Beating the house

The History Channel has run and will run again a documentary called Breaking Vegas about a group of MIT students who learned card-counting techniques and won a ton of money at the casinos. I'm gonna have to set the TiVo to record the next showing of this, not because there's anything revolutionary to me about card counting but because I'd like to know how they kept house security from figuring out who they were and what they were doing. I mean, casinos have known about card counters for years and won the right to bar them in 1981. These guys apparently got caught some of the time, according to that Chron story, but not often enough to prevent them from raking in a tidy sum. I want to know how they did it.

I have to say, my favorite story about beating the casinos is involves a bunch of counterculture engineers who figured out a way to beat roulette by creating a mathematical model to predict roughly where the ball would land, designing and building tiny computers which were kept in their shoes to do the math at the roulette table, and working out a system where one player did the work and signaled another how to bet. Bear in mind, all of this was done in the late 70s/early 80s, well before the micro revolution. It's pretty damn amazing.

Short version: they were teams, each team member having a particular job. Some bet, some didn't. One member was a counter, one watched for security, three bet using different styles. They had a series of codewords and phrases to communicate (commenting on the weather might mean the deck is face card rich).

Vegas catches the good card counters (they welcome the bad ones) by watching their betting patterns. Card counters bet in a very precise way.

So the MIT team had the people actually doing the card counting play the same bet, hand after hand. Other members of the team would change their bets, but would move from table to table to avoid the regular patterns (IE, they wouldn't be changing their bet size, but rather floating between tables with the same bet).

It was pretty complex and effective as hell. The people doing the card counting never changed bets, so no one looked at them twice. The people making all the money were floating from table to table, hitting them when they were ripe, and then moving on when they started losing (as high rollers sometimes do. Who wants an "unlucky" table?). Other players would change their bet, but in such a way as to look like they were "reacting" to the floaters big wins.

If I remember correctly, they got caught because several teams were all spotted together at a tennis match. Considering they were acting, in the casino, as if they didn't know each other and were from different places and walks of life....

It made security suspicious, and once they knew who to look for, they were able to work out who was doing what. Still, the MIT kids made a ton...

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