Hacker CinemaBreaking Vegas
TV series · documentary
Breaking Vegas is a television series that premiered on The History Channel in the United States in the spring of 2004. The series covers the great lengths people have gone to make money, sometimes illegally, from casinos. It premiered in Pakistan on January 19, 2006 and was renamed Decoding Casinos in India on May 9, 2006. In the Spring of 2007, it aired on The History Channel and The Discovery Channel in Canada. Many episodes have to do with cheats who illegally take money from the casino using sleight-of-hand tricks or some sort of gizmo. Namely, these scams include pastposting and card marking. Other episodes include famous examples of legal money-making techniques such as card counting. Some episodes are about legal strategies like winning at the craps table by throwing at certain angles using a certain grip with certain numbers at the top, or taking advantage of a worn-out ball bearing and a thus tilted roulette wheel. The series was inspired by the two-hour History Channel documovie entitled Breaking Vegas: The True Story of the MIT Blackjack Team written and directed by Bruce David Klein and produced by Atlas Media Corp. The episode "Professor Blackjack" is about MIT professor Edward O. Thorp's computer-based research on the Kelly criterion that was applied in real Vegas casinos in the form of computer aided card-counting schemes with very successful results. Manny Kimmell, a known mob associate, provided the venture capital for Dr. Thorp's real life experiment and his contribution is described in the same episode.
2 positivefrom 2 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
10 comments on Hacker News
For a modern take, in the 90's there was a man named Louis Colavecchio who made counterfeit slot machine tokens that even fooled the experts. He was featured in an episode of Breaking Vegas on the History Channel.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/us/louis-colavecchio-dead.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Iashcl1GC8
That seems to still be talking about making predictions after the ball is released. The biases remove enough randomness that an experienced human can predict sufficiently to get a slight advantage where the ball will end up the same way the earlier computers did.
My recollection of the family in the "Breaking Vegas" episode is that they were not looking at the ball release and making predictions. They were taking their records of a large number of observed outcomes and then could come up with a list of bets to make when they later returned to the wheel.
The "Roulette Assault" episode of the old History Channel series "Breaking Vegas" covers another way to beat roulette but without requiring computers or communications devices in the casino or timing anything. Archive.org has a copy of that episode [1].
A family went to casinos around Europe and observed the roulette wheels, keeping extensive records on where the ball landed. They were not covert about it. They'd just openly write down the results.
You might think casinos would not allow that, but actually they love people who do things like that. A person taking notes is a person who thinks they can invent a system to beat the casino, and those people often lose a lot of money before giving up.
The family took all that data and analyzed it to find wheels that had slight consistent biases that were big enough that bets based on them would come out ahead long term. They then went around making those bets and won long term.
The family members had spent so much time looking at wheels that they could recognize individual wheels by things like scratches and discolorations and other ordinary visible wear and tear, so even if a casino moved a wheel the family would recognize it and know which bets to place.
There are a couple other "Breaking Vegas" episodes I remember as standing out.
"Ultimate Cheat" [2] is about another way to win at roulette, but this one involved a team cheating on the bets using a twist on an old cheating method.
There's an old way to cheat on bets where you place small bets that consist of a stack of minimal value chips. You adjust the stack so that the croupier cannot actually see the bottom chip. You and your teammates all do this.
If one the bets wins you try to use sleight of hand to replace the stack with a stack that consists of minimal value chips except for a high value bottom chip, still arranged so the bottom chip is not visible to the croupier. Your teammates can help by trying to distract the croupier so your sleight of hand won't be spotted.
When the croupier goes to your winning bet you point out the amount is wrong and point out the high value chip in the stack that the croupier missed.
Casinos are on to that, and if they suspect at all that you are doing it before paying out they will go to the security tapes to make sure no one tried any sleight of hand on the winning stack.
The team in this episode realized they could work this the other way. Instead of trying to retroactively raise the value of winning bets they could retroactively lower the value of losing bets.
So now the first stack is a stack of low value chips with a high value chip on the bottom with the stack askew to hide the high value chip. If the bet wins no sleight of hand is needed. The high value chip is already in place. If the bet loses that's when they try sleight of hand to switch it for a stack with all low chips. That's easier than switching a winning stack because the croupier is paying attention to the winners.
If the casino goes to the tape after a win no problem. The tape will show no tampering because there was none.
The casino security people knew the team was up to something for quite a while and were scrutinizing every one of their wins and getting really annoyed and frustrated that they couldn't figure out what the heck was going on.
"Counterfeit King" [3] was about counterfeit casino tokens. Manufacturers incorporate a variety of anti-counterfeiting measures in their token designs, but Louis Colavecchio was able to match them all. The only reason anyone knew there was counterfeiting going on was casinos were finding themselves gaining token. No one, including the token manufacturers, were able to figure out which tokens were genuine and which were Colavecchio's.
[1] https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-10-roulette-assault
[2] https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-01-ultimate-cheat
[3] https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-06-counterfeit-king
History Channel had a great series called Breaking Vegas and one episode featured Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard's roulette shoe computer:
https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-08-beat-the-wheel
For those who want to see it, that episode was "Slotbuster" and is on the Internet Archive here [1].
It looks like all 14 episodes of "Breaking Vegas" are there [2]. I haven't seen them since around the time they were originally broadcast, but my recollection is that most of them were quite worth watching.
[1] https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-02-slotbuster
[2] https://archive.org/details/@vegasfan
Breaking Vegas was a fantastic series. My favorite episode was the one where a programmer working for the Nevada Gaming Commission hacked the ROMs of slot machines and was able to activate a jackpot with a secret combination of coins.
There was a Spanish family that took advantage of that and won big in European casinos. They recorded a large number of results, found biases big enough to overcome the house's edge, and used them. The casinos responded by moving the tables around and moving wheels between tables, but the family has spent so long observing the wheels that they could recognize individual wheels by the wear and tear they had accumulated over the years.
But this was not contingent biases. The odds of a given number were not dependent on what number had previously come up.
These people were covered in the episode "The Roulette Assault" of the old History Channel series "Breaking Vegas" [1]. You can watch this episode at the Internet Archive [2].
"Breaking Vegas" also did an episode, "Beat the Wheel", on Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard's computer-in-a-shoe that used physics to predict roulette outcomes. These are the people who were the subject of the book "The Eudaemonic Pie" which another commenter has mentioned. You can watch "Beat the Wheel" at the Internet Archive [3].
There's one more "Breaking Vegas" roulette episode that is very interesting. It is called "Ultimate Cheat".
The Spanish family was definitely not cheating. It is not against the rules to gather data--in fact many casinos encourage it because 99.99% of the time someone gathering data thinks they have some foolproof system for winning when in fact they have completely botched it and casinos love these people. They blow a ton of money before they figure out that their system is completely worthless (at best).
The "Eudaemonic Pie" people may or may not have been cheating depending exactly on how the rules of the casinos were written back then.
The guy in "The Ultimate Cheat" was definitely cheating. At first he was cheating using a particular method. He was successful at it, but then casinos installed video cameras that recorded everything at the tables. When he would win, they would detain him while they checked the tape, and the tape showed the cheating. This seemingly put an end to his career as a roulette cheater.
But then he started winning again, and when the casinos checked the tapes they showed the win was clean. They were certain he was cheating and they were scrutinizing his wins in excruciating detail, but they could not find any problems with them.
There was a good reason for that. His wins were in fact entirely legitimate. He legitimately put a stack of his chips on a number, did not influence the wheel or ball or croupier in any way, and if his number came up by chance (which happened just as often as you would expect it to) he collected his winnings.
What he did was take what he had been doing originally, the method he had to abandon due to the cameras, and apply a brilliant twist to it. That method is post roll bet modification. You put down a stack of low value chips on a number, and if that number wins you try to swap that stack for a stack that has low value chips on top and a high value chip on bottom displaced a little so it is not visible to the croupier.
The cameras catch you doing the stack swap and the jig is up.
His twist was to apply it to losing bets instead of winning bets. He would bet a stack of low value chips on top with a high value chip on the bottom. If he won he did nothing. But if he lost he tried to swap the stack for one that only had low value chips.
The casino was only scrutinizing his wins so he got away with cheating on his losing bets for an embarrassingly long time. You can watch "The Ultimate Cheat" at the Internet Archive here [4].
If you are checking out "Breaking Vegas", there is one more I will recommend even though it has nothing to do with roulette. That's the "Counterfeit King" episode, on the Internet Archive here [5].
That's about a guy who was making counterfeit casino tokens. They were good enough that the casinos only knew they were there because their token counts were unexpectedly going up. When the casinos sent tokens back to the manufacturer to check, the manufacturer said they were all legit.
The downfall of this counterfeiter is instructive. One day he was using his tokens in slot machines. He was playing a fairly expensive machine and it jammed. He just moved over to the next machine and continued. A guard saw this on live surveillance and became suspicious because when a machine eats a high value token the gambler is always very annoyed and comes complaining to casino staff to get their token back. The gambler just going "meh" and moving over a machine was just not believable. That got him on their radar as someone up to something which led to them discovering he was the counterfeiter.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Vegas
[2] https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-10-roulette-assault
[3] https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-08-beat-the-wheel
[4] https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-01-ultimate-cheat
[5] https://archive.org/details/breaking-vegas-s-1-e-06-counterfeit-king
There was an episode of the old "Breaking Vegas" series [1] on the History Channel about such "dice dominators". This site seems to have the episode online [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Vegas
[2] https://www.goldentouchcraps.com/HistoryChannel.shtml
There are actually ways to beat roulette.
1. Observe the motion of the ball and the wheel between the time they start moving and the time betting is closed, and use physics to calculate where the ball is likely to land. Bet accordingly. This was proven effective in the early '80s [1].
2. Record a lot of outcomes on a given wheel to learn its biases. Bet accordingly. You might think it would be hard to surreptitiously gather all the data you would need, but it is made considerably easier because you do not have to be surreptitious. Casinos love people who are taking notes--99.999% of the time it means that is someone who has some idiotic system that they think will let them beat the house, and casinos want to encourage such people.
There was an episode of the wonderful documentary series "Breaking Vegas" [2] that covered this method, focusing on a family that practiced it. They were making a lot of money until the Las Vegas and Atlantic City casinos banned them. American casinos can ban you for winning too much, even if you are not in any way cheating. They switched to Europe, where the casino regulators prohibited the casinos from banning them without cause, and "winning to much without cheating" is not cause. The casinos tried moving the wheels to different tables to confuse the family, but the family had spent so much time looking at each wheel they could recognize individual wheels be wear patterns and place the appropriate bets. It was pretty cool.
3. My favorite, even though it was flat out cheating. This was also covered on a "Breaking Vegas" episode. Before I explain this cheating method, we need to take a look at an older cheating method that is no longer effective. That was "past posting" or "late betting". In past posting, you place a bet AFTER the outcome of the event you are betting on has been determined. So in roulette that would be placing a bet after the ball has fallen into its final slot.
Of course, that would be hard to do. The risk would be too high that the operator might have noticed that there were no bets on that particular number when betting closed. So what you actually did was modify a winning bet after the fact to make it bigger. You put, say, a stack of 3 of the lowest value chips on a number. If that number loses, you lose those chips. If it wins, the rest of your team distracts the operator, and you swap that stack of 3 low value chips for a stack that consists of 2 low value chips on top and 1 high value chip on the bottom.
There was a guy who was doing a lot of past posting on the roulette tables, back before they had constant recorded closed circuit TV surveillance. The casinos suspected he was doing something to cheat, because he was winning more than they would like (but not enough to get banned), but they couldn't catch what he was doing.
Then surveillance came, and when he would win with a stack of 2 low value and 1 high value chip instead of paying right away they would detain him while they pulled the tape and reviewed it to see if they could see any shenanigans. He had to stop past posting. His career as a roulette cheat seemed over.
And then he had a brilliant idea. Instead of cheating by converting low value winning bets into high value winning bets, why not go the other way? Convert high value losing bets into low value losing bets!
The new plan was to place bets consisting of a high value chip on bottom with some low value chips on top, with the low value chips positioned so that the operator would not see the high value chip. It would look to him like a stack of low value chips.
If their bet lost, they would swap the stack for a stack of all low value chips. If their bet won, they would not touch it, and point out to the operator that there was a high value chip there so they would get the right pay off.
The casinos were, of course, very suspicious. They recognized that they were dealing with a known past poster, so every time he won they pulled the tape...and the tape showed that no one had come near fiddling with the winning bet. The high value chip had been at the bottom of the stack from the moment the bet was placed.
He got away with this for a ridiculous amount of time, with the head of security from one of the major casinos reviewing every win and getting quite frustrated at not being able to catch how the cheat was working. I forget how he finally got caught.
BTW, I highly recommend "Breaking Vegas". They profile some remarkable people, some who cheat, and some who won legitimately. A couple neat examples.
• They have an episode on dice dominators. These are people who, through great practice, can roll the dice at craps with such control and consistency as to get the outcome they want much more often than by chance.
• They have an episode on a man who took up counterfeiting slot machine tokens. The casinos detected this because they were getting high token counts at the end of the day, but they could not tell which tokens were counterfeit. They sent batches back to the manufacturer, and the manufacturer said that all the tokens that were sent were real.
His downfall was interesting. He was playing a slot machine that took something like $25 tokens, and the machine jammed. He moved over to the next machine and continued playing. Security happened to see that on camera, and that made them suspicious. The normal behavior when someone loses a $25 token to a jammed machine is for that person to get mad, and go find casino staff to seek a refund. No one just moves over to the next machine and keeps going--unless that $25 token isn't worth $25 to them. Hence, the guard thought he might be looking at the infamous token counterfeiter. They followed him to the parking lot when he left, and when he opened the trunk of his car that he had boxes full of tokens for all the major casinos.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Vegas
As far as roulette goes, I believe that casinos changed the rules a long time ago to require that the bets be placed before the ball is released, after a group of UC Santa Cruz physics postgrads in the late '70s, early '80s built a wearable computer that would predict which octant the ball was going to end up in well enough to give a 44% advantage over the house. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemons
What you could still do, though, is use the computer to look for biases in the wheel. Roulette wheels do not produce uniformly distributed results, and with enough data you can find bets that give you an advantage.
This was covered in an episode of the wonderful TV series Breaking Vegas ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Vegas ). Each episode of that series focused on one person or group that found a way to beat the house. Some cheated (bribe the dealer, hack the slot machine software, sleight of hand to alter bets after the outcome is determined), some develop amazing physical skill ("dice dominators" can throw dice with such precise control over the initial conditions that they come up with the same outcome each time), one guy counterfeited casino tokens (and did such a good job that the chip manufacturer was not able to tell which tokens were his and which were theirs--they only knew counterfeit tokens existed because more tokens were coming back when they emptied the slot machines than they had issued), and some (such as the roulette bias people) exploit the math of the game.
In the episode that dealt with roulette biases, there was a family in Europe that would observe a wheel for a very large number of plays, taking notes on the outcomes. The casinos do not object to note taking--they encourage it, because people taking notes are people who think they have a system, and 99.99% of the time people who think they have a system are people who do not understand the laws of probability and are going to lose. Well, this family is not part of the 99.99%. They took their notes, found the favored numbers, and bet on those, and won big.
The casinos tried moving the wheels between tables, but the family members had spent so much time looking at the wheels gathering data, they could recognize the wheels from wear patterns, scratches, and so on, and so still place the right bets.
The casinos then simply banned them. If they had been playing in Las Vegas, that would have been the end of it, but they were in Europe. They went to court--and the court said casinos could not ban people for simply winning too much. The family had not violated any legitimate casino rules, so the casinos had to let them back in.
I don't remember how the casinos finally stopped these people--probably by replacing wheels with ones the family had not seen, or physically altering the wheels to change the distribution.