So, casinos are chucking people out and not paying out, quite legally, when those people don’t break any rules. Keep telling yourself that, people, and no doubt you’ll come here to complain if it ever happens to you.
No. Casinos (in Nevada anyway) may remove you for any reason they want. They may not deny you any winnings that you have legitimately earned while there. If the casino suspects actual cheating, that is a criminal matter and the police will be called. You are not entitled to keep winnings from cheating, but this must be proven in a criminal trial.
The regulatory agencies and courts in Nevada have regularly upheld the rights of gamblers to collect winnings from advantage play.
If you’re so sure that card counting is illegal – and you decide it’s a good idea to make these factless statements simply challenging the work that other posters have put into proving a point that is well-known by pretty much anyone who has played blackjack well – why don’t you just provide cites that show that it is illegal?
We will be waiting for you… but not holding our breath.
They may not be written, but they are long held to be against the rules of the game. The enforcers of the game would stop you if they knew about it. If they wouldn’t, then it’s by definition not against the rules.
It’s reasonable to expect a human not to catch everything. It’s not to expect a computer game to not catch everything. The rules of a game are the rules that the software enforces. If it doesn’t catch you, then by definition it’s not against the rules. Because if it doesn’t catch you once, it doesn’t catch you ever.
I watch a ton of speedrunners, and a lot of them exploit aspects of the game that were not intended by the game designer. A lot of people whine and call them cheaters. And the answer is always that it’s part of the mechanics of the game and thus cannot be cheating. They used the standard controller device as intended. Cheating means adding something to the game and changing the programming in some way. It’s not simply doing something the designers didn’t intend.
Now, granted, this only works when it’s a game, and the game can reasonably be designed to prevent what you are doing to it. That’s why I made that distinction in my previous post. The point of a computer game is to beat it, and the assumption is that the rules the software enforces are the rules in how you are allowed to do that, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Trying to treat real life games with human enforcers like computer games with software enforcers just doesn’t work. Computer programs have an expectation of perfection in enforcement.
That’s simply not true, which is why people are banned for using exploits in some online games.
But are they charged with federal computer hacking laws?
I doubt it, and I’ve already said that I don’t think the particular cheating here is necessarily criminal.
What if it were a specific combination of buttons…AND…a slight kick at the bottom? Or a specific combination and a partner who has built up a carpet shock and shocks the machine?
All three are interfacing with the machine in a way not intended.
I’m just spitballing.
Easily stopped by passing some vague law about interfacing with machines in ways unintended by the designer.
Is this true of all computer programs? Like, if you find a zero-day exploit in Windows or something, the imperfection in the program proves that you are allowed to exploit it?
How is a player to know that switching to another game while a jackpot pay-out is pending, is unintended by the designer, when there’s a button on the machine which does exactly that? It’d be pretty difficult to obey that law unless you a) know the machine’s designer personally, and b) are a mind-reader.
I didn’t read the exact details…
…at the end of the day it sounds like no law was broken, but maybe the casino can find relief in civil court.
Talking from a purely ethical (rather than legal) point of view, it depends what you mean by “exploit.”
If you exploit the imperfection to change the way your own machine works, in a way that does no harm to other people, i believe that’s a completely reasonable use of your own property, and of a piece of software that you paid for. Using the exploit to interfere with the workings of other people’s computers, or of Microsoft’s servers, however, would be wrong, not because you’ve used the exploit, per se, but because you have intruded onto property that is not yours.
I get (and agree) with the specific examples you described, but what I’m not following is the ethical principle which lays out the reason why one may think that using a bug to do something to someone else’s computer (perhaps to display a silly message or something else innocuous) is prohibited, but using a bug on someone else’s computer to gain money that wasn’t actually the subject of a wager is a-okay.
BigT asserted that non-perfection in a computer program means that any bug is specifically allowed to be used. That’s a very broad assertion.
The casino had a chance to look good here. They could have confronted the dude in a positive manner. Buy him a few drinks, offer him a consultant fee in exchange for the details of how he sussed out the flaw in the machine. Allow him to keep his winnings, of course. Then leak the story to the press. The story which makes them look good and attracts gamblers who think maybe they can find similar machine exploits.
Instead, they go all De Niro/Pesci. 
Yeah, it’s cheating.
If the exploit had been different, then it wouldn’t be. Say the machine paid out $800 for a win on a $1 bet, and they found out that if you tap a certain sequence of keys then your $1 always pays out $800: that’s not cheating. You pay $1 for the chance to win $800: that’s the deal you make with the casino, and if you find a way to improve your chances within the normal working of the machine, there’s nothing wrong with that.
But unless I’m getting this wrong, they found a way to play a $1 bet and make the machine pay out as if they’d made a $10 bet. In other words, they were getting the machine to pay out on a bet they hadn’t paid for. They hadn’t bought a chance to win $8000; they’d only bought a chance to win $800, but they found a way to get the machine to pay the $8000 all the same. that’s cheating. It’s no different from getting the vending machine to give you ten cans for the price of one: you’re getting something you didn’t pay for.
Regardless of the ethics of the situation, those two men would be flipping morons to sell their secret for a few drinks and a finder’s fee. They were looking to make another half a million or more - to the point that the one dude is traveling to different states to screw his partner out of sharing any of the lucre. And they would give that up for another few grand plus some martinis? Yeah, right.
Plus I’m sure the casinos don’t want to be in the business of kissing goodbye to a half a million dollars to find out a cheat that nobody else is apparently using.
No. But the equivalent situation is that the original ticket owner redeems the prize. You then take photocopies of the ticket and redeem those as well.
These guys would look for machines coming upon machines that showed a winning screen which someone else had already (presumably) redeemed. Then, without wagering any money, they would push the button sequence causing the machine to register another win. They could even increase the bet retroactively.
Not at all. And so long as there is actually money at risk for each chance of winning, it’s not cheating IMHO.
The difference is that by using the glitch they discovered these men managed to generate payouts without actually putting money in the machines at times.
(I am not mhendo)
When I put up a website and publicize it, the implied contract with visitors is that they can browse through my site and view its contents, but not e.g. exploit a SQL injection attack to take control of the server, even if I have carelessly left a bug in the software which makes that possible.
In between those extremes, there can be some gray areas. E.g. it happens sometimes that a company website contains a link to /documents/financial_results_for_2013.doc, and then some clever git discovers that financial_results_for_2014.doc is already available on the webserver, even though there’s no link to it yet because it’s not supposed to be published until after next month’s shareholder meeting. Is that unethical? How was the visitor supposed to know that the 2013 link was OK to view but the 2014 link wasn’t?
In such cases, I would say that it’s the responsibility of the webserver maintainer to make sure that non-public information is not available, rather than of the visitors to make sure that they don’t see things they’re not supposed to see. Inside the gray area, a very strong benefit of the doubt should go to the party who is not in control of the system and therefore able to decide what it does and doesn’t allow. This is similar to the legal principle which says that ambiguities in a contract should be explained in favor of the party who did not write it.
In the case of the slot machine, I’d say we are inside the gray area but the benefit of the doubt clearly belongs to the player. Yes, Kane and Nestor could have guessed that the machine’s designers probably did not intend for the player to be able to retroactively increase the size of a jackpot by switching to another game and placing a higher-denomination bet there. The sheer fact that they were able to effortlessly amass so much money by using this trick, made it “too good to be true” that this would be an intentional feature.
But on the other hand, it’s a slot machine – its exact functioning is, by design, unclear, and full of sneaky little tricks intended to make players believe that their chance of winning is greater than it actually is. The casino wants you to believe that there’s a way to beat the system, and that you might be the one to discover it if you put just a few more quarters into the machine. They employ an army of statisticians and psychologists to figure out ever more effective ways to foster exactly that illusion. If you believe you have found a system which lets you beat the odds at the Roulette wheel, they will happily provide you with graph paper and a calculator as long as you keep wasting money on it. So that doesn’t put them on a very strong moral footing when it turns out that they screwed up and accidentally created a way to beat the system for real, and somebody finds it.
To go back to the webserver analogy, it would be as if someone ran a website advertising a hacking contest, and offering a series of puzzles in which visitors can “hack” a pretend website using different techniques. And then it turns out that there’s a real bug in the server actually running the contest, and someone exploits it to give themselves the top score without solving any of the puzzles…
Now, if Kane and Nestor had found a way to e.g. modify the contents of the machine’s memory locations directly, via a carefully timed sequence of button-presses, then I might agree that would count as unethical hacking, even though it still involved only “pressing buttons which they were legitimately allowed to press”. But if some features of a complex slot machine program interact with each other in a way which the designer did not foresee, and which allow you to increase the jackpot amount to the point where it’s a net loss for the casino, then I can’t work up too much moral indignation for the person who discovers that and decides to make use of it while the opportunity is there.
My understanding from the article is that they noticed this as an interesting curiosity, but it is not how they made the majority of their gains. Most of the time they just gambled their own money at the $1 level, until they got a big win at which point they would use their technique to switch the machine over to the highest-level denomination allowed for the machine.
Anyway, I don’t really see the big principal difference. There’s still money being put “at risk”, in the sense that somebody needs to do the initial low-stakes gambling up to the point where the jackpot appears. And you don’t know exactly how much money it will take before that happens, so it’s still gambling in that sense. It’s just that once you have a jackpot, their trick allowed them to increase the pay-out, and maybe even get repeated pay-outs for the same jackpot in some cases, so that they were guaranteed a large net profit even if they had some bad luck in getting to that point.
So if you agree that it’s OK for Gambler B to swoop in and get the pay-out for a slot machine which Gambler A has foolishly abandoned prematurely, and if you also agree (for the sake of the argument) that the trick to increase the pay-out was not itself unethical, then I don’t really see how this makes a difference.