[Nevermark]

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.

[sunshinesnacks]

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.

[majormajor]

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?)

[Nevermark]

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.

[majormajor]

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?