Beating the System

Ever since Orville and Wilbur Wright invented the airplane, people have been trying to beat the system and shift the odds to their favor.

Some do it just for the challenge, but more often, the motivating factor is money. Willie Sutton, as I wrote in a previous column, targeted banks because that is where the money is. Brainy, intelligent people, many of them with backgrounds in mathematics, go after casinos for the same reason.

All games of chance have, or are supposed to have, a built-in factor that favors the House. This is true whether the game is roulette, dice, slot machines, blackjack, video poker, or any of the table games on the premises.

But suppose -- just suppose -- there was a glitch in the system. Suppose someone was able to reverse the odds and shift them in favor of the player the way a math professor named Edward O. Thorp did with blackjack.

Thorp used a high-speed computer to figure out a strategy that involved counting cards and increasing the size of his bets to overcome the House edge. In several well-publicized excursions to Las Vegas and other gambling meccas, he won thousands of dollars with his new system and forced casinos to change the rules of the game.

Joan Ginther is another brilliant mathematician who was able to figure out a way to overcome, of all things, the Texas Lottery. By using a computer to follow the winning numbers, she won four lottery jackpots, each worth over $1 million. Texas lottery officials are still trying to figure out how she accomplished it.

A syndicate of British professors and tutors overcame their boredom by using a computer to track winning lottery numbers for four years. They invested $8,700 and won a jackpot totaling $13 million.

Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo had a passion for playing roulette. He believed there was a system to beat the game and collected data and analyzed roulette wheels in casinos throughout Madrid where he lived before cracking the system. He discovered winning numbers on a small number of roulette wheels were not strictly random. By wagering on the patterns, he was able to win $1.5 million.

Lottery experts said Garcia-Pelayo was able to turn the five percent House edge into a 15 percent player edge. Casino management sued to get their money back -- and lost in court. The casinos retaliated by banning the winner and members of his family from their casinos.

James Grosjean wrote a book, 'Beyond Counting: Exploiting Video Games from Blackjack to Video Poker' and managed to win a small fortune before the casinos fought back. They took him to court where he won a $600,000 judgment against Imperial Palace.

Some math wizards were not interested in winning money. They wanted to show that math has its place in the world of odds and invented systems that took advantage of this fact.

Casinos spend millions of dollars on security systems in order to keep people from beating the games. They have banned body computers, card counting and other systems, but the one thing they cannot outlaw is the human brain.

The brain is the greatest computer ever invented. As long as there are games of chance, people will try to figure a way to beat them. Let the games begin.