[gonvaled]

You are joking, aren't you?

You are telling me that nobody would program a secret algorithm, standing to win loads of money, to tilt the chances at the right moment? Because it is illegal!!!? Ohhh! Illegal! Surely nobody does illegal things? Not in a casino, not in a company, not in a government ...

[pedrocr]

>You are joking, aren't you?

No, I'm not.

>You are telling me that nobody would program a secret algorithm, standing to win loads of money, to tilt the chances at the right moment?

No I didn't make that generalized statement. What I did say was that in this particular case that hypothesis is of low probability:

1) The people building the machines don't make money on poker playing, but by selling them to casinos

2) The article explicitly mentions that they actually have a machine that plays too well and that they've had to dumb it down to give players enough of an incentive to play. So there's no need to cheat.

3) Casinos are heavily regulated and their hardware is known to be verified more thoroughly than both ATMs and voting machines. You don't risk a billion dollar business to nickel and dime a few customers.

4) Casinos make their money milking gambling addicts, making sure they don't take their money fast enough that they'll give up. Fixing the games would only reduce their variance not their final outcome and they have enough scale that the variance isn't high at all.

>Because it is illegal!!!? Ohhh! Illegal! Surely nobody does illegal things? Not in a casino, not in a company, not in a government ...

Adding a bunch of exclamations does not an argument make.

[gonvaled]

Sorry, not convinced. All that control and regulation applies to more important parts of society, and it does not work (NSA).

So, according to you, I, Mr. unbeatable hold'em player, can go to this machine, bet a million dollars and be sure that, in that perfect moment when I know I am going to crush it, it will not play tricks against me?

When I lose, how do I know? How can I be sure that it has not dealt itself favorably? It is not a matter of whether they are doing it: it is a matter of whether they can do it. If there is no independent dealer, this is not for me. It does not matter what the law says, which are the incentives, how they are generating profit, ... As long as the machine can theoretically deal itself a good hand, I am not playing it.

And, by the way, as long as the machine can know what cards I am holding, I am not playing it either.

Give me an independent dealer, and then we talk.

[pedrocr]

>So, according to you, I, Mr. unbeatable hold'em player, can go to this machine, bet a million dollars and be sure that, in that perfect moment when I know I am going to crush it, it will not play tricks against me?

No, I never said you could be sure of that. What I do argue is that no one has much of an incentive to cheat you in this case.

>It is not a matter of whether they are doing it: it is a matter of whether they can do it. If there is no independent dealer, this is not for me.

Don't change the subject. The discussion was around if they were doing it. We all know it could be done, that's why we discussed this in the first place.

>And, by the way, as long as the machine can know what cards I am holding, I am not playing it either. Give me an independent dealer, and then we talk.

That's fine. You require 100% certainty of not cheating and this machine doesn't offer it. That is in no way an argument to say that they are in fact cheating. It's not even an argument to say that the probability that they are indeed cheating is very small (which is what I argued).

[clarky07]

You can't bet a million dollars. it's limit hold-em. not no-limit.

[ubernostrum]

You must be an absolutely miserable person. I'm terribly sorry.

[awakeasleep]

You're missing the bigger picture: the cheating has already been done and the game is over.

It's perfectly legal to make games that, bound by physics and probability, pay more to the casino than the players. There is no need to cheat, get it?

The only thing casinos need to work at is attracting a bigger slice of the pie to their games.

[cuu508]

writing a game that cheats and doesn't raise suspiction might be as hard as writing a game that plays fair :-)

[gonvaled]

Parafrasing Clarke, "A sufficiently complex system is indistinguishable from magic".

You, and nobody, will not notice small probabilistic variations. Whenever you discover it (let us say, 30 years from now), you will be told that there was a difficult to find bug in the random generator. Nobody will be prosecuted.

It could be a couple of lines of code in a subsystem somewhere, available only to a handful of engineers, and understood only by two of them - both of them with nice bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.

[ianstallings]

This is true but the Gaming Control Board audits the software and they are also audited by outside parties. Could they cheat? Of course. So can human dealers, rigged card shufflers, etc. But Las Vegas makes its money from table games, slot machines, and apparently poker machines that play so well you'd have to be a pro to win consistently. It's not in their best interest to cheat you. As always in life: your mileage will vary.