This sounds somewhat similar to the polite fiction of Japanese Pachinko parlors [1].
"Taniguchi swapped the tray of thousands of winning silver balls for a receipt, which in turn was swappable for alcohol, toys or other prizes. To get money, you need to ask for the “special prize” tokens. These are plastic gold-coloured tokens that can be swapped for cash -- but not within the pachinko parlour. Instead, they are cashed in at TUC shops that are always located nearby and exist as a legal loophole enabling you to win money in a country that technically forbids gambling."
Interesting since the officially sealed plastic coin-collector style enclosures themselves would be more easily detected by the cashier if compromised compared to the supposedly gold bullion they contain.
Obviating the need for the bullion to be more than just gold plated under most circumstances . . .
And making the seals and/or enclosures almost as valuable as their face value in actual gold, since they could be substituted for the real thing at any price level and follow the same pricing fluctuations.
great travel story. it misses something that i felt in spades whenever i popped my head into a pachinko parlor: it is incredibly depressing. ive never seen slots in vegas but i imagine its similar. theres something incredibly reductive about sitting there watching balls bounce randomly and slowly losing money. especially knowing that people are hopelessly addicted to it. but, i get it. we are all capable of succumbing to things like this. the void is utterly palpable in those places.
Wow, I've been in about a dozen casinos in my life. I hated every minute I was in them. I had pre-budgeted a specific amount and when it was gone, it was gone.
I could never really place my finger on what it was I disliked about them except that the games bored me. But it was so much more than that. I failed to connect the dots until exactly the moment I read your comment.
There is a void, an abyss of loneliness and sorrow. Many of the people there are empty. Lost. An air of depression, desperation hangs in the air. It's like they've lost the will to live and this is their last hope at redemption that fades with every token they drop into the machines.
As an empath, this emptiness, this void that you describe being so palpable. That cuts to the very core of how it makes me feel when I enter them and why I spend the entire time longing for the door. It's like the Dementor's Kiss for me.
Take 20x the min bet (e.g., $200 to a $10 table) to a craps table, bet the pass line, get free drinks, and cheer like crazy for the shooter.
This is a relatively low variance and no skill way to have fun at a casino. The craps table are usually where the fun people are.
A few general comments:
- Your expected value on a $10 bet is -$0.15. You get maybe 25-30 bets an hour at a full table. It's a very cheap game to play.
- Tables are active at different times in different casinos. Evenings are often the best time. Weekends can be good, but sometimes more crowded and/or higher minimums.
- Stakes can matter in some casinos. The difference of clientele at a $5 min table and a $10 min table can be noticeable. Casinos with a wider range of min bets will also have wider range of atmospheres. Pick your poison.
- Remember that you are responsible for your bet and collecting your winnings (i.e., pulling it in). Dealers sometimes make mistakes, and sometimes people grab the wrong bet (intentionally or unintentionally). This is usually not an issue, just stay on top of it at a busy table.
- Bring some $1 or $5 chips to tip the dealers and the cocktail waitresses. Good tipping usually gets you better service.
I know there are loads of people that do find enjoyment in Casinos. So I know my perspective isn't the only one by a long shot.
A friend of mine used to be a professional gambler. He stuck to the poker tables... I guess he must've played medium stakes. He did pretty well because you're playing against the other players, so even though the house wins overall, if you're a decent poker player, you can walk away with more than you started every night, and he did and the house still wins. The odds work far more favourably when you're betting against other players rather than the house. He started off without much money in the bank, but he was pretty quickly pulling in enough to cover his rent, bills and never seemed to want for much.
It always seemed to me if the game itself could've held my attention longer than 15 minutes, it would've been a pretty easy way to augment my income. The truth is though, after 15 minutes I'm bored with that.
> The odds work far more favourably when you're betting against other players rather than the house.
Not in general, but skill matters more in a game where the house skims off the top (so the players collectively are guaranteed to lose the amount the house has decided it requires independently of the gains or losses of individual players), and there is an element of skill influencing the gains and losses between the players.
This only makes the odds more favorable, though, for a player of above average skill for the players they play against; it makes them worse for players of below average skill, since, after the fixed house take, it still a zero-sum game.
I've played plenty of poker to supplement my income in the past. There is quite a difference in gambling against other players vs against the house. Casinos are not in the business of losing money, so they control odds of the game and their gambles to ensure expected gains long term. They take a rake(small portion of the pots) from player vs player table games, essentially charging a fee for the service of providing a table and dealer. Poker is considered a game of skill to most, (you are making gambles, but can control the odds of yourself and other players by deciding upon wager amounts). This is why you see lots of professional poker players, but not slots players. That said, I found long term play both boring and depressing.
To be fair, there are some professional slot players, and many more professional video poker players. In this [1] podcast episode of Gambling With an Edge, they interview a guy that has been beating slots professionally for 22 years. One of the hosts of the show is a celebrated professional video poker player, and the other is a professional table games player. There are as many ways to beat casinos as there are games on their floors.
This is absolutely false.
For credentials, I have worked for several years in the industry testing slot machine software.
One of the things we test for is ensuring the game always pays out at the correct payback rate, which is always skewed so that the house wins. In most jurisdictions, the laws are written such that it is illegal to have a slot machine that pays back in the players favor over time (doing this would reduce the governments taxes).
In a sufficiently large population, over a finite period of time, there can be a small set of people that look like they are winners. This is called survivorship bias. Given enough time, these people will eventually lose.
However, anyone saying they know how to win on slot machines is probably just lying.
The house always wins in the end. The only way to win as a player is to cheat.
There are slots plays for advantage players ... when the jackpot reaches some amount there can be an edge for the player, they do promotions that can be gamed ... takes a lot of studying the minutiae for a loophole ... a more general article on advantage players https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/magazine/how-advantage-pl...
You are absolutely wrong, but your comment did manage to get mine to -1 point, so thanks for that. You are correct that slots are as random as the RNG within them (which, as it turns out, isn't actually that random [2]), however that does not mean they cannot be beaten. Slots can be beaten in a variety of ways:
1) Any progressive jackpot that gets high enough can skew the game's return to players to above 100%. Believe it or not, digital slot reels can be mapped out and the return extrapolated (example here [1]). On a progressive slot, with this data and the meter rise in hand (which can usually be easily calculated through mere observation), you can calculate the level at which the progressive makes the game positive.
2) Various slot promotions can be beaten. For example, there was a casino team that was tipped off to a promotion where a casino in the midwest was, for 12 hours, offering a double payout any W-2G win (any win over $1200 on a machine). So, they went and played a $100 slot machine, where almost any payout was over $1200 - essentially getting a double payout on every win. They had an enormous advantage with this promotion. These kinds of mathematically challenged promotions are not as rare as you would think.
3) Many slot machines have a "must hit by" feature, where the progressive must hit when it reaches a certain amount. Advantage players wait for these to get to within cents of the payout, locking up machines hours before and playing the minimum amount very slowly, so that they are in a position to win them.
4) Some casinos give loss rebates to some players that can turn almost any game positive, especially when combined with techniques that I won't mention here. This isn't necessarily limited to ultra high-rollers either - I am familiar with a few casinos where significant loss rebates start at losses of just $1,000.
There are more.
So you are absolutely wrong that there are not advantage slot players. There are teams of them that work in Vegas and other jurisdictions.
Some games can get large enough jackpots to make a game +EV.
Doesn't mean the house would lose.
The advantage players would fight for the machine(s, if a pooled jackpot) and play until the jackpot was hit, at which point it would become -EV again and they would stop.
These machines are relatively uncommon, and getting more uncommon.
You can read about these players, I think they can squeak by making about minimum wage or thereabouts.
I believe most of these 'professional' slot players operate around the multi-machine jackpots which can sometimes get large enough to offer a positive EV on the games. They work in teams though admittedly is been a long time since I've read about it. There was also another guy I read about who worked on finding flaws in the prngs and pay tables but those would only last a matter of months before corrected.
My brother used to work in a bar and asserts the following:
Some days he would work all day and see people put money in a machine and not win anything much (e.g. jackpot never came up). Believing that the machine had a payback rate that would balance out over a few hours/days, he would deliberately put a bit of money in at the end of the 'no winner days', and would often win enough that it made it worthwhile overall.
Anecdotal, but it seems consistent with your understanding and is a source of an edge.
In the US & AU, I know they use a Theoretical Hold Worksheet which pre-specifies the win/lose ratios and is required for every machine. That worksheet doesn't make use of past wins/loses, i.e. it is stateless. This matches what you say.
However, I do not know what the situation is in the UK/EU at present, and I do not know what it was 20 years ago (when my brother was working there).
In the UK, it's common for gambling machines in places like pubs to have "compensated" payout odds that are are dependent on the history of wins/losses. Odd quirk of our regulations.
> if you're a decent poker player, you can walk away with more than you started every night,
This is a huge exaggeration from what my poker playing friends have told me. One notable individual being a professional poker player of several years and who has wins in national tournaments as well. So he really knows his game. We've often talked about the odds of winning and how sustainable it is as an income. The figure he gives me is around 20% - that is you can only expect to cash in around 20% of the competitions you enter. Which means you can often go months without seeing a return. However it's not just him I've seen give that figure, other players I've spoken to have echoed a similar statement.
I also know a WSOP final table player, and what you say is true of tournament play.
Think of that more like the lottery for professional poker players. The celebrities do that a couple times a year, and the grinders hope to make enough for buy-in and "make it big". It's the least mathematically interesting way to "make a living" playing poker there is.
Where you grind out your living is the daily cash games. Yes, if you are making a living off of Poker it's basically a job. That means boring play for little hourly money most days of your life. After a few months, I imagine this feels more or less identical to an actual job.
I've watched "pros" grind out their day to day life, and it really doesn't seem that compelling. Better than working fast food, but on average seems to pay about the same and be roughly the same intellectual stimulation. 4 screens with 6 tables on each playing video poker every day doesn't sound that great to me.
> Better than working fast food, but on average seems to pay about the same
There are quite a few people who play from places where living costs are low(er) like Costa Rica or Mexico or, for that matter, Hungary and make -- compared to the locals -- an astonishing amount of money. Istvan Ratkai, who wrote a few successful text adventure games in the eighties have been one of the most well known Hungarian video poker players. He said he played about 3-4 hours a day and made 50-70% more than the minimal wage -- the full time minimal wage, that is. He had an ordinary programmer job as well so this as a secondary was quite a nice haul.
To be honest I wasn't talking about online play either. I was thinking more about GUKPT type competitions. But what you say was also true for my mates back before they became regular final table players in major tournaments. Online playing tends to bring out a different type of competitor from what I gather but the "grinding" nature of the game is still the same.
Cash players still have downswings. Big, ugly, edge of the bell curve downswings. "I worked 60 hours this week and lost five grand" downswings. Downswings where you start to wonder if you're actually any good at poker.
That's the hard part of professional poker. It isn't the maths, it isn't the game theory, it isn't the table selection, it's the psychological resilience. You have to keep making very precise, very aggressive decisions even when everything is going to shit. You have to go all-in on the 51/49 coin flip, even when you've lost the last six coin flips.
It all evens out in the long run, but the long run can be distressingly long.
> "I worked 60 hours this week and lost five grand" downswings.
That's nowhere near the worst downswing that even most midstakes cash game players have had.
> the long run can be distressingly long.
Especially in live cash games. It can go six months. It can make actually-winning players believe they aren't, and drive them out of the game.
Poker swings were the most emotional time of my life--I played HUSNGs for a few years professionally and had very mild downswings, all things considered.
I once lost 14 games in a row against one of the top-10 worst players I'd ever played with. I'm quite certain my winrate was about 70% against this player (exceedingly high for HUSNGs, almost the theoretical edge)
I used to be room mates with the guy. It's no exaggeration. He's charismatic, charming and a whole shit ton of other stuff. A really likeable guy. I saw first hand how he lived because he did it in my house.
Yeah. Poker can definitely be +ev. However, as you mentioned, +ev poker is often not terribly interesting (depends on the game and the stakes).
My reply was mainly just to point out that some casinos do have fun areas that are accessible with a relatively small budget with small expected losses in the long term.
That's the great thing about poker; you don't have to be better than the house's odds which are fixed against you anyway: you only have to be better than the other players. I used to regularly fund trips to Vegas playing small stakes tournaments against people who had watched one too many WSOP events on TV. Then I'd lose or barely place in the money playing medium stakes tournaments with all the locals and the grinders. It is possible to find your level and profit from playing those slightly below it. But after a while it's indistinguishable from a 9-5 job, so you really have to love it.
I did mention playing tournament poker where the entry costs are fixed although escalating blinds can force you to adopt different strategies based on your M. I agree live is different but even then house take can vary greatly.
The rake on live poker tournaments is terrible, probably worse than cash games. The great thing about tourneys is that anyone can win one and think they are great at poker. My mid-high stakes cash games were always helped immensely by tourney donkeys.
Live tournament means tournaments played in person at an actual table across from actual people as oppose to online tournament played over the internet.
The post above me is good advice. Despite the temptation and the fact that it is slightly more in your favor, resist the urge to "wrong" bet which is actively betting against the player with the dice. People who play these games can be superstitious and don't appreciate your favoring the odds over their luck by betting against them.
It's only a fraction of a penny in your favor for a $10 bet, but it will kill the mood at a table in no time.
That said, this superstition can be used to your advantage. One night there was a really negative and obnoxious drunk dude at the other end of the table. Every time he was the shooter, my buddy and I bet don't. He left the second time we did this. ;-)
I tend to play don't, I experience ribbing as a result and it becomes part of the atmosphere of the table. I think you minimize the mathematical difference too far, isn't it around .3% or .5%? I switch sides when the shooter is the player standing next to me, out of courtesy. Also playing this way gives you more to pay attention to, if you choose to lay odds.
In the movies they depict roulette table players as having a camaraderie, but I never saw that at roulette and I always see it at dice.
I believe it is 1.41% house advantage for pass and 1.36% for don't pass -- 0.05% difference. On a $10 bet that's a half cent difference.
Anyway, I've bet don't for a few trips for most/all of the trip just to see what happened. These were on weekends when the tables were going to be full no matter what. I agree that it made for some fun banter, and we sometimes go back to it for fun, but we mostly bet pass now and get stupid silly with our cheering.
Craps really is the best game. It is nice to play a game where everyone is on the same team (generally). There is a nice camaraderie that goes along with playing craps.
Another key to go along with this is don't go to the casino to win money. Go to the casino to spent $X over the course of Y hours to have fun. If you walk away with extra money, that's just a bonus.
couldn't agree with this more - gambling is about the ride and the "free" drinks you get while you're playing - never bring more money than you can afford to lose.
Craps is all about the whole table having fun playing against the house, and it's great fun when everyone is "winning".
If you walk into a casino with the goal of winning money (without a team and an exploit of some sort that actually gives you an edge over the house), you're doing it wrong.
Even if you do have an exploit and a team, don't count on keeping your winnings (see Phil Ivey and his baccarat scheme).
Casinos are near-perfect skinner boxes [1]. An industry that thrives on exploiting human nature and destroying the subject in the process, little by little.
What always astounds me when I was in them is that everyone seemed oblivious to it.
Their need for instant gratification, the pleasure centre in their brains triggered just enough to keep them ignoring the stress of their losses. Distracting them long enough to make them think they can win it all back and get back on top.
It's like playing poker in an interrogation room with a good cop and a bad cop. The good cop comes in enough to make you think you're okay. It doesn't matter whether you're innocent and you only lose a day of work or you're guilty and lose your freedom, you still lose.
People go in thinking they can beat the system and the rare few do, but most don't. Overall, the house always wins. That's why the doors are still open and they earn yearly profits of millions of dollars while a whole bunch of their patrons gradually lose their homes and the shirts on their backs.
Let me check in with you for a second: some people just like to gamble and do so responsibly. Those people - I'm one of them - know that it's unlikely that they'll win, but they enjoy the process just the same.
I think about gambling the same way I think about, say, playing a recreational sport. I'm going to lose money (participation fees) but I'm going to have fun.
Yup, that's me too. I have a £30 hard deposit limit for gambling (which comes out of my 'nice things to keep me sane' budget anyway) per month. Maybe I'm just lucky but it's genuinely very rare that I walk away out of pocket - I play by the rule of "hit >2*deposit, withdraw deposit amount and keep playing what's left" and for the most part it works, and I get a couple hours of fun out of it.
I know people who'd happily drop £30 a month on junk food or some other frivolous and non-essential purchase, yet they call me an addict. Maybe I am maybe I'm not, I don't know. I do know that I have a good time for a couple of hours and if I'm lucky, I get to walk away with a couple hundred extra in my bank account.
I've been in a few casinos over the last few years (I go with a friend just to have the existential experience, we have yet to play anything, but we then try out their buffet), what strikes me is how much and how little they have changed from what I remember from the few I've been to as a kid or seen in movies. The staple slot machines are still there, they take up most of the floor space, but they're the most depressing. They don't even have physical levers, it's all just repeatedly pressing a button. No coins, everything's on a card now. They all look pretty much the same. There were like 20 different wolf-themed slots. The game variety is so small in terms of objectives and what you can control (or have the illusion of control anyway), the effects even when you win are so dull (many pinball games have a much more exciting "Multiball!" announcement) -- again no spitting out a bunch of coins -- how do people get addicted to that, especially when they're usually losing money? If people claim it's for fun and don't expect to win (as rationally they shouldn't against the house), why don't they just buy an actual game, or download any of the free ones, for a console, phone, or PC, and derive many more hours of entertainment for a much lower dollar investment? If people do it just to enable fantasies of striking it rich, why don't lotto tickets adequately fill that niche?
Fortunately casino buffets are generally good enough that I can enjoy the food and put aside such thoughts.
Honestly, it just sounds like you don't like gambling and have created emotional preconceptions out of ignorance. What separates responsible video games from gambling?
Addiction and using simple pleasures to fill the hole of depression is certainly a problem... however that issue transcends any individual pleasure. People can be addicted to TV, video games, political news, and even books.
Yes, people can be addicted to anything, but that's a false equivalence. Debilitating addiction to video games is incredibly rare in comparison to gambling, and someone addicted to video games isn't normally going to lose their life's savings. We're comparing cigarettes and potato chips.
Further, gambling is essentially a zero-sum game. The house always wins, equal to how much you lose, and pretty much every gambler loses besides the one or two rare examples who strike a jackpot the first time they ever play and then never gamble again. In contrast, buying a video game is a transactions both parties are normally expected to benefit from equally, and a video game's single player mode is expected to last at least 10 hours at a minimum nowadays not counting online play that lasts essentially as long as you want, while gambling machines need a constant input of money that adds up to much more over time. Even comparing to coin-based arcade machines, a session on one of those will last much longer for the price, and even in the microtransactions that have become common nowadays you at least end up with something more than the screen flashing some bright lights for a few seconds. So overall on this point, it seems to me like a gambling establishment is necessarily exploitative while a video game publisher isn't.
While I agree that the gaming industry is exploitative, it's unfair to assert that gambling is zero-sum by generalizing all means of gambling as "screens flashing bright lights for a few seconds."
You or I might value a video game more, but some people who gamble actually derive utility from the games themselves (and from a purely scientific standpoint, even a near-miss in gambling results in the release of dopamine [1]).
You're making assumptions about other people's value tradeoffs. And, perhaps, simply don't understand what responsible gambling looks like.
I like going to a casino once a month with friends, always with a preset $50 limit. That translates to hours of great fun, food, drinks. I'll start the day with poker if we're planning to stay for a while, I'm good enough to turn a profit (which I spend on other pure-luck games). Other times I'll just suss out the slot machines while watching a game at the bar.
On the other hand, I never play video games... I just find them universally boring. $20 for 10 hours of gameplay sounds like a waste of time and money to me. However, I do understand why other people enjoy video games.
At the end of the day, I've seen self-destructive gamblers pumping the slots and subtly self-destructive gamers pay2playing... as well as responsible gamblers and gamers. To each their own.
Very little necessarily separates gambling from video games. After all, another name for casinos is the "gaming industry".
The main practical differences to me are that the gambling industry is more nakedly exploitative, more reliably engineered for addiction, and more frequently destructive to people's lives.
But I think parts of the video game industry are headed in that direction.
When I watch my brother and my nephew playing, say Battlefield 1, they are visibly having fun. They bought the game once and are getting many hours of enjoyment out of it, a few at a time. It seems a reasonably healthy pastime to me.
But then I'll watch people playing Zynga-ish games. They don't look like they're having fun. They look like people playing slots: low affect, compulsive, grinding away at something that never really satisfies.
So personally, it's not that I don't like gambling specifically. A friend's low-ante poker night can be a good time. It's that I hate profitable exploitation of people's weaknesses in a way that leaves them worse off. Industrial-scale gambling and shitty, addictive games are both in that bucket for me.
> What separates responsible video games from gambling
What separates responsible anything from anything else? Nothing at all.
Anything can be addictive if it lights up the pleasure centres in your brain and you use that to fill the hole of depression. Computer Games. Drinking. Gambling. Smoking. Drugs. Adrenaline. Shopping. Hoarding. None of these things will fill the hole in your heart or fix depression. They're just distractions. I used to be married to a drug addict. Her father was an alcoholic. I knew and spent time with dealers and other addicts. I have direct experience with that. I spent 6 years of my life dealing with that. So I have more of an understanding of what depression and addiction can do to your life than most.
Sure, I do have a lot of ignorance when it comes to casinos. But I have been in them, I have seen people gambling responsibly. I have gambled responsibly. You're right in your perception that I don't get enjoyment out of it. In fact, the act of gambling doesn't light up the pleasure centres in my brain. The wins and losses are academic. Clinical. But this goes far deeper than that. There are tons of things I don't get enjoyment that I have tried that don't give me this feeling about the participants.
I am an empath. The moods of people in my proximity greatly affects my own emotions. I frequently have problems untangling which feelings are mine and which are someone else's. I can be feeling light and happy and walk into a room where someone is in a bad mood, and like The Pink Panther, the cloud rolls in and my good mood is gone. I am under a cloud. It's usually not as clear cut as this, nor as easy to decipher that this isn't my mood. This is off-topic, I'm just trying to give you a sense of the fact that this isn't borne out of my own emotional preconceptions. This is borne out of the people around me, not the casino itself which I'm actually largely indifferent about. Just as I'm indifferent about people who smoke pot, enjoy computer games, find enjoyment shopping. This isn't about the activity. This is about the emotional well-being of the people in my proximity.
I agree, there are many people that do gamble responsibly for fun, they go out, they spend responsibly, they enjoy it for what it is, they walk away. I don't get this feeling from those people. These are healthy, emotionally balanced people. They're not trying to fill a void in their soul. They're just out having fun. Perhaps I'd enjoy their company. I can't say because I don't know them.
However, there are such a significant portion of people that aren't like this in casinos that it's impossible to ignore - to the point that I literally feel like it's suffocating me and invokes my fight or flight response. It makes me want to leave. If you suffer from claustrophobia, you will understand they symptoms profoundly. If you're put in a room you can't get out of, you suffer a physical and emotional response. You may be able to hide it from those around you. You may be able to look to everyone else like you're okay. But inside, you're suffering from an increased stress response, you feel uncomfortable, you feel hot, you might start to feel your muscles tingle or vibrate, you feel trapped, you feel like you need to escape, you're acutely aware of where the exits are and your shortest path to them. Add to that the fact that the hopeless lost void I'm feeling in those around me and that's how I feel in most of the casinos I've been in.
It's about how much research and development has gone into making those machines as addictive as possible. Also one of the most depressing books I've ever read.
> It's like they've lost the will to live and this is their last hope at redemption that fades with every token they drop into the machines.
Consider the Rat Park experiment (http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/rat-park/) — it seems "psychological addiction" in general is essentially a way of coping with a stressful environment.
I've never seen this before, it's actually a pretty damning assessment of what putting an addict in jail will do to them... it makes them even more addicted than if they found a way to socialize and rehabilitate them. Give them an ability to enjoy their lives and they will gradually self ween.
This is quite sad really... I felt terrible for the rats in the cages.
There's a place in the world
For a gambler
There's a burden that only
He can bear
There's a place in the world
For a gambler,
And he sees
Oh, yes he sees
And he sees
Oh, yes he sees
There's a song in the heart
Of a woman
That only the truest of loves
Can release.
There's a song in the heart
Of a woman.
Set it free
Oh, set it free
Set it free
Oh, set it free
Set it free
Oh, set it free.
There's a light in the depths
Of your darkness
There's a calm at the eye
Of every storm.
There's a light in the depths
Of your darkness.
Let is shine
Oh, let it shine
Let is shine
Oh, let it shine
Let is shine
Oh, let it shine.
Let it Shine
It's a curse you can't walk away from sadly. I hope you treat that compassionately. Many people have no idea just how deeply that affects them. It's not just being attuned to other people's emotions so much as it affects your own emotions. Much of the time it clouds my own emotions so deeply, I find it impossible to untangle which are my own emotions and which are those of the people around me. I have to walk away and give myself time for respite. It can be really hard. I try and surround myself with happy, positive, optimistic people that make me laugh. Sometimes, that's literally the only way I can deal with it.
It makes for a good counsellor, but I can't fix everyone's problems and I have to remind myself of that constantly.
Everyone is responsible for their own feelings. I am responsible for my own.
I have to remind myself of that numerous times every day or I spend all day feeling guilty for not fixing things for everyone.
Their journey is not mine. My journey is not theirs. I can share their path, they can share mine, but I am not here to fix everything for everyone. All I can do is be there and show them how they can fix it for themselves.
I was in Vegas once and can confirm it's incredibly depressing to walk through a casino. And they're mostly slots and slot zombies, unlike casinos in the movies.
Except in this case, its almost certainly a violation of money laundering laws in the US.
Tbh, part of me wonders if it would be perfectly legal if they sold an actual product at a massive markup (say, "designer chocolate"), provided "bonus tokens", and allowed refunds of the chocolate even if it was purchased with those tokens.
I'm not aware of any laws that prevent the conversion of tokens to chocolate to refunds. Then again, a cryptocurrency is probably less hassle at this point than any of these fronts.
Though these are generally discussed in terms of their tax or financial domain, the step doctrine and substance over form doctrines would preclude those actions from being legal just because there is an intermediate step inserted.
I don't know of their specific applicability (or not) w.r.t. money laundering.
I love stories like these. I wonder what the Japanese equivalent is, in terms of "bizarre tourist experiences"? I bet there's equally breathless articles somewhere about American gun ranges, for example.
As I've mentioned before I first encountered transaction hiding in World of Warcraft. There were 'grey'[1] items in the Auction House with a buy it now price of 500 gold (which at the time was extreme). I could not figure out who would buy a twill vest for 500g until it was explained that you went to a web site, paid them some cash for gold, told them your character name, and then put up for auction a grey item that was priced at how much gold you had purchased. One of the vendors 'agents' would then go into the auction house and buy it. You ended up with your gold and as far as the game was concerned it was a straight up, if unusual, transaction between players.
[1] Item descriptions were colored, grey was "trash" and meant to be sold to vendor for cash, "green" were somewhat nicer/rare, then "blue" for very rare, and "purple" for epically rare, and "goldenrod" for legendary.
Around 10 years ago before the rise of bitcoin, WoW gold was the de facto illicit currency of the internet, since there was a reasonably robust market for it. Things like batches of stolen credit cards would routinely be bought and sold in prices delineated in WoW gold.
According to a Blizzard employee one of my coworkers talked to, their chargeback rates were significantly higher than even porn sites (15+%, IIRC), to the point that it was somewhat surprising that their payment processor was still doing business with them. It's unclear to me if those accounts were primarily used to generate mules to facilitate these transactions, gold farming, or something else.
Indeed you couldn't. Technically you still can't, but now you can buy a game token with cash and then sell that to other players on the auction house for gold.
One of the ways to launder ISK in EVE Online works almost the same way. Make ingame contract listing something at ridiculous prize, other party buys it, game logs look like "ordinary" game scam (EVE is famous for scamming).
Customer support gave up the con on a phone call? I imagine with a little more effort they could have been indistinguishable from a legitimate business.
> Customer support gave up the con on a phone call?
They kind of have to, since the whole purpose of the support number seems to be to reassure people who know they paid “MyIllegalPokerSite.com” but see a charge on their bill from “MyTotallyLegitFabricStore.com” that the charge corresponds to their payment to the poker site, and that they shouldn't contest the charges as fraudulent with their card issuer.
Yeah. This scheme makes it seem easy to issue a chargeback though, gamblers can just tell their credit card co "I have no idea who FabricFactory.com is". I wonder how/if they prevent gambling customers from doing that.
From the article, they told the reporter that they handled virtually all online gambling transactions; they might just accept a certain level of it and then blacklist the customer. (They might even let a customer suggesting that they might issue a chargeback know that that is the consequence.)
It is also very hard to withdraw money from illegal gambling sites. It can be done, but is often a slow drawn out process, to get you as close as possible to the date that you can't cancel. Also don't forget that these are dodgy people who have your home address... And know you've been breaking the law - likely with also some tax issues too on the winnings.
I believe they usually have a 90-day waiting period for withdrawals if you load via credit card (instead of Western Union or BTC), helping them ensure the user does not perform a chargeback.
I noticed one of these payment processing fronts when I looked at my card transactions after making a PartyPoker deposit back in ~2006. In this case, it was a site called Gygon.com. If you visited their website, you would have thought it was an online lamp store with many broken features. I later learned that GYGON stood for "get your game on".
I feel really stupid, can someone explain to me what people are allegedly doing here?
My understanding is a Poker company (for example) puts all transactions from US customers through these fake stores. Then the organisation running the fake stores reimburses the Poker company outside of the US and takes a small slice for the service?
Credit card details are passed to a "payment processor" who uses one of these storefronts who have a legitimate merchant account (due to their legit-enough looking website), they charge the cards and load credits into online poker accounts.
The poker company puts transactions (deposits, anyway) through the fake stores. The organisation running the fake stores may well be the poker company or a wholly owned subsidiary, so they don't necessarily keep a cut.
If they took deposits in their own name, the credit card companies and banks would refuse to do business with them.
I would think this is primarily to hide gambling activities so it doesn't affect your credit score. If you're applying for a loan or credit card your bank statements can be assessed and if it finds transactions to known gambling sites or ATM withdrawals from known gambling venues or hotels then that will affect your credit rating badly.
"After I set up the account, I couldn't quite figure out how to deposit money. That's when I got a phone call on my cell phone and a guy walked me through how to put money on the book. Took my credit card right over the phone. Then he assured me there wouldn't be anything on my credit card statement that said BetOnline."
What would show up on the statement was MoserSafety. Which was a front website. If you called the contact information, they confirmed they had no safety goggles, gloves, hard hats, etc. to actually sell you. It was a shell. In fact, they confirmed on the phone that the number called was a, "third party payment processing support service." Some time later, the site no longer existed.
And this is why everyone should start requiring 3D Secure. On sites with 3D Secure support I need to use an app to authorize transactions, so if this was the norm online credit card fraud would be a much smaller problem.
3DS is mostly a joke for anyone who _really_ wants to use your credit card. I won't go into details publicly, but I will say that having an app to authorize transactions is a step-up from the good 'ol "enter your PIN"
If all physical stores required chip and PIN and all online stores required 3D Secures then my credit card number, expiry date, and CVV would no longer be sensitive information meaning someone would need to either steal my physical credit card and my PIN or the secret key stored in my phone plus the PIN for the app. This means I would not need to worry about websites stealing my card info.
Nowadays most of them also have a bitcoin address as it is safer. Less hassle. Atleast this way you don't have to pay extra to not receive stuff you don't need anyway...
This is quite common with torrent site donations too, where you are directed to a webstore selling 'merch' that is actually your donation to the site in question.
Oh wow, I just looked it up and yes, they use a shockingly sophisticated system for this now [0]. I suspect you could still defeat it, but crypto is absolutely the easier option.
Funny though, my friends who use Draft Kings were able to just VPN into NJ from NY to use it.
Fraudulent online front stores? Quick. We need a new government agency with 10 digit budget and 722 lawyers to complain to Congress that their funding was cut and that will fix it and make sure it never happens again.
It's a weakness in the system, because the help desk employees have to be trained to tell people "yes I know it says MyFabricFactory on your credit card bill, but that was actually your deposit to our gambling website" because they get that call all the time and they need to be able to put the customers at ease rather than have them call Visa to dispute the transaction.
Ok who here hasn't ordered "something" from Europe that showed up on your credit card to some ecommerce site selling overpriced ipods? Let this be a lesson to you kids, try anything unscrupulous and the feds will catch up to you in a couple of decades.
I ordered a pump typically used in dialysis machines for a project that happened to require a pump of that nature. It came from some former Soviet republic and had been opened and examined by customs in a handful of countries (as evidenced by layers of cut tape and identifying tape and stickers placed on it when it was deemed passable). I wonder if after the first customs official inspected it all the subsequent countries decided if it was good enough to be of interest to the prior country they had better open it up and take a look as well.
I'm not sure if stuff like that is highly regulated but I was able to just buy it on eBay and it got to me no problem so it was pretty painless.
Based on purchases a friend of mine alleges one of his friends had made the really shady "somethings" go through .onion sites using bitcoin.
This sounds somewhat similar to the polite fiction of Japanese Pachinko parlors [1].
"Taniguchi swapped the tray of thousands of winning silver balls for a receipt, which in turn was swappable for alcohol, toys or other prizes. To get money, you need to ask for the “special prize” tokens. These are plastic gold-coloured tokens that can be swapped for cash -- but not within the pachinko parlour. Instead, they are cashed in at TUC shops that are always located nearby and exist as a legal loophole enabling you to win money in a country that technically forbids gambling."
1 - http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20120815-the-big-business-of...
I looked for a picture of these tokens. There's one near the bottom of this page: https://jenleetravel.wordpress.com/2015/09/14/a-beginners-gu...
It looks like these might be actual gold chips of 1g and 0.3g...
She received 8500 yen, about $70 at the time. One gram of gold was about $48 at the time so it seems to fit.
Interesting since the officially sealed plastic coin-collector style enclosures themselves would be more easily detected by the cashier if compromised compared to the supposedly gold bullion they contain.
Obviating the need for the bullion to be more than just gold plated under most circumstances . . .
And making the seals and/or enclosures almost as valuable as their face value in actual gold, since they could be substituted for the real thing at any price level and follow the same pricing fluctuations.
great travel story. it misses something that i felt in spades whenever i popped my head into a pachinko parlor: it is incredibly depressing. ive never seen slots in vegas but i imagine its similar. theres something incredibly reductive about sitting there watching balls bounce randomly and slowly losing money. especially knowing that people are hopelessly addicted to it. but, i get it. we are all capable of succumbing to things like this. the void is utterly palpable in those places.
Wow, I've been in about a dozen casinos in my life. I hated every minute I was in them. I had pre-budgeted a specific amount and when it was gone, it was gone.
I could never really place my finger on what it was I disliked about them except that the games bored me. But it was so much more than that. I failed to connect the dots until exactly the moment I read your comment.
There is a void, an abyss of loneliness and sorrow. Many of the people there are empty. Lost. An air of depression, desperation hangs in the air. It's like they've lost the will to live and this is their last hope at redemption that fades with every token they drop into the machines.
As an empath, this emptiness, this void that you describe being so palpable. That cuts to the very core of how it makes me feel when I enter them and why I spend the entire time longing for the door. It's like the Dementor's Kiss for me.
Thank you! Sincerely!
Take 20x the min bet (e.g., $200 to a $10 table) to a craps table, bet the pass line, get free drinks, and cheer like crazy for the shooter.
This is a relatively low variance and no skill way to have fun at a casino. The craps table are usually where the fun people are.
A few general comments:
- Your expected value on a $10 bet is -$0.15. You get maybe 25-30 bets an hour at a full table. It's a very cheap game to play.
- Tables are active at different times in different casinos. Evenings are often the best time. Weekends can be good, but sometimes more crowded and/or higher minimums.
- Stakes can matter in some casinos. The difference of clientele at a $5 min table and a $10 min table can be noticeable. Casinos with a wider range of min bets will also have wider range of atmospheres. Pick your poison.
- Remember that you are responsible for your bet and collecting your winnings (i.e., pulling it in). Dealers sometimes make mistakes, and sometimes people grab the wrong bet (intentionally or unintentionally). This is usually not an issue, just stay on top of it at a busy table.
- Bring some $1 or $5 chips to tip the dealers and the cocktail waitresses. Good tipping usually gets you better service.
I know there are loads of people that do find enjoyment in Casinos. So I know my perspective isn't the only one by a long shot.
A friend of mine used to be a professional gambler. He stuck to the poker tables... I guess he must've played medium stakes. He did pretty well because you're playing against the other players, so even though the house wins overall, if you're a decent poker player, you can walk away with more than you started every night, and he did and the house still wins. The odds work far more favourably when you're betting against other players rather than the house. He started off without much money in the bank, but he was pretty quickly pulling in enough to cover his rent, bills and never seemed to want for much.
It always seemed to me if the game itself could've held my attention longer than 15 minutes, it would've been a pretty easy way to augment my income. The truth is though, after 15 minutes I'm bored with that.
> The odds work far more favourably when you're betting against other players rather than the house.
Not in general, but skill matters more in a game where the house skims off the top (so the players collectively are guaranteed to lose the amount the house has decided it requires independently of the gains or losses of individual players), and there is an element of skill influencing the gains and losses between the players.
This only makes the odds more favorable, though, for a player of above average skill for the players they play against; it makes them worse for players of below average skill, since, after the fixed house take, it still a zero-sum game.
I've played plenty of poker to supplement my income in the past. There is quite a difference in gambling against other players vs against the house. Casinos are not in the business of losing money, so they control odds of the game and their gambles to ensure expected gains long term. They take a rake(small portion of the pots) from player vs player table games, essentially charging a fee for the service of providing a table and dealer. Poker is considered a game of skill to most, (you are making gambles, but can control the odds of yourself and other players by deciding upon wager amounts). This is why you see lots of professional poker players, but not slots players. That said, I found long term play both boring and depressing.
To be fair, there are some professional slot players, and many more professional video poker players. In this [1] podcast episode of Gambling With an Edge, they interview a guy that has been beating slots professionally for 22 years. One of the hosts of the show is a celebrated professional video poker player, and the other is a professional table games player. There are as many ways to beat casinos as there are games on their floors.
[1] http://slot-machine-resource.com/podcasts/liston2.mp3
This is absolutely false. For credentials, I have worked for several years in the industry testing slot machine software. One of the things we test for is ensuring the game always pays out at the correct payback rate, which is always skewed so that the house wins. In most jurisdictions, the laws are written such that it is illegal to have a slot machine that pays back in the players favor over time (doing this would reduce the governments taxes).
In a sufficiently large population, over a finite period of time, there can be a small set of people that look like they are winners. This is called survivorship bias. Given enough time, these people will eventually lose.
However, anyone saying they know how to win on slot machines is probably just lying.
The house always wins in the end. The only way to win as a player is to cheat.
There are slots plays for advantage players ... when the jackpot reaches some amount there can be an edge for the player, they do promotions that can be gamed ... takes a lot of studying the minutiae for a loophole ... a more general article on advantage players https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/magazine/how-advantage-pl...
>This is absolutely false.
You are absolutely wrong, but your comment did manage to get mine to -1 point, so thanks for that. You are correct that slots are as random as the RNG within them (which, as it turns out, isn't actually that random [2]), however that does not mean they cannot be beaten. Slots can be beaten in a variety of ways:
1) Any progressive jackpot that gets high enough can skew the game's return to players to above 100%. Believe it or not, digital slot reels can be mapped out and the return extrapolated (example here [1]). On a progressive slot, with this data and the meter rise in hand (which can usually be easily calculated through mere observation), you can calculate the level at which the progressive makes the game positive.
2) Various slot promotions can be beaten. For example, there was a casino team that was tipped off to a promotion where a casino in the midwest was, for 12 hours, offering a double payout any W-2G win (any win over $1200 on a machine). So, they went and played a $100 slot machine, where almost any payout was over $1200 - essentially getting a double payout on every win. They had an enormous advantage with this promotion. These kinds of mathematically challenged promotions are not as rare as you would think.
3) Many slot machines have a "must hit by" feature, where the progressive must hit when it reaches a certain amount. Advantage players wait for these to get to within cents of the payout, locking up machines hours before and playing the minimum amount very slowly, so that they are in a position to win them.
4) Some casinos give loss rebates to some players that can turn almost any game positive, especially when combined with techniques that I won't mention here. This isn't necessarily limited to ultra high-rollers either - I am familiar with a few casinos where significant loss rebates start at losses of just $1,000.
There are more.
So you are absolutely wrong that there are not advantage slot players. There are teams of them that work in Vegas and other jurisdictions.
[1] https://wizardofodds.com/games/slots/hot-roll/
[2] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/russians-engineer-brilliant-sl...
Some games can get large enough jackpots to make a game +EV.
Doesn't mean the house would lose.
The advantage players would fight for the machine(s, if a pooled jackpot) and play until the jackpot was hit, at which point it would become -EV again and they would stop.
These machines are relatively uncommon, and getting more uncommon.
You can read about these players, I think they can squeak by making about minimum wage or thereabouts.
I believe most of these 'professional' slot players operate around the multi-machine jackpots which can sometimes get large enough to offer a positive EV on the games. They work in teams though admittedly is been a long time since I've read about it. There was also another guy I read about who worked on finding flaws in the prngs and pay tables but those would only last a matter of months before corrected.
My brother used to work in a bar and asserts the following:
Some days he would work all day and see people put money in a machine and not win anything much (e.g. jackpot never came up). Believing that the machine had a payback rate that would balance out over a few hours/days, he would deliberately put a bit of money in at the end of the 'no winner days', and would often win enough that it made it worthwhile overall.
Anecdotal, but it seems consistent with your understanding and is a source of an edge.
I own a bar and a few of these machines, and I can assure you they don't work that way. (I have several family members who believe they do, though)
Each spin has an equal chance of winning. The payback is adjustable in the software, but it does not pay extra when it's behind.
Of course, sometimes the jackpot is larger and that's a better time to play (but still not a good time).
In the US & AU, I know they use a Theoretical Hold Worksheet which pre-specifies the win/lose ratios and is required for every machine. That worksheet doesn't make use of past wins/loses, i.e. it is stateless. This matches what you say.
However, I do not know what the situation is in the UK/EU at present, and I do not know what it was 20 years ago (when my brother was working there).
In the UK, it's common for gambling machines in places like pubs to have "compensated" payout odds that are are dependent on the history of wins/losses. Odd quirk of our regulations.
Lmao what a noob
> if you're a decent poker player, you can walk away with more than you started every night,
This is a huge exaggeration from what my poker playing friends have told me. One notable individual being a professional poker player of several years and who has wins in national tournaments as well. So he really knows his game. We've often talked about the odds of winning and how sustainable it is as an income. The figure he gives me is around 20% - that is you can only expect to cash in around 20% of the competitions you enter. Which means you can often go months without seeing a return. However it's not just him I've seen give that figure, other players I've spoken to have echoed a similar statement.
I also know a WSOP final table player, and what you say is true of tournament play.
Think of that more like the lottery for professional poker players. The celebrities do that a couple times a year, and the grinders hope to make enough for buy-in and "make it big". It's the least mathematically interesting way to "make a living" playing poker there is.
Where you grind out your living is the daily cash games. Yes, if you are making a living off of Poker it's basically a job. That means boring play for little hourly money most days of your life. After a few months, I imagine this feels more or less identical to an actual job.
I've watched "pros" grind out their day to day life, and it really doesn't seem that compelling. Better than working fast food, but on average seems to pay about the same and be roughly the same intellectual stimulation. 4 screens with 6 tables on each playing video poker every day doesn't sound that great to me.
> Better than working fast food, but on average seems to pay about the same
There are quite a few people who play from places where living costs are low(er) like Costa Rica or Mexico or, for that matter, Hungary and make -- compared to the locals -- an astonishing amount of money. Istvan Ratkai, who wrote a few successful text adventure games in the eighties have been one of the most well known Hungarian video poker players. He said he played about 3-4 hours a day and made 50-70% more than the minimal wage -- the full time minimal wage, that is. He had an ordinary programmer job as well so this as a secondary was quite a nice haul.
To be honest I wasn't talking about online play either. I was thinking more about GUKPT type competitions. But what you say was also true for my mates back before they became regular final table players in major tournaments. Online playing tends to bring out a different type of competitor from what I gather but the "grinding" nature of the game is still the same.
Cash games are completely different than tournaments though.
Cash players still have downswings. Big, ugly, edge of the bell curve downswings. "I worked 60 hours this week and lost five grand" downswings. Downswings where you start to wonder if you're actually any good at poker.
That's the hard part of professional poker. It isn't the maths, it isn't the game theory, it isn't the table selection, it's the psychological resilience. You have to keep making very precise, very aggressive decisions even when everything is going to shit. You have to go all-in on the 51/49 coin flip, even when you've lost the last six coin flips.
It all evens out in the long run, but the long run can be distressingly long.
> "I worked 60 hours this week and lost five grand" downswings.
That's nowhere near the worst downswing that even most midstakes cash game players have had.
> the long run can be distressingly long.
Especially in live cash games. It can go six months. It can make actually-winning players believe they aren't, and drive them out of the game.
Poker swings were the most emotional time of my life--I played HUSNGs for a few years professionally and had very mild downswings, all things considered.
I once lost 14 games in a row against one of the top-10 worst players I'd ever played with. I'm quite certain my winrate was about 70% against this player (exceedingly high for HUSNGs, almost the theoretical edge)
Multi-table tournaments are the most high-variance way to play poker.
The post you replied to was talking about cash games. Those are also fairly high variance--you certainly can't win every night.
Poker great Barry Greenstein says in his book that he won, IIRC, 70% of his sessions.
I used to be room mates with the guy. It's no exaggeration. He's charismatic, charming and a whole shit ton of other stuff. A really likeable guy. I saw first hand how he lived because he did it in my house.
Yeah. Poker can definitely be +ev. However, as you mentioned, +ev poker is often not terribly interesting (depends on the game and the stakes).
My reply was mainly just to point out that some casinos do have fun areas that are accessible with a relatively small budget with small expected losses in the long term.
That's the great thing about poker; you don't have to be better than the house's odds which are fixed against you anyway: you only have to be better than the other players. I used to regularly fund trips to Vegas playing small stakes tournaments against people who had watched one too many WSOP events on TV. Then I'd lose or barely place in the money playing medium stakes tournaments with all the locals and the grinders. It is possible to find your level and profit from playing those slightly below it. But after a while it's indistinguishable from a 9-5 job, so you really have to love it.
it's really hard to win st poker, the take is high enough to make 95% of players bet losers.
I did mention playing tournament poker where the entry costs are fixed although escalating blinds can force you to adopt different strategies based on your M. I agree live is different but even then house take can vary greatly.
The rake on live poker tournaments is terrible, probably worse than cash games. The great thing about tourneys is that anyone can win one and think they are great at poker. My mid-high stakes cash games were always helped immensely by tourney donkeys.
Live tournaments? That's a contradiction in terms. I don't know what you mean.
Live tournament means tournaments played in person at an actual table across from actual people as oppose to online tournament played over the internet.
The post above me is good advice. Despite the temptation and the fact that it is slightly more in your favor, resist the urge to "wrong" bet which is actively betting against the player with the dice. People who play these games can be superstitious and don't appreciate your favoring the odds over their luck by betting against them.
Absolutely correct.
It's only a fraction of a penny in your favor for a $10 bet, but it will kill the mood at a table in no time.
That said, this superstition can be used to your advantage. One night there was a really negative and obnoxious drunk dude at the other end of the table. Every time he was the shooter, my buddy and I bet don't. He left the second time we did this. ;-)
I tend to play don't, I experience ribbing as a result and it becomes part of the atmosphere of the table. I think you minimize the mathematical difference too far, isn't it around .3% or .5%? I switch sides when the shooter is the player standing next to me, out of courtesy. Also playing this way gives you more to pay attention to, if you choose to lay odds.
In the movies they depict roulette table players as having a camaraderie, but I never saw that at roulette and I always see it at dice.
I believe it is 1.41% house advantage for pass and 1.36% for don't pass -- 0.05% difference. On a $10 bet that's a half cent difference.
Anyway, I've bet don't for a few trips for most/all of the trip just to see what happened. These were on weekends when the tables were going to be full no matter what. I agree that it made for some fun banter, and we sometimes go back to it for fun, but we mostly bet pass now and get stupid silly with our cheering.
Craps really is the best game. It is nice to play a game where everyone is on the same team (generally). There is a nice camaraderie that goes along with playing craps.
Another key to go along with this is don't go to the casino to win money. Go to the casino to spent $X over the course of Y hours to have fun. If you walk away with extra money, that's just a bonus.
> don't go to the casino to win money
couldn't agree with this more - gambling is about the ride and the "free" drinks you get while you're playing - never bring more money than you can afford to lose.
Craps is all about the whole table having fun playing against the house, and it's great fun when everyone is "winning".
If you walk into a casino with the goal of winning money (without a team and an exploit of some sort that actually gives you an edge over the house), you're doing it wrong.
Even if you do have an exploit and a team, don't count on keeping your winnings (see Phil Ivey and his baccarat scheme).
"This is a relatively low variance and no skill way to have fun at a casino. The craps table are usually where the fun people are."
I'll see your low variance casino fun and raise you an old defcon story:
http://phrack.org/issues/54/1.html#article
Not for the faint of heart.
Casinos are near-perfect skinner boxes [1]. An industry that thrives on exploiting human nature and destroying the subject in the process, little by little.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
What always astounds me when I was in them is that everyone seemed oblivious to it.
Their need for instant gratification, the pleasure centre in their brains triggered just enough to keep them ignoring the stress of their losses. Distracting them long enough to make them think they can win it all back and get back on top.
It's like playing poker in an interrogation room with a good cop and a bad cop. The good cop comes in enough to make you think you're okay. It doesn't matter whether you're innocent and you only lose a day of work or you're guilty and lose your freedom, you still lose.
People go in thinking they can beat the system and the rare few do, but most don't. Overall, the house always wins. That's why the doors are still open and they earn yearly profits of millions of dollars while a whole bunch of their patrons gradually lose their homes and the shirts on their backs.
Let me check in with you for a second: some people just like to gamble and do so responsibly. Those people - I'm one of them - know that it's unlikely that they'll win, but they enjoy the process just the same.
I think about gambling the same way I think about, say, playing a recreational sport. I'm going to lose money (participation fees) but I'm going to have fun.
Yup, that's me too. I have a £30 hard deposit limit for gambling (which comes out of my 'nice things to keep me sane' budget anyway) per month. Maybe I'm just lucky but it's genuinely very rare that I walk away out of pocket - I play by the rule of "hit >2*deposit, withdraw deposit amount and keep playing what's left" and for the most part it works, and I get a couple hours of fun out of it.
I know people who'd happily drop £30 a month on junk food or some other frivolous and non-essential purchase, yet they call me an addict. Maybe I am maybe I'm not, I don't know. I do know that I have a good time for a couple of hours and if I'm lucky, I get to walk away with a couple hundred extra in my bank account.
I've been in a few casinos over the last few years (I go with a friend just to have the existential experience, we have yet to play anything, but we then try out their buffet), what strikes me is how much and how little they have changed from what I remember from the few I've been to as a kid or seen in movies. The staple slot machines are still there, they take up most of the floor space, but they're the most depressing. They don't even have physical levers, it's all just repeatedly pressing a button. No coins, everything's on a card now. They all look pretty much the same. There were like 20 different wolf-themed slots. The game variety is so small in terms of objectives and what you can control (or have the illusion of control anyway), the effects even when you win are so dull (many pinball games have a much more exciting "Multiball!" announcement) -- again no spitting out a bunch of coins -- how do people get addicted to that, especially when they're usually losing money? If people claim it's for fun and don't expect to win (as rationally they shouldn't against the house), why don't they just buy an actual game, or download any of the free ones, for a console, phone, or PC, and derive many more hours of entertainment for a much lower dollar investment? If people do it just to enable fantasies of striking it rich, why don't lotto tickets adequately fill that niche?
Fortunately casino buffets are generally good enough that I can enjoy the food and put aside such thoughts.
Honestly, it just sounds like you don't like gambling and have created emotional preconceptions out of ignorance. What separates responsible video games from gambling?
Addiction and using simple pleasures to fill the hole of depression is certainly a problem... however that issue transcends any individual pleasure. People can be addicted to TV, video games, political news, and even books.
Yes, people can be addicted to anything, but that's a false equivalence. Debilitating addiction to video games is incredibly rare in comparison to gambling, and someone addicted to video games isn't normally going to lose their life's savings. We're comparing cigarettes and potato chips.
Further, gambling is essentially a zero-sum game. The house always wins, equal to how much you lose, and pretty much every gambler loses besides the one or two rare examples who strike a jackpot the first time they ever play and then never gamble again. In contrast, buying a video game is a transactions both parties are normally expected to benefit from equally, and a video game's single player mode is expected to last at least 10 hours at a minimum nowadays not counting online play that lasts essentially as long as you want, while gambling machines need a constant input of money that adds up to much more over time. Even comparing to coin-based arcade machines, a session on one of those will last much longer for the price, and even in the microtransactions that have become common nowadays you at least end up with something more than the screen flashing some bright lights for a few seconds. So overall on this point, it seems to me like a gambling establishment is necessarily exploitative while a video game publisher isn't.
While I agree that the gaming industry is exploitative, it's unfair to assert that gambling is zero-sum by generalizing all means of gambling as "screens flashing bright lights for a few seconds."
You or I might value a video game more, but some people who gamble actually derive utility from the games themselves (and from a purely scientific standpoint, even a near-miss in gambling results in the release of dopamine [1]).
[1]:http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v36/n5/abs/npp2010230a.htm...
You're making assumptions about other people's value tradeoffs. And, perhaps, simply don't understand what responsible gambling looks like.
I like going to a casino once a month with friends, always with a preset $50 limit. That translates to hours of great fun, food, drinks. I'll start the day with poker if we're planning to stay for a while, I'm good enough to turn a profit (which I spend on other pure-luck games). Other times I'll just suss out the slot machines while watching a game at the bar.
On the other hand, I never play video games... I just find them universally boring. $20 for 10 hours of gameplay sounds like a waste of time and money to me. However, I do understand why other people enjoy video games.
At the end of the day, I've seen self-destructive gamblers pumping the slots and subtly self-destructive gamers pay2playing... as well as responsible gamblers and gamers. To each their own.
Very little necessarily separates gambling from video games. After all, another name for casinos is the "gaming industry".
The main practical differences to me are that the gambling industry is more nakedly exploitative, more reliably engineered for addiction, and more frequently destructive to people's lives.
But I think parts of the video game industry are headed in that direction.
When I watch my brother and my nephew playing, say Battlefield 1, they are visibly having fun. They bought the game once and are getting many hours of enjoyment out of it, a few at a time. It seems a reasonably healthy pastime to me.
But then I'll watch people playing Zynga-ish games. They don't look like they're having fun. They look like people playing slots: low affect, compulsive, grinding away at something that never really satisfies.
So personally, it's not that I don't like gambling specifically. A friend's low-ante poker night can be a good time. It's that I hate profitable exploitation of people's weaknesses in a way that leaves them worse off. Industrial-scale gambling and shitty, addictive games are both in that bucket for me.
Yeah, sounds exactly like how some people on HN have described people at Walmart.
It sounds like how an honest person might describe me on HN.
> What separates responsible video games from gambling
What separates responsible anything from anything else? Nothing at all.
Anything can be addictive if it lights up the pleasure centres in your brain and you use that to fill the hole of depression. Computer Games. Drinking. Gambling. Smoking. Drugs. Adrenaline. Shopping. Hoarding. None of these things will fill the hole in your heart or fix depression. They're just distractions. I used to be married to a drug addict. Her father was an alcoholic. I knew and spent time with dealers and other addicts. I have direct experience with that. I spent 6 years of my life dealing with that. So I have more of an understanding of what depression and addiction can do to your life than most.
Sure, I do have a lot of ignorance when it comes to casinos. But I have been in them, I have seen people gambling responsibly. I have gambled responsibly. You're right in your perception that I don't get enjoyment out of it. In fact, the act of gambling doesn't light up the pleasure centres in my brain. The wins and losses are academic. Clinical. But this goes far deeper than that. There are tons of things I don't get enjoyment that I have tried that don't give me this feeling about the participants.
I am an empath. The moods of people in my proximity greatly affects my own emotions. I frequently have problems untangling which feelings are mine and which are someone else's. I can be feeling light and happy and walk into a room where someone is in a bad mood, and like The Pink Panther, the cloud rolls in and my good mood is gone. I am under a cloud. It's usually not as clear cut as this, nor as easy to decipher that this isn't my mood. This is off-topic, I'm just trying to give you a sense of the fact that this isn't borne out of my own emotional preconceptions. This is borne out of the people around me, not the casino itself which I'm actually largely indifferent about. Just as I'm indifferent about people who smoke pot, enjoy computer games, find enjoyment shopping. This isn't about the activity. This is about the emotional well-being of the people in my proximity.
I agree, there are many people that do gamble responsibly for fun, they go out, they spend responsibly, they enjoy it for what it is, they walk away. I don't get this feeling from those people. These are healthy, emotionally balanced people. They're not trying to fill a void in their soul. They're just out having fun. Perhaps I'd enjoy their company. I can't say because I don't know them.
However, there are such a significant portion of people that aren't like this in casinos that it's impossible to ignore - to the point that I literally feel like it's suffocating me and invokes my fight or flight response. It makes me want to leave. If you suffer from claustrophobia, you will understand they symptoms profoundly. If you're put in a room you can't get out of, you suffer a physical and emotional response. You may be able to hide it from those around you. You may be able to look to everyone else like you're okay. But inside, you're suffering from an increased stress response, you feel uncomfortable, you feel hot, you might start to feel your muscles tingle or vibrate, you feel trapped, you feel like you need to escape, you're acutely aware of where the exits are and your shortest path to them. Add to that the fact that the hopeless lost void I'm feeling in those around me and that's how I feel in most of the casinos I've been in.
Oh, yes.
You might like reading this book, Addiction by Design:
http://www.powells.com/SearchResults?kw=title:addiction%20by...
It's about how much research and development has gone into making those machines as addictive as possible. Also one of the most depressing books I've ever read.
The book is really great - eye opening. Showing all psychology and behaviour systematicaly applied to players to stay / become addicted.
Recommended
Great, just what I need, another thing to depress me :D
Actually, this sounds pretty fascinating. I will check it out.
Thanks
> It's like they've lost the will to live and this is their last hope at redemption that fades with every token they drop into the machines.
Consider the Rat Park experiment (http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/rat-park/) — it seems "psychological addiction" in general is essentially a way of coping with a stressful environment.
I've never seen this before, it's actually a pretty damning assessment of what putting an addict in jail will do to them... it makes them even more addicted than if they found a way to socialize and rehabilitate them. Give them an ability to enjoy their lives and they will gradually self ween.
This is quite sad really... I felt terrible for the rats in the cages.
I've always thought of this more for entrepreneurs than casino gamblers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srNvp7w341I
There's a place in the world For a gambler There's a burden that only He can bear There's a place in the world For a gambler, And he sees Oh, yes he sees And he sees Oh, yes he sees
There's a song in the heart Of a woman That only the truest of loves Can release. There's a song in the heart Of a woman. Set it free Oh, set it free Set it free Oh, set it free Set it free Oh, set it free.
There's a light in the depths Of your darkness There's a calm at the eye Of every storm. There's a light in the depths Of your darkness.
Let is shine Oh, let it shine Let is shine Oh, let it shine Let is shine Oh, let it shine. Let it Shine
Songwriters Fogelberg, Dan
For me it's the smoke. And the $10 minimums. Would love to find a smoke free casino with $1 minimums.
I believe all the casinos in Vancouver BC are smoke free by law. Don't know about the rest of Canada.
My wife gets the same feeling as you. She's always really attuned to other people's emotions.
It's a curse you can't walk away from sadly. I hope you treat that compassionately. Many people have no idea just how deeply that affects them. It's not just being attuned to other people's emotions so much as it affects your own emotions. Much of the time it clouds my own emotions so deeply, I find it impossible to untangle which are my own emotions and which are those of the people around me. I have to walk away and give myself time for respite. It can be really hard. I try and surround myself with happy, positive, optimistic people that make me laugh. Sometimes, that's literally the only way I can deal with it.
It makes for a good counsellor, but I can't fix everyone's problems and I have to remind myself of that constantly.
Everyone is responsible for their own feelings. I am responsible for my own.
I have to remind myself of that numerous times every day or I spend all day feeling guilty for not fixing things for everyone.
Their journey is not mine. My journey is not theirs. I can share their path, they can share mine, but I am not here to fix everything for everyone. All I can do is be there and show them how they can fix it for themselves.
But now we're totally off-topic.
I read this to my wife, who said, "Are you me?" Thanks for that, she appreciates knowing she's not the only one like that. Stay well :)
Thanks. She's definitely not alone. There are many like us.
Gambling may be the one vice I am morally against and will not partake in.
I won't even buy raffle tickets for charity, I'd rather just give them money.
That's interesting to me, as I don't consider the choice to gamble or not a moral decision.
I consider it a financial decision. Akin to buying something I want.
It's more that I'm morally against the purveyors of gambling than against the act itself.
I'm a fan of probability... conjoined, disjointed, conditional, decision trees.. the void can be fun, really!
I'm a fan of probability... conjoined, disjointed, conditional, decision trees.. the void can be fun, really!
I'm a fan of probability... conjoined, disjointed, conditional, decision trees.. the void can be fun, really!
I can confirm the same perception seeing people play slot machines in US casinos.
I was in Vegas once and can confirm it's incredibly depressing to walk through a casino. And they're mostly slots and slot zombies, unlike casinos in the movies.
You just described Reno, NV. Even at noon there, I felt more at risk on the streets than any other place ( SF Tenderloin, etc )
Except in this case, its almost certainly a violation of money laundering laws in the US.
Tbh, part of me wonders if it would be perfectly legal if they sold an actual product at a massive markup (say, "designer chocolate"), provided "bonus tokens", and allowed refunds of the chocolate even if it was purchased with those tokens.
I'm not aware of any laws that prevent the conversion of tokens to chocolate to refunds. Then again, a cryptocurrency is probably less hassle at this point than any of these fronts.
https://bitcasino.io/
And I guess I'm not the only one to conclude that.
Though these are generally discussed in terms of their tax or financial domain, the step doctrine and substance over form doctrines would preclude those actions from being legal just because there is an intermediate step inserted.
I don't know of their specific applicability (or not) w.r.t. money laundering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step_transaction_doctrine
Fair enough. xD The law isn't something I'm well versed in. It just seemed odd that loophole existed in Japan.
I love stories like these. I wonder what the Japanese equivalent is, in terms of "bizarre tourist experiences"? I bet there's equally breathless articles somewhere about American gun ranges, for example.
I'm finishing a novel where an app has the same functionality for street level dealers. Money laundering is fascinating.
Which novel?
As I've mentioned before I first encountered transaction hiding in World of Warcraft. There were 'grey'[1] items in the Auction House with a buy it now price of 500 gold (which at the time was extreme). I could not figure out who would buy a twill vest for 500g until it was explained that you went to a web site, paid them some cash for gold, told them your character name, and then put up for auction a grey item that was priced at how much gold you had purchased. One of the vendors 'agents' would then go into the auction house and buy it. You ended up with your gold and as far as the game was concerned it was a straight up, if unusual, transaction between players.
[1] Item descriptions were colored, grey was "trash" and meant to be sold to vendor for cash, "green" were somewhat nicer/rare, then "blue" for very rare, and "purple" for epically rare, and "goldenrod" for legendary.
Around 10 years ago before the rise of bitcoin, WoW gold was the de facto illicit currency of the internet, since there was a reasonably robust market for it. Things like batches of stolen credit cards would routinely be bought and sold in prices delineated in WoW gold.
According to a Blizzard employee one of my coworkers talked to, their chargeback rates were significantly higher than even porn sites (15+%, IIRC), to the point that it was somewhat surprising that their payment processor was still doing business with them. It's unclear to me if those accounts were primarily used to generate mules to facilitate these transactions, gold farming, or something else.
Could be that people were buying WoW gold with stolen cards and trying to "fence" it before the chargeback.
I don't believe you could buy gold directly from Blizzard at the time.
Indeed you couldn't. Technically you still can't, but now you can buy a game token with cash and then sell that to other players on the auction house for gold.
Wow, that is amazing. And it is the first I've heard of the high chargeback rates.
One of the ways to launder ISK in EVE Online works almost the same way. Make ingame contract listing something at ridiculous prize, other party buys it, game logs look like "ordinary" game scam (EVE is famous for scamming).
Customer support gave up the con on a phone call? I imagine with a little more effort they could have been indistinguishable from a legitimate business.
> Customer support gave up the con on a phone call?
They kind of have to, since the whole purpose of the support number seems to be to reassure people who know they paid “MyIllegalPokerSite.com” but see a charge on their bill from “MyTotallyLegitFabricStore.com” that the charge corresponds to their payment to the poker site, and that they shouldn't contest the charges as fraudulent with their card issuer.
They could have customer service lookup the customer's order number and change the script accordingly. You can't have a front without a back.
Yeah. This scheme makes it seem easy to issue a chargeback though, gamblers can just tell their credit card co "I have no idea who FabricFactory.com is". I wonder how/if they prevent gambling customers from doing that.
From the article, they told the reporter that they handled virtually all online gambling transactions; they might just accept a certain level of it and then blacklist the customer. (They might even let a customer suggesting that they might issue a chargeback know that that is the consequence.)
It is also very hard to withdraw money from illegal gambling sites. It can be done, but is often a slow drawn out process, to get you as close as possible to the date that you can't cancel. Also don't forget that these are dodgy people who have your home address... And know you've been breaking the law - likely with also some tax issues too on the winnings.
I believe they usually have a 90-day waiting period for withdrawals if you load via credit card (instead of Western Union or BTC), helping them ensure the user does not perform a chargeback.
True. On another note often the bank is in on it and simply wants plausible deniability.
Some of these websites would collect the national ID cards of users and post them on a "wall of shame" if the user does a chargeback.
You are assuming that the bank isn't in on it. They often are, and simply need plausible deniability.
They wouldn't be very good at serving their "legitimate" customers then:
Customer: "Hi, umm, it looks like I'm not getting my winnings from pokerfastlane dot com, can you help me with that?"
Support rep: "I'm sorry sir, we are a fabrics import/export company, we have no relation to pokerfastlane dot com."
C: "But they gave me this number..."
SR: "I'm sorry, I can help you only with fabrics related matters. Perhaps I could interest you in a nice afghan?"
I noticed one of these payment processing fronts when I looked at my card transactions after making a PartyPoker deposit back in ~2006. In this case, it was a site called Gygon.com. If you visited their website, you would have thought it was an online lamp store with many broken features. I later learned that GYGON stood for "get your game on".
I feel really stupid, can someone explain to me what people are allegedly doing here?
My understanding is a Poker company (for example) puts all transactions from US customers through these fake stores. Then the organisation running the fake stores reimburses the Poker company outside of the US and takes a small slice for the service?
Credit card details are passed to a "payment processor" who uses one of these storefronts who have a legitimate merchant account (due to their legit-enough looking website), they charge the cards and load credits into online poker accounts.
The poker company puts transactions (deposits, anyway) through the fake stores. The organisation running the fake stores may well be the poker company or a wholly owned subsidiary, so they don't necessarily keep a cut.
If they took deposits in their own name, the credit card companies and banks would refuse to do business with them.
I would think this is primarily to hide gambling activities so it doesn't affect your credit score. If you're applying for a loan or credit card your bank statements can be assessed and if it finds transactions to known gambling sites or ATM withdrawals from known gambling venues or hotels then that will affect your credit rating badly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlawful_Internet_Gambling_E...
None of this is true of traditional credit scoring.
PBS Frontline covered this in their February 9th, 2016 episode, "The Fantasy Sports Gamble" (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/fantasy-sports-gamble...)
Zip to around 18:15 in the video.
"After I set up the account, I couldn't quite figure out how to deposit money. That's when I got a phone call on my cell phone and a guy walked me through how to put money on the book. Took my credit card right over the phone. Then he assured me there wouldn't be anything on my credit card statement that said BetOnline."
What would show up on the statement was MoserSafety. Which was a front website. If you called the contact information, they confirmed they had no safety goggles, gloves, hard hats, etc. to actually sell you. It was a shell. In fact, they confirmed on the phone that the number called was a, "third party payment processing support service." Some time later, the site no longer existed.
Only about a decade behind on covering this.
Some usenet indexers and pay-for-join torrent sites use similar fronts to be able to accept PayPal.
They usually ship you the item. You can pay extra to not receive it, which always struck me as odd...
If you're using a stolen credit card or fake address or whatever and you don't want to create any waves, not shipping the item is a value-add.
If you're using a stolen credit card, the cardholder will definitely issue a chargeback.
And then people wonder why PayPal is such a pain in the ass to do business with...
And this is why everyone should start requiring 3D Secure. On sites with 3D Secure support I need to use an app to authorize transactions, so if this was the norm online credit card fraud would be a much smaller problem.
3DS is mostly a joke for anyone who _really_ wants to use your credit card. I won't go into details publicly, but I will say that having an app to authorize transactions is a step-up from the good 'ol "enter your PIN"
If all physical stores required chip and PIN and all online stores required 3D Secures then my credit card number, expiry date, and CVV would no longer be sensitive information meaning someone would need to either steal my physical credit card and my PIN or the secret key stored in my phone plus the PIN for the app. This means I would not need to worry about websites stealing my card info.
3DS doesn't process your card, it simply validates a transaction.
It would really be any payment processor. When a chargeback is filed with the credit card company, they claw back the cash from PayPal.
Nowadays most of them also have a bitcoin address as it is safer. Less hassle. Atleast this way you don't have to pay extra to not receive stuff you don't need anyway...
The linked article is also very interesting
http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-consett-companies-s...
Still online: https://www.myfabricfactory.com/index.php
I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here. Do we need enforcement here or do we need to change policy?
This is quite common with torrent site donations too, where you are directed to a webstore selling 'merch' that is actually your donation to the site in question.
Nice, maybe I can start playing online poker again here in the US. Just have to figure out a way to send me my winnings that are not bolts of fabric.
I've used Cloudbet for sports bets, they have poker too, but never used it. (It's all bitcoin)
Just use cryptocurrency. Or VPN into a state that allows it.
New Jersey (at least) doesn't just rely on ip now, and need a companion app or similar.
Oh wow, I just looked it up and yes, they use a shockingly sophisticated system for this now [0]. I suspect you could still defeat it, but crypto is absolutely the easier option.
Funny though, my friends who use Draft Kings were able to just VPN into NJ from NY to use it.
[0] https://www.dailydot.com/business/new-jersey-online-gambling...
ACR is pretty solid. Bitcoin deposits/withdrawals are relatively quick and painless.
How could a platform detect this kind of "transaction laundering"?
Fraudulent online front stores? Quick. We need a new government agency with 10 digit budget and 722 lawyers to complain to Congress that their funding was cut and that will fix it and make sure it never happens again.
We're going to ban this account if you don't stop with the unsubstantive inflammatory sarcasm like we've asked.
"Reuters examination has found" => we called the help desk and they said "yea, we don't sell anything, we're a front you dummy"
It's a weakness in the system, because the help desk employees have to be trained to tell people "yes I know it says MyFabricFactory on your credit card bill, but that was actually your deposit to our gambling website" because they get that call all the time and they need to be able to put the customers at ease rather than have them call Visa to dispute the transaction.
Ok who here hasn't ordered "something" from Europe that showed up on your credit card to some ecommerce site selling overpriced ipods? Let this be a lesson to you kids, try anything unscrupulous and the feds will catch up to you in a couple of decades.
I ordered a pump typically used in dialysis machines for a project that happened to require a pump of that nature. It came from some former Soviet republic and had been opened and examined by customs in a handful of countries (as evidenced by layers of cut tape and identifying tape and stickers placed on it when it was deemed passable). I wonder if after the first customs official inspected it all the subsequent countries decided if it was good enough to be of interest to the prior country they had better open it up and take a look as well.
I'm not sure if stuff like that is highly regulated but I was able to just buy it on eBay and it got to me no problem so it was pretty painless.
Based on purchases a friend of mine alleges one of his friends had made the really shady "somethings" go through .onion sites using bitcoin.