. I mean, maybe there would have been, but like we just, we weren't really trying that hard to make it seem otherwise. We thought that just being a friendly presence as opposed to the more unpleasant regulars would serve us well. And it turned out, I think it did. And one day, one evening, one of the, poker room supervisors comes by he's on a cell phone he comes he looks at the table and he looks down at where the payouts are and he goes oh yeah i see i see what you mean and then my wife and i just looked at each other we knew it was over then and so we played until they closed that night and then the next day the next morning we came in and the game had been fixed
SPEAKER_00:this episode was almost titled everything matters because jamie said that when they were doing the shuffler play he realized that every tiny detail matters. I think that phrase everything matters also kind of points in the right direction in terms of how edges materialize at all. You might need a sequence of things to go right and plays can be very sensitive to just one element being off. But Jamie also says that he thinks of this idea as being related to the illusion of knowledge and the fact that the amount you have to learn can pretty much always be rounded up to everything. I
SPEAKER_04:think it's kind of like When, you know, the concept of when you're new to something, you know, you understand that you don't know anything. But then once you kind of get like some degree of competence, you think you know everything. And then once you sort of become an expert at it, you realize you don't know anything. I think it's just, I think it's just that emotion is all it really is. So when you get to the point where you're, you know, you could do some, you're making money, you're winning. You've thought you've come up with some stuff that has never been done before, but obviously it's been done for hundreds of years. Then you sort of think that you're the best and you think that you kind of know everything. And then once you actually sort of wake up to some other stuff that's going on, you realize that you don't know anything. And so I think that that's kind of the stage that I'm permanently in. I'm sure there's just an entire universe of things that I do not know and I'll never know.
SPEAKER_00:The fact that there's always more to learn also means that there's always more stuff to think about.
SPEAKER_04:It's like an intellectual challenge, too. You know, it's like it keeps your mind sharp. You know, I don't think I'd ever be able to turn it off. But even if I could, I don't think I'd want to because it is just sort of like a stimulating thing to think about. It's, you know, I don't know. It's it's it's
SPEAKER_00:what I do. One of the ways I think about the show is as a rejection of convention. So I often try to find people who are willing to talk about doing strange stuff like hacking together a cat's litter box exhaust system or working an engineering job and then leaving for a week to try to visually clock a roulette wheel. It's not that I think convention has no utility. It obviously does. It's just that staying with the herd is such a powerful instinct for humans that we need to actively seek out solutions. counter-narratives. Call it building up an immune response to complacency. Also, when I say that our guests are up to strange stuff, I mean that as a compliment, of course. I actually make this show in part so that I can continue to disseminate these counter-narratives for my own benefit. I think that Jamie is maybe uniquely aware of how being untethered to the herd has benefited him, and also how it didn't have to turn out that way.
UNKNOWN:...
SPEAKER_04:So the truth is, is I am extremely lucky. Like if you redid my life with like the same circumstances, the same set of circumstances and redid that, whatever you call it, a simulation or parallel timeline or something. If you just did that like a thousand times, like 950 times out of those a thousand, I'm just like a homeless person pretty much because I'm not really motivated that much by like money. I'm not like the brightest guy in the world. I'm not super interested in the world around me in like a, you know, a unique or interesting way. And I'm honestly, I'm pretty lazy too. So I think that just, it just so happens that if you put all that stuff together in like a certain way and get crazy lucky, you end up in a position that I'm in right now where it's like, because I am, you know, lazy, as I said, but I'm like in a weird kind of lazy where I'll work crazy hard to make sure that I don't have to ever like do anything I don't feel like doing.
SPEAKER_00:We'll see you next time.
UNKNOWN:music music