How to beat a poker machine

Now why didn't I think of that. :(

http://ift.tt/2tl7qkH

Quote:

So how did they do it? With a hidden smartphone and some serious maths back in Russia. The cheating Russians weren't playing just any old machine — they played only on the Aristocrat Mark VI, an oldish pokie manufactured in Australia. And they did more than just press play. After each one cent play, the gamblers would enter the pokie screen display into an app on an iPhone hidden in their pocket. (Spoiler alert: you cannot get this app from your app store.) They would do this a few dozen times — and all that information would go back in real time to the criminal mothership in St Petersburg. There, the mathematical criminals would work out exactly where in its pseudo-random number sequence the poker machine was. The gambler would keep putting in cent after cent, until they got word from St Petersburg to play big. The phone would vibrate, and one quarter of a second later the gambler would put in a big play — and get back $1,000. They were careful to avoid the really large and major pay outs, hoping not to attract too much attention to themselves. A team of four gamblers would typically win a quarter of a million dollars in a single week. Not a bad return!

All perfectly legal. :)

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2snvlT9