Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

British magician Darren Brown aired a TV special called "The System" revealing a foolproof method which allowed him to provide the name of the winning horse to a lucky person who randomly responded to his newspaper advertisement in time for that person to bet on the race and win. He continued doing this with that person for six more races over six consecutive weeks - with that person betting their own money and winning each time, beating astronomical odds and winning quite a large sum. The bets were real, legally placed in advance on televised races at regulated betting parlors and the person really randomly responded to the ad without knowing Brown beforehand. For the last race Brown and the person met at the race track but for all the prior races Brown didn't even know when or where the person would place their bet. He really had no involvement or even contact, other than sending the name of the horse to bet on via email once a week.

Of course, it's (sort of) a very clever trick. All is revealed in the show (now on Brown's YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR970Y10WNw). I showed it to my kid who had recently asked me about a state lottery billboard claiming "Someone has to win!" and it proved to be an entertainingly effective answer as well as providing some good ways to think critically about gambling propositions.

I heard about a similar trick once in the framework of a scam, which may be the same (I'm not willing to watch this much youtube for the payoff), where out of the 1,000 people that reached out for answers to a 50/50 bet of some sort, they provided 50% of them one answer, and 50% the other. Out of the 50% that won, they provided 50% one answer and 50% another. Leading to a situation where eventually you had a small group of people who had received correct "lottery" or whatever answers five or six times in a row, priming them to believe the scammer had some major advantage. Then the scammer charged that last group of 15 or 30 some large amount of money to receive the last answer, and so on with the winners of that bet.

yeah - this one was very popular in seasonal sports like football.

A version of it was on the UK series "Minder". Broadcast 40 years ago

https://www.minder.org/episodeguide/S04E04_SorryPalWrongNumb...

I am confident some of the stock advisor websites are doing the same thing. Just sending out random advice and collecting subscriptions from the winners.

If stock advisors had secret knowledge that helped them make money on the stock market they would use it to make money on the stock market not tell people about it.

In the stock market, though, saying "I know $FOOBAR is going to overperform on earnings" could trigger other people to pump the price and INCREASE your payout.

Conversely, if you know Santa's Little Helper is going to win the 6th race and told everyone, that would drive DOWN the odds and your potential payout. You'd have to have insider knowledge, then fabricate and disseminate a lie so that the actual winner gets bid down to 99:1 least-favourite before the race.

So the incentive model is different. In a way, in the stock market, being seen as a psychic genius can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. $FOOBAR doubled in price because people chased your prediction, not due to fundamentals.

In both finance and sportsbetting I assume anyone giving out information is part of a long con.

"Alfred Hitchcock Presents" had an episode, "Mail Order Prophet", that was this (66 years ago).

That’s basically the scam. At the end he has her bet one extra time and she loses. Except it’s revealed that Darren Brown had swapped out her ticket for the winning ticket somehow. Very likely he just placed bets on all horses and then did a sleight of hand to give her the winning ticket before she opened it. In other words he spent $20k of the show’s budget placing bets on all 5 horses and gave her the $13k of the winnings that were reclaimed from having bought a winning ticket.

That's not what happened nor is it how he accomplished the "trick". There's no slight of hand or trickery. Everything is fully revealed near the end of the special on YouTube (which I linked). She won every bet, including the last. He never had any of her tickets nor did he even see her place her bets.

It's much simpler than that. Although the show appears in the beginning like it's a "magic trick" (though that is never actually claimed), in the end the audience is clearly shown how there's no trick at all. It's all simple probability and there really is no way to "beat the odds". Which IMHO is ultimately more entertaining and valuable than just some slight of hand or magic trickery.

You might be misremembering (it's my fav DB show btw...)

It's not really revealed how he does the last trick. In the last bet she believes she loses because the horse he tips doesn't win - and during the race he reveals there is no system.

However, he places the final bet - not her - and after the race ends she opens the ticket to find it's placed on the winner, not the tipped horse.

Almost certainly it's slight of hand (which he is excellent at) but that is never revealed.

Yes, it's been several years since I watched it, so I guess I'm not remembering it clearly. I remember a race where there were multiple volunteer bettors at the track who were unaware of each other and only one of them won. Maybe that was the second to last race.

Anyway, I apologize for my error in recollection. I sincerely remember the gist of the show being as I described. Another reminder that memory can sometimes be weirdly porous yet not be correctly 'flagged' with an appropriate sense of uncertainty.

That’s fine. It was indeed the penultimate race shown where each bettor recorded themselves. The ultimate race had him and the lady and supposedly no other bettors. I take that at face value leaving betting on all horses and sleight of hand as the more likely explanation.

Vlovich is describing the very last race only, where he did place the final bet. He takes her 4k and tells her he’s going to place the bet for her so how much she’ll win is a surprise. The horse he said he would bet on loses the race and then he reveals he actually bet on the winner. So for that race and that race only I do think he just bet on every horse and sleight-of-handed the right ticket to her. Timestamp 35:20 in the video you linked earlier. Right after that he explains how the “trick” worked for all the earlier races, which is what you’re referring to.

It's been several years since I watched it, so it appears I'm not remembering the circumstances of the last race clearly. I remember a race where there were multiple volunteer bettors at the track who were unaware of each other and only one of them won. Maybe that was the second to last race.

Anyway, I apologize for my error in recollection. I sincerely remember the gist of the show being as I described. Another reminder that memory can sometimes be weirdly porous yet not be correctly 'flagged' with an appropriate sense of uncertainty.

This is the plot of some daytime court drama tv/movie I half-saw ages ago when I was a kid like 15-20 years ago.

It really stuck in my head for some reason, but never been able to figure out what show/movie it was.

the social media version is to post all of the possible outcomes to a sporting event like the super bowl a year in advance, deletes the ones that missed then claim your a sport genius using the "correct" prediction made a year ago as proof.

Or just change the date of the post (if possible)

Is a binary search involved in this "gambling system"?

You get so many respondents, you can give them all different combinations. Each race you disregard the losers, and when the population gets low enough you might miss a race, you just say "hey, I predicted x races, call Bob to confirm".

Yes, that's basically how it worked. To be clear, Brown was careful to promote and run it for entertainment and not a scam. He made very clear up front that those choosing to participate were very likely to lose their money and insisted that the early bet amounts were minimal "fun money". The ever-shrinking number of those continuing to later rounds had made enough from earlier wins to offset the later eventual loss.

> All is revealed in the show

He may have done it like this for real (I haven't seen the show), but just be aware that part of Derren Brown's magic is that the "reveal" is still part of the act. Often he claims to have done things using psychological effects but actually it's just traditional magic.

Clever really because nobody believes magic really exists today, but plenty of people believe in stuff like hypnosis and NLP.

It went kind of hilariously wrong for his "wisdom of the crowds" explanation for predicting the lottery - that one was too blatantly bullshit for most people and they screwed up the CGI fakery.

This is another one that always stuck in my mind:

https://youtu.be/sEmCQzueyEQ

(I watched it years ago and haven't rewatched it but IIRC he has a whole NLP explanation for what was clearly sleight of hand performed days ago off camera.)

Plenty of people believe in NLP (Natural Language Processing), indeed.

In this context, "neurolinguistic programming".

> Often he claims to have done things using psychological effects but actually it's just traditional magic.

Lots to unpack here. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com