Investors - PitchBook

Investors - PitchBook

Grosjean specializes in finding vulnerable games like the one in Shawnee. He uses his programming skills to divine the odds in various situations and then develops strategies for exploiting them. Only two questions seemed to temper his confidence in taking on this particular game. How long would they be allowed to play before being asked to leave? How much money would they be able to win?blog.dinocasino When Grosjean first reconnoitered the game, he saw that the 12 playing cards used to simulate a pair of craps dice were being shuffled by a machine designed to speed up play and randomize the order of the cards. But Grosjean knew that shuffling machines are computer driven and therefore only as good as they are programmed and used: Sometimes, in fact, the devices are surprisingly predictable. That was true in Shawnee. After each round, the dealer there swept up the cards and put them in the shuffler without mixing them by hand. Grosjean discovered that he could see the identity and order of at least three cards entering the machine, the bottom one held by the dealer and the two that were exposed during game play. Because he has examined these shuffling machines and knows how they work, he could reliably judge the likelihood that certain cards would be excluded from play. Armed with that knowledge, he spent several months simulating the game in software; his computer mimicked the shuffling algorithm and played the game millions of times. His findings would give him a significant edge playing the card-based craps game in Shawnee. It would be equivalent to gambling at standard craps with dice and knowing which three dice faces — out of 12 possible — would have a reduced probability of coming up on any roll. Many casino executives despise gamblers like Grosjean. They accuse him of cheating. Yet what he does is entirely legal. “I would not describe Grosjean and those like him as cheaters,” says Ted Whiting, vice president of corporate surveillance at MGM Resorts International, one of the world’s largest casino companies. Whiting acknowledges that they do not deserve to be arrested. “If you use a device to get information that other people do not have access to, it’s cheating in the state of Nevada” — and most other states as well. Grosjean, for one, doesn’t use his computer in casinos. That is usually illegal, the sort of thing that can result in jail time. But Whiting says: “When you are sitting there and doing what anyone else at the table can do, it’s what we call advantage play. But whether you’re a cheater or an advantage player, you can take money from us, and I don’t want that to happen. I view it all as preventable loss.”