MetaFilter posts tagged with gambling

Who knew you could find such a big fish in the middle of a desert?

Afroblanco — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 01:07:04 -0800

During a year-long gambling binge at the Caesars Palace and Rio casinos in 2007, Terrance Watanabe managed to lose nearly $127 million. The run is believed to be one of the biggest losing streaks by an individual in Las Vegas history.

CityCenter, Las Vegas

Joe Beese — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:26:08 -0800

Tomorrow in Las Vegas, a mixed hotel/condominium called Vdara will open for business on the spot once occupied by the unlamented Boardwalk Hotel and Casino. It is the first stage of the CityCenter complex, the largest privately financed development in the United States, which has already cost $8.5 billion and six lives. Even before the recent debt-restructuring woes of 50% stakeholder Dubai World, there was concern over CityCenter's impact on the struggling local economy. (previously) Vdara's opening is sure to be the top story on the Five Hundy by Midnight podcast - an affectionate but candid weekly review of Sin City news hosted by Tim and Michele Dressen.

Bloodless war game

twoleftfeet — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 05:26:47 -0800

Oral histories indicate that slahal is an ancient game, dating to before the last ice age. At times discouraged, this gambling game is still being played. Also known as the bone game and the hand or stick game, the rules are simple: guess which hand holds the unmarked bone. But while your team tries to guess, the opposing team will confuse you with chants and drumming and music. And you do the same to them. An entire game can be quite loud and quite subtle. A short documentary.

You know how to whistle, don't you? Just put your lips together and blow....

msalt — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:40:02 -0800

The book the NBA doesn't want you to read. Former NBA referee Tim Donaghy was convicted of passing inside information on NBA games to gamblers, for thousands of dollars. He has written a book purporting to reveal many explosive scandals about NBA officiating (detailed excerpts). It was scheduled for publication by Random House (cached Amazon page), then cancelled after an alleged lawsuit threat by the league. Donaghy's book names names about organized referee manipulation 1) favoring Kobe Bryant and the LA Lakers, 2) to extend playoff series, 3) against strong defenders such as Raja Bell, 4) betting with each other on calls during games, 5) makeup calls, 6) feuds with players, etc. In 2007, when Donaghy was arrested, a league investigation found that every single NBA referee gambled in violation of the rules, half betting in casinos. In response, they relaxed the rules against betting.

George Julius' Mechanical Totalisator

Fiasco da Gama — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:41:29 -0800

Sir George Julius's Automatic Totalisator, first used by the public in New Zealand, and quickly taken up by racetracks throughout Australasia and North America (warning hideous HTML), automates parimutuel betting.

WTO, the US and Antigua - a love story

bigmusic — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 02:10:17 -0800

USA ♥'s Antigua ∴ Zookz

That single-serving website sure is sweet

Asparagirl — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:20:15 -0800

Need to settle a dispute with a friend, but don't want to flip a coin? Try Diabetting, a new way to settle decisions using the most-recently-updated blood sugar readings of a Type I diabetic web developer.

Sorry, Phil.

cmyr — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 04:15:45 -0800

Several months ago, poker player Tom "durrrr" Dwan issued an unprecedented challange. In effect, he is offering 3:1 odds—his $1.5 million to the challengers $500,000—that, playing high-stakes heads-up (one on one) online poker, he will be winning after 50,000 hands. The challenge is open to anyone except for durrrr's good friend Phil Galfond; three players have reportedly accepted, and play in the first match began yesterday. The results are being tracked in real time here and here; you can brave the inanity of twoplustwo (previously) and read the ongoing match thread here.

Crapping out

Joe Beese — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:53:07 -0800

Trump Entertainment is about to run out of the third extension of its debt payments. Station Casinos is offering its investors as little as 10 cents on the dollar in a pre-packaged bankruptcy. Wynn Resorts is cutting staff hours and bonuses to avoid layoffs. MGM Mirage may see a default rate of 30% on its City Center condominiums. Harrah's long-term debt has doubled. There are no more traffic jams on the Strip. Oh... and the Borgata Hotel in Atlantic City had to settle a $70 million sexual harassment lawsuit brought by its beverage servers. In short: times are tough.

I Have a Little Dreidl, I Learned to Make it Pay...

ubiquity — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:57:03 -0800

OK, everyone knows Chanukah overlaps Christmas this year (it starts this Sunday evening), but do you have your dreidel game going? If you are full of Maccabean mojo, you might want to try to win some gelt at Major League Dreidel, No Limit Texas Dreidel, or even The World Series of Dreidel ("a chai stakes tournament"). For those of you who will only be playing at home, but would like something more convenient than a physical dreidel, there is also Dreidel Dreidel Dreidel – for your chai-phone, of course!

Gamblers Anomalous

Potomac Avenue — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 21:06:09 -0800

A long-brewing online poker scandal reaches the mainstream: 60 Minutes Report (1, 2) (text version) and two consecutive front page Washington Post articles (by Pulitzer winning investigative journalist Gil Gaul) (plus lots of web exclusive content about the investigation)! Originally discovered by high-stakes online math whizzes on a poker forum, news of the insider cheating by some big names in the game is coming out nationally just as the Bush administration moves hurriedly to implement a last-minute back-door crackdown on banks who enable the flow of money to gambling sites, casting the industry even further beyond regulation that would help make such cheating impossible. But perhaps there is still hope for online poker to eventually be fair and as legal as other areas of US private life. Previously (and)

The Dollar Auction and Swoopo

Zarkonnen — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:10:53 -0800

An online auction site called Swoopo, once called TeleBid, has hit upon an ingenious way to make money. They are an auction site not entirely unlike Ebay - but using a different auction scheme. Where EBay uses a slightly modified Vickrey auction system, Swoopo uses an auction system based on the "Dollar Auction" game - with interesting results. Their system is an open auction with a very tight time limit, where each bid made increases the price by seven pence, costs the bidder fifty pence to make and increases the time limit by a couple of seconds. This might seem benign at first, until you do the maths: For example, a camera worth £679.99 was recently sold for £189.49 to someone who had made 81 bids. This particular bidder paid a mere £229.99 for the camera. But to drive up the camera's price to £189.49, some 2706 bids had to be made, at a total cost of £1353. Hence, Swoopo ended up receiving £1542.49 for a camera valued at less than half that. It's a good deal for the winner - but an even better one for the company. An even stranger kind of auction takes place on the site - a "100% off" auction, where the final price does not have to be paid. Whoever makes the final bid before the timer runs out gets the object of the auction for no additional cost beyond the bidding fees. The object of the auction is five hundred pounds. So the deal is this: keep on giving money to Swoopo in 50p increments, hoping to be the one to get the money at the end. Whenever that is. At the time of writing, there was a £500 auction that has climbed to £738.08. If it ended at that point, one of the parties would walk away with £500 in exchange for however much it cost them to bid. And the company would end up with £5272 in fees in exchange for that £500. Is this auctioning or entertainment? A clever application of game theory? Gambling? A scam? It's probably not illegal, as far as anyone can tell. The decision on its morality is left up to the reader... Previously on Everything2 and TechCrunch, including a comment from (apparently) the CEO of Swoopo.

Crap. No Snake Eyes!

ericb — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 12:13:59 -0800

Arelia Margarita Taveras “made a name for herself representing the families of victims of American Airlines Flight 587, which crashed in New York City's borough of Queens in November 2001, killing 265 people.^#⁺ Her practice had 400 clients and earned her $500,000 a year.” She claims that she sought to relieve the pressures of her work by gambling in Atlantic City and Las Vegas over the past few years. She lost $1 million and was disbarred as a result of stealing money from clients [PDF] in order to support her gambling addiction. Taveras also lost her own home and that of her parents (who mortgaged it to support her debt). Taveras owes the IRS $58,000. In response she has filed a $20 million racketeering lawsuit in federal court against six Atlantic City casinos and one in Las Vegas, “claiming they had a duty to notice her compulsive gambling problem and cut her off.”

Best of the web you bet!

Brian B. — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 11:05:02 -0800

Poker hand simulator. Get a feel for the odds before you bet the farm.

From Poker to Preachers

punkfloyd — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 11:24:51 -0800

Learn how the most opulent casino in the North American hemisphere, complete with guard turrets and escape tunnels, became a Baptist College in 1956. Predating Las Vegas and frequented by the likes of John Wayne, Howard Hughes, Joe Louis, Lana Turner, Will Rogers, Bonnie Parker, and Clyde Barrow the Top O’ Hill Terrace was proclaimed by Dr. J. Frank Norris, cofounder of Bible Baptist Seminary, "A blight on Tarrant County. One of these days we are going to own the place!"

Pachinko! (Bring the Noise).

flapjax at midnite — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 18:15:37 -0800

Tokyo-Ga: this excerpt from a Wim Wenders film offers an interesting little glimpse into the world of pachinko, a gambling obsession for so many in Japan. But while most are gazing hypnotically into the noisy little machines in order to win prizes or money, others are circuit bending them to make them even noisier. Here's the circuit bending pachinko guy's YouTube Channel: "I am Japanese circuit bender."

Poker is a game of chance. But some chances are better than others.

rmd1023 — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 10:53:04 -0800

Poker is pretty popular, and it seems like alm ost everyone is making money at it. At the tables, on Wall Street, and online. The World Poker Tour helped create the current boom and, with the World Series of Poker, helped make poker players into rock stars. There have been some previous issues with online poker room management, but -- for the most part -- players tend to believe that the software and random number generators are reasonably secure, and that the cheating risks of playing on line are mostly due to collusion, chip dumping, and the like rather than something specific to online play. (modulo the growing possibility of workable poker bots for online play). They appear to be wrong.

It's beginning to look like one online poker site has a cheating problem. theories abound, and some fallout has happened already.

Double or nothing

jeffmshaw — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 16:49:11 -0800

Ashley Revell bet his life's savings on one spin of roulette. Watch the video to find out what happened. The young Englishman sold everything he owned -- including rights to his name -- and put the entire proceeds on red (which he decided at the last minute, originally having fixed on black). After you've watched the video, read an interview about the aftermath and about how Vegas almost didn't take the bet. His wager topped Inside Poker magazine's list of "Top 25 Most Outrageous Gambles."

The Man Who Shook Up Vegas

jonson — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 21:54:48 -0800

The Man Who Shook Up Vegas is a fascinating and relatively brief Wall St Journal article about Bob Stoll, a college dropout whose statistical wizardry seems to be forcing the $96 Billion U.S. sports wagering industry to jump through hoops. Even if you don't follow sports gambling at all, the article is a very compelling read. note: since the wsj.com is subscriber only, link goes to a reprint of the article.

The Internet Sucks

GuyZero — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 10:08:52 -0800

Teh Intarweb suXXors! Macleans, the venerable Canadian magazine of declining circulation, declares the Internet a failure. But they're not bitter.

Virtual Economies

MetaMonkey — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 09:13:09 -0800

As virtual worlds economic activity and populations grow, the importance of Real Money Trade comes to the fore. When does fraud inside game worlds become illegal? when do earnings from online worlds become taxable? [discussion], and what happens when real day traders get interested? [more inside]

Internet Gambling on the way out

mathowie — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 10:51:02 -0800

H.R. 4411: The Internet Gambling Prohibition and Enforcement Act is a bill aimed at making online gambling illegal by blocking any US funds to foreign servers from American banks and credit cards. It passed the House on Saturday and sent British gambling stocks tumbling. I was kind of surprised at the swift passing of this bill, given that online poker is a pretty serious business, but one poker site says they'll be in the clear as poker is a game of skill and not just chance (good luck with that). Oh, and this is just one cog in the 10 tooth wheel of The American Values Agenda, the republican attempt to push socially conservative issues in time for the election.

Think of it as evolution in action.

ikkyu2 — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 05:43:45 -0800

Little Citadels. "Dine, shop, live, work, and be entertained in a unique and alluring environment," says the Time Warner Center website - all without ever stepping outside your gleaming Manhattan skyscraper. San Jose's Santana Row, which at first glance seemed no more than a Beverly Center you can live in, is now being compared favorably to urban European living. And MGM-Mirage's new, mysterious and costly ($7 billion!) Project CityCenter brings the trend to Las Vegas - with gambling, of course. They're not Arcosantis - and they don't, as yet, require an Oath of Fealty - but by all accounts they're thriving. What do they have in common? Wealthy tenants, megacorporate sponsors, and a shared desire to integrate efficient, conspicuous consumption into every aspect of civic life. Paolo Soleri may have been right after all - maybe he just forgot to account for the effects of capitalism.

U.S. Crackdown on internet gambling intensifies

Lame_username — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 08:58:25 -0800

Foreign owner of internet gambling site arrested as he attempted to change planes in Dallas. The Department of Justice announced his indictment on 22 counts and caused stock prices to drop rapidly on publicly traded gambling issues. A cynic might suppose that the arrest was related to his outspoken role as a critic of the pending anti-gambling legislation. The proposed legislation is clarified on the Daily Show

Shuffle up and deal!

mosk — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 14:29:55 -0800

When it started more than 36 years ago, the World Series of Poker was more like a trappers' rendezvous than anything else: a small gathering of professional poker players and road gamblers getting together amongst themselves to see who was “the best.” Now, of course, it is an industry unto itself, with extensive media coverage, televised coverage on ESPN, and a large fan base that follows the daily results of this now six-week long series of tournaments, which culminates in the $10,000 buy-in “main event” to determine the “world champion.” In 1970, eight gamblers put up the $10k each to play in the main event; in 2005, that number had grown to more than 5600, making the total prize pool of $56M one of the largest ever contested, a number that is either exciting or appalling, depending on your point of view. The 2006 WSOP begins today with the casino employees event, and then the larger “open” events begin tomorrow, and continue until July 28, when the main event kicks off. This year’s main event has been lengthened to almost two weeks to allow for enough play to reduce the field from the estimated 6000 starting participants to the final 9 who will vie for an estimated first prize of $10M. Shuffle up and deal!