How to beat roulette

You’ll need your best friend, a computer in your shoe, and a working knowledge of physics. Guest: Doyne Farmer, Director of Complexity Economics at Oxford For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠ Help us plan for the future of Unexplainable by filling out a brief survey: ⁠⁠⁠⁠voxmedia.com/survey⁠⁠⁠⁠. Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 0:39Speaker 01

  I'm Anna Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Chloe Mal. We talk all about her taking on the top job at Vogue, finding her personal style, and her favorite lunch order in the iconic Conde Nast cafeteria. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  All right, numbers are going up.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  We're recording.

• 1:20Speaker 03

  Good.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  All right, so to kick things off, how did you first become a scientist?

• 1:27Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I dropped out of graduate school for a while to beat the game of roulette, and that's how I became a scientist, I guess.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  Today, Doyne Farmer is a physicist, an economist. His work helped define the field of chaos theory. But before all that, nearly 50 years ago, he was gaming casinos. I gotta, I gotta ask about the roulette. Whose idea was it to apply physics at the casino?

• 2:04Speaker 03

  It was my friend Norman Packard, who I'd known since we were about nine years old.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Doan and Norman had been Boy Scouts together in southern New Mexico. Silver City is on the edge of millions of acres of national forest land. It's also a university town. And both boys, self-described science kids, were inspired to go to grad school for physics. So by the summer of 75, Doan and Norman were very smart and very poor students.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  We were always trying to find a nice way to make money during our summers.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Doan was making more money playing poker than at his summer job with the Forest Service in rural Montana. Reading The Complete Guide to Winning at Poker was enough to give him an edge and a taste for winning money. Norman, on the other hand, spent his summer in Vegas playing blackjack.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  But then while he was playing blackjack and staring at roulette wheels, he got this idea that we were physicists. We should be able to beat roulette.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Roulette is a game that feels at home in James Bond movies or Casablanca, where tuxes and ball gowns gather around the table to bet on the epitome of chance. As the spinning ball falls onto a spinning wheel, it can land on one of 38 numbers. You can bet on the ball falling on red or black, an even number or an odd one, or cryptic combinations of numbers. But ultimately, it's simple.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Predict where the ball is going to land. And if you guess right, the payout can be as much as 35 to one. Way higher returns than blackjack or even a really good hand of poker. The thing is, though, there's not really any strategy. There's no opponents to bluff, no cards to count, just pure random chance. But Norman saw potential. What, what was his pitch? Like, why, why should physicists be able to beat roulette? I mean, wasn't there like an Einstein quote that no one could win at roulette unless you steal the money from the table?

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right. But there's something Einstein didn't think of, but he should have actually, which is that roulette is a, it's just physics. There's nobody making any decisions. It's just physics.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  The casino croupier, not a dealer, spins the wheel one way and then spins the ball the other way. And then it's a little more complicated maybe than playing catch in the yard. But Norman and Doan's reasoning was largely the same. If you know where the ball is, what direction it's going, how fast it's going, you can have a pretty good idea of where it'll end up. And yet roulette is this random number generator. Even Einstein supposedly didn't think there was any rhyme or reason to it.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  And that's because tiny differences in the way the ball is thrown can cause big differences in where it lands.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  But there's an opening because casinos keep the table open for bets after the croupier throws the ball. Maybe 10, 15 seconds of golden opportunity. That sweet spot after the throw that makes the ball unpredictable, but before it's had a chance to land. Doan and Norman had to figure out where the ball was going to land in those precious few seconds when roulette was just a predictable physics problem.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  So how did you figure out how to beat roulette?

• 5:54Speaker 03

  Well, you know, we started by thinking, okay, it's a rolling ball on circular track, but it's slowing down. What causes it to slow down? We realized it's air resistance. So then we went to the library and looked up air resistance and thought about that. And so we wrote out an equation that described a rolling ball under circular track with air resistance and solved it.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  And then we bought a roulette wheel and we started doing experiments to see if...

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Wait, where'd you set up the roulette?

• 6:24Speaker 03

  Well, the roulette wheel was set up first in my dorm apartment. I was a graduate student advisor in the dorm. And then we would take it into the physics department in the middle of the night where, you know, I had a master key and the janitor was in on it. So he didn't tell the faculty we were doing this in the middle of the night.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Doan and Norman spent their nights doing experiments on the roulette table and solving their equations on bulky 1970s computers. But they weren't going to make any money in an empty physics department at midnight. They needed to take their strategy to the casino and they needed to bring their computers with them. So naturally, they built the first ever wearable, concealable, digital computer.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  The idea of a personal computer, let alone one that you could carry around with you, was pretty out there at the time. Doan and Norman couldn't just order up parts and start tinkering. They had to set up a shell company to buy the components they needed. They used the same processor that went into their original Apple computer and even ran in the same circles as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Though Doan and Norman couldn't quite imagine what regular people would do with personal computers, they were completely obsessed with roulette.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  Doing experiments, building computers, solving the equations, writing programs that would solve the equations on the computer we built.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  The project, as they called it, grew from just Doan and Norman to about 30 people. They found that they could use their equations and computers to roughly predict where the ball was going to land. And, you know, even if the ball bounced around a little as it fell off the track, it wasn't going to bounce clear over to the other side of the wheel. They could narrow it down enough to cover the bets. They had it. The dream was to win enough money to fund a science commune where they could live and study and work together outside of the pressures of academia. But first, they had to hit the casino floor.

• 8:52Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 12:30Speaker 06

  Do you wish to place another bet? No, no, I guess not. Drive 22 tonight.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  So you had the strategy, you had the math. Walk me through, through the heist. What was, if I'm imagining like an Ocean's Eleven theme song playing?

• 12:47Speaker 02

  What was the heist that you guys?

• 12:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we'd start out by, in our apartment, we would suit up, which meant putting on the computer.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Alright.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  You know, the computer was strapped under one arm. There was a 12 AA batteries strapped under the other arm. Back in those days, it took a lot of power to run a computer, and we could only run for about an hour and a half.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  So you'd strap on the battery pack. It was all sewn into this belt, like weight lifters would use. And then we had switches in each of our shoes with wires running up.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Like up your leg?

• 13:22Speaker 03

  Up our legs. And we had a kind of radio transmitter around our shoulders. And we had little buzzers. So the buzzers, they were like thumpers. So they'd give us a low-frequency thump, medium-frequency thump, high-frequency thump.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  On your chest?

• 13:39Speaker 03

  Uh, actually, the men typically put them kind of under their belts. And the women had them sewed into a bra, so they would give them a vibration in their bra.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  So we would suit up in the apartment, and suiting up already was kind of tricky because you had all these wires and things you had to plug together. And then we would get in our car. It was usually my 1966 Dodge van, and drive to the casino.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Dohen and the team made 11 trips to Nevada and all. They'd spill out of Dohen's van, adjusting the wires in their belts and bras, and head into the casino.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  And then we would look around for roulette wheels with a little bit of tilt. Turns out, only a tiny bit of tilt would make the dynamics much more predictable. Because it caused the ball to be more likely to land on one side than the other.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  And then one of them, usually Doan, approached the table. He'd act stupid and loud, call himself Clem, and bet small stakes. But all the while, Doan was using his big toes to click the switches inside of his shoes to program the computer tucked into his weightlifting belt. Using all this, he'd measure the speed of the ball and the rotor turning the wheel.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  Depending on the friction and the rotor, it might slow down faster, or the ball's a little more dense. Or even if the barometric pressure's changed, the ball will accelerate faster or slower.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Once he had a feel for that particular tilted wheel, with that specifically dense ball on a fair-weather desert night, Doan and his computer were ready.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  I would signal the other player, and I would just be betting red or black. And I'd say, "Switch to betting even odd." So the other player would know, "Ah, now he's ready." And then the other player would take their place on the opposite side of the table. And my computer would relay to their computer when the ball was about six seconds ahead of falling off. It would tell them what part of the roulette wheel was the best part to bet on. And they would have memorized the pattern. So if they got a buzz that meant, say, seven, they'd know, "Okay, that's the seventh octave, and the numbers in there are 14, 32, and 3."

• 16:11Speaker 03

  And they'd lay down bets on those numbers, which were all in about the same part of the wheel, and that's how it worked.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, and this is all on taps in the shoes and thumps under the belt or in the bra. And that's how you're communicating, trying to stealthily do all these calculations.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  That's exactly right.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  This system, it was complicated.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  We always had a lot of problems with hardware. For every hour we spent playing, we probably spent five hours fixing our equipment.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  And it didn't always go as planned.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  It could drive you crazy because the ball would land just short, just right next to the number you made your bet on. You could be making good predictions and still end up losing just from bad luck, which is part of why we were always nervous about having a big enough bankroll to outlast the bad luck.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  But trip after trip, it paid off.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  We make predictions and they were far from perfect, but they were still good enough to give us about a 20% edge over the house. So in other words, every time we laid down a dollar, on average, we got a dollar 20 back.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  That was pretty good, but we were always a little cowardly about scaling up to big, big stakes because every time we started to do that, we'd fill a lot of casino heat.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Hmm, interesting. Feels like a lot of trouble to go through for a little extra pocket money if you consider all the like man hours put in.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  It was, it was, but it was a lot of fun, I must say.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  It was a engineering project where we had to do the basic science. We had to do the math. We had to do experiments. We had to build a device. We had to get the device to work in the field. My thesis advisor said, actually, you could just write your thesis about this if you wanted. And I decided not to. I didn't think that really would qualify me to do much else, but it did actually in the sense that it taught me a lot about predictions.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  About a decade later, Norman, Doan, and some friends founded The Prediction Company in 1991. They kept up the grad school vibes, setting up their company in a barely furnished adobe house in Santa Fe, and basically sharing one business suit between them to wear to meetings with investors. Just like their days playing roulette, Doan and Norman harnessed the underlying science, invented the technology they needed, and profited by finding predictable patterns where others saw randomness.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  We knew a lot. We'd learned an awful lot from that first enterprise, and we put a lot of the things we'd learned into practice, beating financial markets.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  At a time when trading floors still ran on brokers in colored blazers shouting out orders and throwing up hand signs, The Prediction Company used computers, mountains of data, and even some early machine learning to find these predictable patterns and automate trades.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  In stock markets, in bond markets, in commodities markets, foreign exchange markets.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Basically, they started one of the very first quantitative hedge funds.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  Exactly. That's what we did, inspired by, in many respects, our time in the casino. And we did succeed in making a decent amount of money. We made a pretty good, we made quite a, a pretty good amount of money doing that.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  If you want to hear more about Doan's work, teasing out those patterns he keeps seeing in the economy, check out our episode, "Embracing Economic Chaos."

• 20:13Speaker 02

  This episode was produced by me, Meredith Hoddinott. I also run the show. We had editing from Jorge Just, sound design and mixing from Christian Ayala, music from Noam Hassenfeld, and fact checking from Melissa Hirsch. Julia Longoria is looking a little green, and Byrd Pinkerton got to the airport. She waited till 12 and made her way outside, and at the far end of the abandoned runway, she saw a pigeon. Ah, she thought, that must be Aaron Bird. But next to him, she saw something else hiding in the tall grass. It couldn't be a platypus?

• 20:54Speaker 02

  Thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick. Hey, O'Brien. Thank you so much for creating the show. And if you have thoughts about the show, you should send us an email. Brian, specifically, you should email us, but also any other listeners. Really excited to hear what you think about the show. We're at [email protected]. You can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. Really helps bring new listeners into the fold. Tell the world about Unexplainable. It's gonna be their new favorite podcast. They'll thank you for it. You can also support us and all of Vox's journalism by joining our

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  membership program. You can go to vox.com/members to sign up. And if you do, you'll be helping make this place run. You also get unlimited access to all the phenomenal reporting on vox.com. You'll get exclusive newsletters, and you get all of our podcasts ad-free. Unexplainable is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will see you next week.