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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

That jumped out at me too. You could lose 500K in a casino and nobody would bat an eye but win 500K and suddenly the police is involved and the casino refuses to pay out. Personally I think if they can't prove that you are cheating that you should be allowed to continue to play as long as you feel like and the casino stays afloat. What's good for the goose should be good for the gander. The police automatically siding with the casino and arresting people without any proof or even reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing other than the say so of a party that clearly isn't impartial is ridiculous.

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Google Phil Ivey Crockfords. This case isn't that bad because the casino let them have the winnings. Ivey didn't get his winnings, sued them and still lost because the court concluded he was "dishonest". Iirc, all that happened was that there was an imperfection in how certain cards were printed, and Ivey was a stooge for a Chinese woman (Ivey is a poker player who is known to gamble huge) who had worked out this edge.

The same is also true with sports betting in the UK. Because sportsbooks are so bad at managing risk in the UK, they will shut down winning accounts (unlike in Asia where the huge books actually winning accounts to improve their line and make more money) and use the whole range of AML/consumer protection rules to tilt the odds in their favour.

The reality is that casinos can't beat that minority of customers that are smarter than them...so they cheat.

>unlike in Asia where the huge books actually winning accounts to improve their line and make more money

This is true but it should have a big footnote. Disregarding Asian bookmakers that like to void winning bets from time to time for no apparent reason, Pinnacle, which is the book you’re referring to, lets winning players bet at such low limits that making money off them is an excruciating process.

I was more thinking of SBO. They do have low limits on unpopular events, but syndicates are doing $1m/match with them on soccer...they are prepared to take risk.

You have to understand that the limit is a function of the volume they take after you set their line. That is how the economy works. Your profit is paid out of their profit from squares after the line is set. So if they aren't doing volume after the line moves, then they are just going to leave the limit.

> That jumped out at me too. You could lose 500K in a casino and nobody would bat an eye but win 500K and suddenly the police is involved and the casino refuses to pay out.

You have to win small. As another poster put it below, the role of the player is to lose.

Anecdotally, I used to travel to a coastal city 650km away every two weeks for around 5 years. My Saturday afternoons during this time were usually free and I was bored. For two months I spent those Saturday afternoons (til around midnight) sitting in the casino noting the frequency of each pie slice of the wheel on as many different roulette tables that I could simultaneously view (between 6 and 8 at a time).

Divide the wheel into 5 pie slices (one will be a different size from the rest) and make 5 columns on a small page - one for each pie slice. Each time that slice "wins" (no matter what the number is) simply make a checkmark in that column. Over time this forms a histogram. If any one of those columns is an outlier, then that wheel is biased.

I found one biased wheel (casino had maybe 14 tables in total?), which remained unfixed and remained biased for the next 13 months or so, and I repeatedly just placed small bets on all numbers in that slice that was biased.

I made a respectable amount of money (about 40k ZAR) over 13 months.

I have no illusions that had I been placing maximum bets on each spin, I'd have been escorted out of the casino after the first visit.

FYI: 40K ZAR = ~$2,000

It wasn’t that they won; the article explains that plenty of people walk out with designer bags full of money. It’s that these folks won in a statistically hugely unlikely way, and that alone is pretty damning evidence that something is off. It’s usually just a matter of finding the smoking gun. Although it’s unpleasant that the casino and police assumed it was cheating and not a defect in the game itself (in what turns out to be a naive and self-delusional assumption), is that really that surprising or ridiculous a position to take? The catch 22 is the accused cannot defend themselves without divulging their secrets.

> It wasn’t that they won;

Of course it was! If they had lost using the same method there would have been no issue.

> It’s that these folks won in a statistically hugely unlikely way, and that alone is pretty damning evidence that something is off.

That's the casino's problem though, not law enforcement. Statistically unlikely equates 'we haven't seen this before' and that should not be enough reason to arrest people. The police should not be in the business of protecting the revenue streams of gambling installation operators. There should be some symmetry here, if the casino is a-ok with making money on gamblers then they should take their lumps when the situation is - temporarily - reversed. LE has no business here, tough luck they should have run a business where the flow is one way by design instead of one with a pretend two way flow.

> The catch 22 is the accused cannot defend themselves without divulging their secrets.

Which is precisely why the police has no business doing this. The burden of proof with respect to cheating is on the casino, and until they have something solid nobody should be arrested. That's the police acting unilaterally on behalf of one party. A more balanced response would have been to help the players cash their checks, after all the casino did not object to the reverse when the funds were deposited. It's fraud by the casino until proven otherwise.

This isn’t subjective.

If I gamble once, and only once, with a lot of money at very high odds, I might get very lucky and win a fortune.

But despite small odds of a massive pay out, the odds would have been very low, but not infinitesimal.

Whereas, if I consistently win much more than I lose over many bets, across seversl visits, and a group of people can do this, the odds of that happening rapidly become virtually zero.

Or in mathematical or scientific terms, confidence that pure chance is being broken far, far, far exceeds a 6-sigma threshold. It’s proven.

But legal proofs, for making judicial decisions of guilt or culpability, usually require an explanation of how it was done.

If a gambler consistently loses much more than they win, in a way that the odds of it happening are almost zero, will police show up and arrest someone from the casino?

There may be an investigation, but I'd be surprised if anyone is arrested before hard evidence of rigging a game is found.

Six standard deviations is 1 in 2 billion per Wikipedia here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rul....

Ok that's pretty crazy, let's lower it a notch, throw out the sigmas, just talk about 1-in-hundreds-of-millions odds.

The article doesn't actually list the odds of their winning streak, but I'd wager a casino is gonna be suspicious well before the "one in a hundred million" level of streak.

Powerball can get there, e.g. 1-in-292M per here https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/08/powerball-dr...

So how many bets across how many visits does it actually take for it to be "proven"? Like, people can win powerball, someone may have had that 1-in-300-million casino run too. If they're independent events, you expect it to happen randomly eventually! Some poor lucky bastard will probably face a lot of questions one day.

I dunno, I guess if you want to win a fortune gambling, do it all in one bet, since getting lucky all at once vs getting less-lucky-but-for-a-longer-time is gonna attract a lot of scrutiny. ;)

(I kinda suspect, though, that a lot of people who were down the path of that 1-in-300M luck playing roulette would stop while they're ahead at some point. If you hit on 00 in roulette three times in a row do you go for a fourth?)

If it’s coin flipping, then winning 10 coin flips is 1 out of 1000.

20 flips, 1 out of 1 million.

30 flips, 1 out of a billion.

40 flips, 1 out of a trillion.

With roulette, and overall gain (not a perfect score), say a ratio of 2 wins out of 3 bets, it takes more bets.

But in this case we are talking about many roulette games, with a recognized group of people, often playing in tandem. at multiple casinos.

The odds of their record of successes, as documented by the casinos, could be 1 out of billions or trillions easily. Maybe even more.

There was a lot suggestive about this group, but that includes a lot of subjective factors.

It's the pure math side I think is fun, because I find examples of people getting tricked by confidence intervals into developing blindspots to the randomness, and substituting "proof" for "very unlikely" fascinating. Comes from working in a lot of companies with ... sloppy ... methodology for their AB tests.

If you go to a casino and win 20 straight coin flips [or the equivalent in roulette or craps] don't you think they'd be pretty damn sure you cheated somehow?

> The police should not be in the business of protecting the revenue streams of gambling installation operators.

What about in something like betting on a boxing match and having the fighter throw the fight? Is that the casino's problem too?

If you're ok with someone cheating then it all makes complete sense what you're saying. If you're not then someone has to investigate. Do you really want the casino being law enforcement for anyone they find suspicious? I'm not on the casino's side at all but there's a big grey area here.

It's the casino here that's cheating, and the casino that doesn't know its own business well enough to spot the flaws that are exposed. Winners have no obligation to explain how they won just as the casino isn't going to tell the losers to stop losing.

And in this case, without proof, the winners did get paid. The police and internal investigation did not result in any definitive proof, thus the seizure of funds was unjustified and soon released.

As far as protecting casino revenue, casinos have a complicated arrangement with governments but in most jurisdictions the reason they are legal is to pay hefty taxes on gaming revenue (also normal income tax, separately). Thus the police are, when investigating similar claims, protecting government revenue. The casino is just the conduit to generating that revenue.

> That's the casino's problem though, not law enforcement.

In most jurisdictions where gambling is legal, it is carefully regulated and those regulations include not cheating.

Which does make it a law enforcement issue.

In places where cheating is not a law enforcement issue, it is a mafia-enforcement issue, which is even worse.

Normally they just ask you leave and/or ban you. But they should still be paying out any winnings if they cant prove any wrongdoing.

> Personally I think if they can't prove that you are cheating that you should be allowed to continue to play as long as you feel like and the casino stays afloat.

I think it should be within the casinos rights to decline to continue to take bets when something is happening that they don't understand and is far outside of their expectations of statistical probability.

To quote Buster Scruggs: "Can't no one compel another man to engage in recreation."

I do think they should be obligated to honor the bets they actually made, though.

> You could lose 500K in a casino and nobody would bat an eye but win 500K and suddenly the police is involved

Yes, the Police exist as the private military of the rich.

Their job is literally to protect the assets of the rich, and that's exactly what they will do whenever you "get one over" the rich.

A casino can ask you to leave for any reason or no reason at all. Fifteen years ago or thereabouts I was asked to leave the roulette table (actually, all casinos owned by the same company). I won 12 times in a row. Not big money at all. Still, they didn’t like that.

What they said was “You are done for the night at our casinos. You are welcome to return tomorrow.”

They were very nice about it and I had no issue with it at all. It’s their house.

I'm sure if you did the maths you'd find that the casino winning >$500k from a particular set of games has a high chance of occuring whereas the probability that the punter wins 500k legitimately is almost zero.

It's like those Minecraft speedruns; you can't necessarily prove it's false (at that point), but if there's a 1/10,000,000,000 chance that an outcome is achieved legitimately, what would you expect them to do?

Except of course that in this case it was legitimately, and the chance was substantially better than that.

happens so much in many other types scenarios they like to think they are just interviewers and let the judges determine guilt they're power is beyond measure causing systemic effects in the entire system. i think the individual officer know this to an extent better then anyone.. so best not give off any body language avoid speaking at all costs because all are parasites feeding off the energy from all the pain and turmoil caused. then throw their hands up and be like not my problem double it pass to the next person.

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