Quote:
Originally Posted by David Sklansky
I was addressing the idea that its not right to take advantage of a company's negligence. Does this include mathematical stupidity as well as carelessness? I don't want to feel so guilty that I give back several hundred thousands of dollars.
For the purposes of the discussion at hand I believe that as long as you accept and play the games as offered you shouldn't feel guilty about winning and I don't think the casino would find any legal recourse available to them to try to recover their losses. CLEARLY, this is a far different scenario than exists in the Ivey cases.
Did you ever watch the big to-do over "Press Your Luck"? I think it is available on YouTube. In any event one player managed to memorize the not so random patterns involved in their game and beat the game for record amounts. Everybody knew something was wrong while they were watching, but nobody could figure it out. In the end though the guy kept the money because he didn't cheat. He just beat them at their own game. They didn't know it was beatable. He did. It was clearly "advantage play" and nothing more. Great story.
Casinos are much in the same boat. The only game I know of where real advantage play is readily available is blackjack. As we know card counters can effectively make the game even money or better by playing and betting according to mathematical formulae based on the the probabilities of cards remaining in the deck by keeping track of cards exposed during play. The casinos don't like this and in Nevada they are allowed to exclude card counters from playing. Casinos have learned to protect themselves from card counters by adjusting the rules. They shuffle more often. They cut the decks deeper. They pay less on blackjack. They use new machines with shoes that hold many, many decks of cards. As a result of the Ivey case, I would suspect that you will find most casinos paying particular and renewed attention to the designs of their card backs to ensure the cards can not be manipulated so as to identify their value as Ivey and Sun did.