MIT Lottery Team..

[HotlikeSauce]

Ok,, Don't know to much about this, but it is true... We all know how the MIT Blackjack team where the first to put together something on that level... Now i read how students from MIT found a way to somehow beat the Massachusetts state lottery to the tune of like 3 million( Might be a lil less..)... Since the state found out they had a beatable lottery set up.. It since been reconfigured.. Sort of like how Vegas had to reconfigure there second half NBA spreads cause Haralbous kept killing them.. They stopped just cutting spreads in half for the second half...

[BeerAndPoker]

An article on this from last year:

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/08/07/...for-8-million/

[mulva]

the need to work on figuring out how to beat keno next

[shortbuspoker]

the need to work on figuring out how to beat keno next

There is actually a Breaking Vegas episode about a guy who did this. He worked for NGC and noticed that there were actually patterns that would occur due to wear on the balls. He then wrote a program that would predict blocks of numbers after he got a given sample size on the machine the casino was using. He set up a bank of computers in a NJ casino/hotel room and hit something absurd like 8 out of 10 with $100 bet and it drew gaming commission suspicion. I forget why they arrested him but they found some reason.

[bukowski72]

the need to work on figuring out how to beat keno next

There is actually a Breaking Vegas episode about a guy who did this. He worked for NGC and noticed that there were actually patterns that would occur due to wear on the balls. He then wrote a program that would predict blocks of numbers after he got a given sample size on the machine the casino was using. He set up a bank of computers in a NJ casino/hotel room and hit something absurd like 8 out of 10 with $100 bet and it drew gaming commission suspicion. I forget why they arrested him but they found some reason.

That's not what happened. He figured out the pattern of electronic keno because he had access to seeding data because he worked for the NGC. The disgusting part is that Casinos are able to offer Keno. The reason he got caught is that odds to hit a 10 number Keno are so bad that when his partner hit one an investigation of the winner was launched.


"Ronald Dale Harris is a computer programmer who worked for the Nevada Gaming Control Board in the early 1990s and was responsible for finding flaws and gaffes in software that runs computerized casino games. Harris took advantage of his expertise, reputation and access to source code in order to illegally modify certain slot machines to pay out large sums of money when a specific sequence and number of coins were inserted. From 1993 to 1995, Harris and an accomplice stole thousands of dollars from Las Vegas casinos, accomplishing one of the most successful and undetected scams in casino history.

Towards the end of his stint, Harris shifted his focus to the probability game Keno, for which he developed a program that would determine which numbers the game's pseudorandom number generator would select beforehand. When Harris' accomplice, Reid Errol McNeal, attempted to redeem a high value winning keno ticket at Bally's Atlantic City Casino Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey, casino executives became suspicious of him and notified New Jersey gaming investigators. The investigation led authorities to Harris and after a trial was sentenced to seven years in prison. He was released from prison after serving 2 years, and currently resides in Las Vegas."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Dale_Harris

[bukowski72]

There have been many hedge funds(and i think Goldman Sachs) who have been looking at lotteries as an investment. They have mostly been foiled by the need to print the tickets. There is not enough time, when the jackpot gets high enough, to print the number of tickets they would need to own the percentage of possible tickets they need.

There a female math professor who has Won big in the Texas Lottery FOUR Times. They think she does it like this. There are six big winning tickets distributed around the state for a game. As each big winner is announced you can cross of that area. Then she has worked of some formula to break down the areas that still have winning tickets into smaller blocks that will most likely have the winning ticket. Then she drives around the area and buys every ticket she can.

She moved to Vegas:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/0..._n_645520.html

How She Does it:
"Nathaniel Rich, writing in Harper's Magazine (it's subscription-required but summarized here), notes Ginther has a PhD in math from Stanford, which we guess is harder to get than a journalism degree from UH.

He says she's figured out the algorithm used in printing scratch-offs, and the lottery's method of delivering cards to stores, to greatly increase her chance of buying a winner.

[Rich] believes that after Ms Ginther figured out the algorithm, it wouldn't be too difficult to then determine where the tickets would be shipped, as the shipping schedule is apparently fixed, and there were a few sources she could have found it out from.

Scratch-off tickets aren't manufactured randomly, since the state has to guarantee a certain percentage of winners. So some formula has to be devised to create them. Two of the winning tickets were sold at the same convenience store."
http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairba...ner_genius.php