How Al Capone and the Mob fixed casinos during prohibition: Secrets of roulette table which guaranteed the House won is discovered
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I chose this forum instead of games and entertainment because this specific topic is so much about science and (old) technology. I'm rather skeptical that this rigged wheel would consistently produce increased profits for the house particularly when it was used in an era before computers and high speed cameras. Any legitimate roulette wheel will already provide profit to the house but we might expect attempts at cheating to increase the overall profits, or to prevent single-event large losses (a big money bet).
The articles seem to assume that it actually worked and was reliable for that. At the minimum it seems that this device would have required a highly skilled, practiced and trained croupier to accomplish the goal. His goal must have been to prevent a bet from paying off. But when many different players are at the table then the decision becomes more complicated because there are bets all over the wheel with many being overlapping. Maybe he looked for the biggest payoff bet and acted to prevent that bet from winning, knowing that other bets would still pay off for those players.
What we don't know is if this thing worked as it was intended to or if maybe it was an experiment that couldn't be mastered and never really showed itself to be worth the expense and necessary croupier training. The articles speak of it as an especially profitable money stealer. It may not have really been that. Consider too that the house may have experienced a reduced profit with this table because of croupier "errors" of split-second timing and judgement. IOW, if this thing can actually allow the croupier to place the ball into specific slots on the wheel then human errors will cause the ball to end up where you do not want it to be.
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Originally Posted by DailyMail
The secrets of how the mob that controlled the Chicago underworld fixed casinos has been discovered.
A rare table, uncovered by a games company owned from Guildford, England revealed how it was fitted with hidden buttons driven by battery packs stuffed in the table legs which disrupted the spin of the ball. By controlling when the ball fell through tiny pins that tripped it, the croupier could decide where the it fell on the roulette table. Alexander Walder-Smith found the table's secret when it was taken apart for restoration at The Games Room. He had purchased it in Cedar Rapids, in Iowa, from a man who had kept it in his barn for decades, but he has now sold it to a wealthy collector. The table, made of American walnut, was used in Chicago between 1929 and 1931 when Al Capone dominated the city underworld... |
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Originally Posted by The Games Room Company
When we began work on the restoration of this late 1920's roulette table last year no one could have guessed that it would lead to one of the most remarkable discoveries in the Games Room Company's long history...
The two large batteries we found housed in one of the table legs effectively powered a mechanism which, when activated by the controller, forced a tiny pin out into the path of the ball as it travelled around the outside of the wheel. The intervention was so sudden and so brief that the naked eye couldn't possibly have detected it, and so we must assume that many a punter left the table shaking his head and cursing his bad luck, completely unaware that the mob's rigged table had ensured that he never stood a chance!... |
I chose this forum instead of games and entertainment because this specific topic is so much about science and (old) technology. I'm rather skeptical that this rigged wheel would consistently produce increased profits for the house particularly when it was used in an era before computers and high speed cameras. Any legitimate roulette wheel will already provide profit to the house but we might expect attempts at cheating to increase the overall profits, or to prevent single-event large losses (a big money bet).
The articles seem to assume that it actually worked and was reliable for that. At the minimum it seems that this device would have required a highly skilled, practiced and trained croupier to accomplish the goal. His goal must have been to prevent a bet from paying off. But when many different players are at the table then the decision becomes more complicated because there are bets all over the wheel with many being overlapping. Maybe he looked for the biggest payoff bet and acted to prevent that bet from winning, knowing that other bets would still pay off for those players.
What we don't know is if this thing worked as it was intended to or if maybe it was an experiment that couldn't be mastered and never really showed itself to be worth the expense and necessary croupier training. The articles speak of it as an especially profitable money stealer. It may not have really been that. Consider too that the house may have experienced a reduced profit with this table because of croupier "errors" of split-second timing and judgement. IOW, if this thing can actually allow the croupier to place the ball into specific slots on the wheel then human errors will cause the ball to end up where you do not want it to be.
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1rik1Ui
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