Gambler Turned $50 into $40 Million, Then Promptly Lost It All

Archie Karas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_Karas

LOL.
Been to Vegas many times (when my in laws were retired there) and one thing I learned, the longer you play, the more likely the house gets it all back.
Reminds me of this......


Funnier still, is this:

MaxQ said:

Been to Vegas many times (when my in laws were retired there) and one thing I learned, the longer you play, the more likely the house gets it all back.

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Basic statistics. The probability distribution function has a little tail at one end in the "win" area for your first bet. The more you play the skinnier the peak gets (always on the "lose" side) and less tail in the "win" side.

Interesting to me that people think they can ever come out ahead by gambling. If that were true, the casinos would go out of business. And of you know a trick for beating them, like counting cards in Blackjack, they usher you right out the door.

Bat-mite said:

Interesting to me that people think they can ever come out ahead by gambling. If that were true, the casinos would go out of business. And of you know a trick for beating them, like counting cards in Blackjack, they usher you right out the door.

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I had a friend in college who would go to the reservation casino to make gas money for the month on the beginner blackjack tables. As I understood it, it was basically training wheels--you could see the dealer's cards and you couldn't win more than $5-$10. If you stayed there, you could always come out with a small amount of money. Of course, the casino used it to get people comfortable so they would graduate to the real tables and lose real money.

In my college years, I worked at a 7-Eleven. We sold lottery tickets. Everyday, we would have people who could not afford their groceries lining up to buy tickets. They would often spend $20 - $50 on tickets (and that was in the 80s), and then come around to the check-out counter and buy groceries with food stamps.

There was one man to whom I said one day, "Sir, why don't you take that $50 each week and put it in a savings account. At the end of the year, you have over $2500 earning interest."

He looked at me and said, "I don't have time for no bank. I need my money now."

Bat-mite said:

In my college years, I worked at a 7-Eleven. We sold lottery tickets. Everyday, we would have people who could not afford their groceries lining up to buy tickets. They would often spend $20 - $50 on tickets (and that was in the 80s), and then come around to the check-out counter and buy groceries with food stamps.
There was one man to whom I said one day, "Sir, why don't you take that $50 each week and put it in a savings account. At the end of the year, you have over $2500 earning interest."
He looked at me and said, "I don't have time for no bank. I need my money now."

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Sad but very true.
And when they made laws allowing people to claim gambling losses on their tax returns ...it got worse.
I know a college friend that lost his house, and wife, to this scratch off card nonsense at the local convenience store, (and drinking played a part as well).
Classic downfalls...gambling and booze. And he started out more disciplined than the rest of us when we got out of college...saving money and planning for the future.No matter what sense we tried to talk into him...it was always..."You understand ?...it's a disease."
Like that was a rationale for it?
It's a disease alright...but one that requires an aggressive cure or a serious intervention.

MaxQ said:

And when they made laws allowing people to claim gambling losses on their tax returns ...it got worse.

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Gambling losses can only be used to offset gambling winnings, not something like ordinary income. That seems fair to me.

I live within 30 minutes of a dozen casinos and we quit going years ago. The out of towners and tourist win but not us locals. Every time we get company visiting from out of town they always want to hit the casino's. Most of the time they leave here ahead or even. And now the surrounding motels are giving away $$ in casino free play just for staying with them so your stay and casino is sometimes free. Our guest that used to stay here at the house are now opting for the casino/motel deals. We only go for the prime rib or crab leg specials now.

Occasionally I go to a casino with our relatives who like that sort of thing. It is not entertainment for me. I expect to lose $50 each time I go (years between visits) and I am never disappointed. It is more of a family catchup than anything else.

I like to going Vegas, until I was dating my GF now currently my EX of 4 years. We would go to Vegas or even the local reservation casinos here in southern California and she would spend hours and hours just feeding $20's into the slot machines like they were postage stamps. Sure she would win, but I mean after sticking probably more in than what she got back. It is ridiculous. There was no fun in our trips and I use to stay in the room or walk around the casino and people watch or grab a couple beers at the bar. I would just leave her alone. Sometimes I would get in the car and cruise around outside Vegas and grab a bite to eat. They had a cool pinball place I would go to and hang out there for 4 hours and drop maybe $20 while she dropped hundreds. IDK if I play any game at the casino it would be video poker at the bar to get the FREE drinks faster or play poker in the poker room. Playing poker to me yeah its gambling, but at least you decide what hands you want to play and you can get up and walk away anytime like anything else, but the problem is that most people can't get up and walk away. They are down a few hundred and they want to throw good money after bad money thinking they are going to break even or win all of it back and then some. What they don't understand even if you walk away while you down $300 you are still ahead because you aren't walking away while you're $900 down. Vegas didn't build those big beautiful and light filled casinos on their losings, no they built on suckers that chase that dream of hitting it big on the slots. IDK where I read it, but I think it was on a TV show or program I was watching that stated Vegas casino make 75-80% of their winnings off slot machines and other coin related games. Also if you gamble you have to have a budget and know what your limitations are. Again advice a lot of these people haven't grasped.

Memory of my first visit to Vegas was when I was 5 yo, the family was going cross country and we stopped over and my dad hit a jack pot on a slot machine, back when they were still using silver dollars .....in 1959. The metal tray on slot machines was designed to be loud when coins (later casino tokens) started dumping out. It's a very audible thing, on purpose. Now I think when you hit big, it's a paper receipt. A lot less exciting.

Was nice to fly in late at night when the city was all lit up...and get breakfast at 2 in the morning..."the city that never sleeps". LOL
Two things I recall...when visiting my wife's parents after they retired there...
1.) playing black jack, and being a little slow on the uptake, not knowing all the hand signals to give the dealer...he got frustrated real fast, weird thing : I was winning and not even trying. They pulled the dealer. I started losing.
2.) hearing all the sounds and seeing all the lights go off on a slot machine at the Luxor, when a guy hit big. He was filling buckets with the tokens raining out. A crowd formed around him, a guy next to him asked him how far into the machine he was when it hit..."Oh, about $500 worth...." Too rich for my blood. I have never won much, but then again, I haven't lost much either.

The worst slot machines to play are at the airports, the hold on those machines is tight....and they have a captive audience, since they are waiting for flights ...so there is no incentive to get people in by setting a machine to pay more often ...people waiting for a plane flight have time to kill, and money they will lose.
The best slot machines I found always seemed to be one or two near the entrances to the casino floor- those slots were loose, by design, so people walking by the casino would see a win, and come on in.

I remember a NARAM at a Las Vegas casino. I lost $0.50 in the casino slots, in the arcade room. I lost $0.25 to an antique one armed bandit at a museum. A few years ago I bought one lottery ticket when the pot was over one Billion; I hit zero numbers. I bet $20 once on horse to place, but it only showed. On an entertainment value per dollar, I'm probably still a winner.

Gaming the system: Edward Thorp and the wearable computer that beat Vegas

https://www.engadget.com/2013/09/18/edward-thorp-father-of-wearable-computing/

Excerpt:

After months of experiments, the two settled on a computer they thought would work. Roughly the size of a pack of cigarettes, the computer itself had 12 transistors that allowed its wearer to time the revolutions of the ball on a roulette wheel and determine where it would end up. Wires led down from the computer to switches in the toes of each shoe, which let the wearer covertly start timing the ball as it passed a reference mark. Another set of wires led up to an earpiece that provided audible output in the form of musical cues -- eight different tones represented octants on the roulette wheel. When everything was in sync, the last tone heard indicated where the person at the table should place their bet. Some of the parts, Thorp says, were cobbled together from the types of transmitters and receivers used for model airplanes.

During their tests, Thorp and Shannon found that the computer gave the wearer a 44 percent edge in roulette -- more than enough to make it worth their while. By then, it was the summer of 1961, and the two decided it was time to test the computer in a casino. In August, they went to Vegas for a week -- Shannon's wife, Betty, and Thorp's wife, Vivian, joined them.

While only one person wore the computer, the operation in the casino was a two-man job. The person wearing the computer would stand by the roulette wheel and time -- also writing down the numbers on a pad to appear like a system player, what Thorp describes as a "decoy mode," since "whoever was doing that was considered harmless because fools do that all the time to no avail."

The other person, usually Thorp, would sit at the betting table with the earpiece and a receiver, hearing the same cues that the person wearing the computer heard. "When the computer was operating without any trouble," Thorp says, "it worked really well." Indeed, it worked just as well as it did in the lab. "We'd start out with dime chips," he says, "and single dimes would turn into piles of dimes, quite often causing a fair amount of excitement, but nobody caught on to what was going on."

Wearing a computer in 1961 wasn't easy. While the small computer worn around the waist was inconspicuous enough, the earpieces proved more difficult. For those, Thorp and Shannon used thin stainless steel wires that were soldered onto the speaker and painted a flesh color. The wires ran down the neck and through the wearer's clothing to the receiver. They proved to be discreet, but the wires were delicate and tended to break, which Thorp says "was the Achilles' heel of the system."

"So," he says, "we'd bet for a while and then a wire would break, and we had to go back to the room and take the person who was doing the betting, namely me, apart and solder things together and hook me back up." In his paper, he recounted one incident in particular: "Once a lady next to me looked over in horror. I left the table quickly and discovered the speaker peering from my ear canal like an alien insect."

While those problems prevented them from any "serious betting," they deemed the computer a success. It now resides at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Mass.

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Another guy using tech to cheat:

The Hustler Origins of Wearable Computers

https://gizmodo.com/casinos-and-con-men-the-hustler-origins-of-wearable-co-1718085809

Excerpt:

Taft experimented with blackjack as a lark on a family trip to Reno, pushing aside his reservations about its morality after receiving a voucher. It quickly turned into a fixation that overpowered his qualms. Taft was determined to kill it at the casino. So he did what any probably-blighted-by-a-burgeoning-gambling-addiction engineer with a DIY streak would do: He spent two years building a wildly original 15-pound, 16-bit computer to count cards for him, naming it “George.”

Taft would strap “George” to his waist with Ace bandages like some kind of gambling reverse-suicide bomber, hiding the heavy copper-coated machine by wearing an oversized pea coat at the betting table so he could smoke the house. “I saw the gambling computer as my bridge to the independent life,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1979, after explaining how “George” transmitted instructions to him through LED lights installed on the inside of his glasses:

Working with the precision of a watchmaker, he inserted a row of seven tiny light-emitting diodes into the frame of his black horn rim eyeglasses just above the right lens. The diodes were connected to the computer by a fine wire that was combed into his hair and ran down the back of his collar. When all the diodes flashed on—stand. When they all flashed off—hit.

“George” worked and improved his odds, but it was cumbersome, and Taft was kind of bad at gambling anyways. As Sports Illustrated noted, one time it burned Taft when its battery acid spilled on his torso.

When a novice gambler makes bank and walks around with a giant bulge in his mid-section and nonchalantly gets scalded by battery acid, other players don’t miss it. Ken Uston, a blackjack veteran, heard about Taft’s invention and asked him to partner up. Taft needed expertise, so he agreed to a 10% cut to supply Uston with his equipment. Taft developed a new model he called “David” that, like Thorp, was controlled through custom-built orthotics. He showed the rudimentary wearable to Sports Illustrated in the same profile:

David, as in David vs. the casino Goliaths, is what Taft calls the space-age microcomputer and battery pack, each about the size of a deck of cards, that were hidden in pockets sewn into the high-waisted athletic supporter that he was wearing. All along, by using his big toes to manipulate a pair of switches that were connected to the computer by copper wires running down the insides of his pants legs, he had been “inputting” the value of each card as it was dealt. In turn, the computer, whirling through 100,000 calculations a second, “told” Taft the best possible play by means of a tapping device built into the instep of his left shoe.

Taft rigged his “David” devices so that the computer’s recommendation would get tapped into the shoe in Morse code. Uston and Taft tag-teamed Vegas using the “David,” eventually getting a gaggle of Taft’s adult children involved, much to the disapproval of his nervous, anti-gambling wife. As the Captain von Trapp of high-tech borderline-legal casino operatives, Taft started hot, doubling his team’s winnings in a week. The luck didn’t last: Casino officials busted one of Taft’s sons with one of his machines and sending the computer to the FBI.

But the FBI cleared the device. No one was arraigned, charges were dropped. Uston and Taft parted ways, but the former choirmaster still wanted in, enlisting more con artists and high rollers to help. Emboldened, Taft started working on more computers for his growing circle of blackjack schemers, devices called “Thor” and “Narnia.” He kept tinkering, and developed a way to relay which cards were on the table with an elaborate custom-made dental imprint; he hid the wires that ran from the mouthguard to the computer in his mustache and beard. He created one of the first computer networking systems so his team could communicate as they played in tandem.

Embittered by hostility and sneaky tactics from casinos, Taft got bolder about breaking rules, spending the early 80s wreaking havoc on Atlantic City and other gambling hotspots. He invented an early digital camera by putting a camera inside a belt buckle, attaching a homemade shutter, along with a DIY one-inch hidden monitor inside his shirt so he could see the images. He called it the “Belly Telly,” which is a fantastic name and I applaud him for it.

Taft, his friends, and his passel of offspring set up a satellite receiver on a truck so they could see what was going on in the camera images and communicate it back to him. It was a straight-up hustle.

That truck ended up screwing Taft and his team over: At a Lake Tahoe casino, security guards raided it after a bomb threat on the building. When they discovered the elaborate computerized gambling scheme, they called the police and arrested members of Taft’s team for using an illegal gambling device.

Taft eventually gave up gambling in the mid-80s, worn down by the new shuffling strategies casinos developed to make it harder to gain an edge, the death of one of his sons in a rafting accident, and the arrests of his friends. He never really made a fortune with his devices. The man who was a pioneer of wearable tech drifted back into his old life, retiring and becoming a Baptist worship leader. He died in 2006.

Taft’s legacy is apparent in the gambling world: Devices that help you count and analyze what’s going on at the table are almost universally illegal. But his absurdly prescient achievements aren’t talked about nearly as much as they should be. Dude was building and using wearable computers before anyone else besides Thorp.

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The movie "21" based on Ben Mezrich's book "Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions" available for free streaming by Amazon Prime members:

https://www.amazon.com/21-Jim-Sturgess/dp/B007OXAYZ2

I like to going Vegas, until I was dating my GF now currently my EX of 4 years. We would go to Vegas or even the local reservation casinos here in southern California and she would spend hours and hours just feeding $20's into the slot machines like they were postage stamps. Sure she would win, but I mean after sticking probably more in than what she got back. It is ridiculous. There was no fun in our trips and I use to stay in the room or walk around the casino and people watch or grab a couple beers at the bar. I would just leave her alone. Sometimes I would get in the car and cruise around outside Vegas and grab a bite to eat. They had a cool pinball place I would go to and hang out there for 4 hours and drop maybe $20 while she dropped hundreds. IDK if I play any game at the casino it would be video poker at the bar to get the FREE drinks faster or play poker in the poker room. Playing poker to me yeah its gambling, but at least you decide what hands you want to play and you can get up and walk away anytime like anything else, but the problem is that most people can't get up and walk away. They are down a few hundred and they want to throw good money after bad money thinking they are going to break even or win all of it back and then some. What they don't understand even if you walk away while you down $300 you are still ahead because you aren't walking away while you're $900 down. Vegas didn't build those big beautiful and light filled casinos on their losings, no they built on suckers that chase that dream of hitting it big on the slots. IDK where I read it, but I think it was on a TV show or program I was watching that stated Vegas casino make 75-80% of their winnings off slot machines and other coin related games. Also if you gamble you have to have a budget and know what your limitations are. Again advice a lot of these people haven't grasped.

When I was at Nellis Air Force Base in Loss Vegas on official business, I gambled exactly twice as experimentation. A USAF coworker's wife once worked in a casino and she had a tip that I tried out. I had a hunch of my own to try out, too.

Some casinos in Vegas, at least back then, had air dam doors. This allows passers-by to easily see the flashy-lights action inside and be enticed in. Her tip was that any slots closest to such doors paid off more often. That made perfect sense as that would be a great way to sucker people in. I added to the likelihood of better odds by using ones which were also closest to a cashier's cage. It may have been The Pioneer Club, the one with the neon cowboy sign, where I tried this out, but I'm not sure. Anyway, within maybe an hour I had turned a roll of quarters into about $50. One time after a jackpot, I went to shut the rotating red light and alarm off in the only way you can, by rolling again and losing. So, I inserted a quarter, pulled, and won ANOTHER jackpot on the same machine.

On another day, at Circus Circus I think, knowing that the digital display slot machines were microprocessor controlled, I had a hunch. How would I program a machine that can easily time how long it's been since it was last used and by that assume that the person playing is a new player? How would that machine "hook" a new player? By giving a relatively quick payoff? I tried that on a very slow day in what must have been the off season when there were row after row of slots not being used. I moved from machine to machine after small, but by no means instant payoffs and was making slow but steady headway, not anything dramatic as with the air door / cashier's cage proximate slots. When I'd win on a machine, I'd leave it and go to another. It didn't take long for one of the casino gals to stop by and claim that my odds would be better if I stuck with one machine... like she'd want to actually be telling me how to beat the casino on camera. I don't doubt that she probably believed what she'd most likely been told by the casino.

Yeah, the stories are fascinating. I fell a lot for scammers on the Internet