Really bad article. Goes to great lengths to glamorize that Curzi person, yet does not provide some of the most crucial information on the subject. For example - does oregon law require that the machines have certain winning percentage? And secondly did the state of oregon make a representation to gamblers that this machine had certain winning percentage?
And finding documents marked "confidential" that say the machine has a certain winning percentage means nothing. You cannot say that a confidential document that was unknown to gamblers before Cruzi obtained it from a public records request mislead anyone. If people do not know about a document there is no way it can mislead them.
Since the article is quiet on the two questions listed above it seems very likely that their answer is "no". In that case that Cruzi person, as glamorous as the article makes him, probably has no case. If the machine is not required by law or by previous advertisement to give out a certain percentage, I do not see how the fact that the advice it gives results in a lesser percentage than other possible advice is at all relevant.
From the article: 'The lottery’s rules require “a close approximation of the odds of winning some prize for each game” and say those odds “must be displayed on a Video Lottery game terminal screen.”'
Curzi discovered that the odds displayed were not correct and the commission knew about it.
That is also very puzzling. It gives the above quote but it does not say whether these odds were actually displayed on the screen of this particular game, and it does not say which odds were displayed (the ones with using autohold or the ones without).
I used to work as a mathematician making OSL video poker games and I can tell you that there is no requirement that the autohold in the game use optimal strategy in Oregon. I don't remember if it was even required to have autohold enabled on the device. It was a configuration option in our software and could be turned on or off. It's possible that Oregon requires it is always on, but I can't remember.
I can't speak for everyone that manufactures these games, but the company I worked for always made autohold use a simplified strategy (similar to whats found here: http://wizardofodds.com/games/video-poker/strategy/jacks-or-...) for ease of implementation. 9-6 Jacks or Better had a slightly different optimal strategy than 8-5 Jacks or Better, and it was easier to code a simplified strategy that every paytable variation could use. Obviously a simplified strategy will deviate somewhat from optimal, but not by a huge margin. Autohold is generally as good as any unskilled player would expect to be on their own. Anyone considering themselves to be a skilled video poker player would never rely on autohold during their play.
In this specific instance it sounds like a software bug or a poorly implemented hold strategy. There's no reason the game should be offering such bad advice and I'd hope the game maker would correct it in an update. I'm inclined to assume stupidity rather than malice on the part of the game maker in this instance. It's absolutely ridiculous to imply some kind of conspiracy on the part of Oregon State Lottery however. As someone who made these games I would have happily blown the whistle on that kind of shenanigans had I encountered them. The truth is that nobody needs to rig these games to make money. We already have the laws of mathematics on our side and cheating just sows distrust in the player base.
If anyone wants more insight on how these games are made please ask. There are lots of misconceptions about gambling devices and how they really work.
Do you recall which 3rd party lab validated the games for OSL?
I've spoken with a few colleagues that are ex-WMS and the consensus has pretty much been "yeah, that sure sounds like a bug but why didn't GLI catch it?"
Edit: Now that I've (finally) finished the article I see it was a WMS machine. I worked for WMS and on this exact product before I left. I'm not sure why they didn't name the manufacturer in the first paragraph of the article.
It's been years since I've worked on that poker product, but I remember the autohold on Jacks or Better used a very short, simple ruleset that didn't do anything obviously boneheaded. I'm having a hard time imagining it doing what the article described, but I don't have access to the system to check it out anymore. The autohold ruleset was built long before I started there and was ported from system to system.
The nuances of autohold are something that's really hard to explain in terms of the PAR sheet, in my opinion.
Is the goal of autohold to provide the player with any win, or give the proper chance at the optimal win given the upcards? Those two goals aren't always in alignment given certain hands.
(ex-WMS engineer here too. Glad to see you survived.)
Another purpose of autohold is to provide a floor for unskilled players in a game of skill. They don't use it in Las Vegas specifically to allow players to make as many mistakes as possible. Optimal strategy on 9-6 JorB is 99.54% RTP. Reverse-optimal strategy (making the worst selection every time) is something like 3% RTP. Use of autohold puts an absolute worst case on the downside to video poker.
But do states set a min RTP for something like autohold? I always understood it as something that, technically, didn't have to be held to a PAR sheet or validated at all, really.
Slots with bonus games could auto-percentage themselves, right? Like how does Jackpot Party hold to a PAR sheet percentage when the player is pretty much making random pokes? Or are the pokes gaffed to reveal the five virtual reels that were spun earlier in the play?
Each of the state jurisdictions have different rules regarding minimum RTP percentages in games. With regards to poker autohold there aren't any rules that I'm aware of other than it has to be above the regulated minimum for the state. For example, Nevada had a minimum RTP requirement to 75%, so autohold would have to be at least that good. (Note to tourists: never play the slot machines in the Las Vegas airport. They're probably barely over the minimum required by law)
Articles generally get built around a story such as what we see here, leading with a human-directed hook, and then proceeding to build up the human backstory - even when it's only vaguely related to the actual topic. In this case I skimmed past maybe half the article as useless fluff.
Willamette Week isn't exactly traditional media - it's an alt-weekly known for investigative reporting. I think it's the only alt weekly ever to have won a Pulitzer, actually.
>For example - does oregon law require that the machines have certain winning percentage? And secondly did the state of oregon make a representation to gamblers that this machine had certain winning percentage?
What relevance to the claim being made does this have at all? The question is whether a feature on the machines intended to accelerate play by automatically choosing the ideal card draw was actually doing that. It has been determined that it was not (unlike every other supplier of machines that Oregon uses), and those machines have now been withdrawn.
>And finding documents marked "confidential" that say the machine has a certain winning percentage means nothing. You cannot say that a confidential document that was unknown to gamblers before Cruzi obtained it from a public records request mislead anyone. If people do not know about a document there is no way it can mislead them.
This objection is incomprehensible. It is not being claimed that players were being deceived by the listed winning percentage of machines within documents marked "confidential." The documents are being used to prove that Oregon was aware of an error in their favor within the autoplay algorithm on those particular machines, therefore consciously benefiting from that error by possibly over $100M.
Simple example: suppose healthcare.gov (US healthcare exchange under ACA) had a feature that calculated the amount of insurance plan subsidy that you were eligible for based on the information that it had about you. You would then be optionally allowed to review the calculation before selecting the plan, or click "NEXT." Further suppose that this feature was broken, and unless the calculation was reviewed, it would consistently ignore certain subsidies whether or not you qualified for them. Now, add that this error was discovered, but since it was in the government's favor, was ignored, resulting in a loss of over $100M to people who pressed "NEXT" (or lets say $100M * [US population/Oregon population] = $8.1 billion.
This is really disturbing. For all of the sleaziness of Vegas, any time I've asked a dealer or pit boss about the house advantage in a particular game, or the correct play for a particular hand, they've told me cheerfully and correctly. They sell strategy cards in all of the gift shops -- and you can have them on the table with you while you are playing. There's no need for them to lie -- they already have the advantage, all they need to do is get you to play long enough to let the odds do their thing.
Except that in the case of live poker, they're getting theirs via the rake.
I assume you're talking about blackjack: unless there is a CSM at the table or an absurd 6:5 blackjack payout (you shouldn't be there in either event, period) you can absolutely play to your advantage.
Most blackjack card counting strategies are no more difficult with a higher number of decks. Instead of counting actual 'cards', one instead keeps a running total of points based on the cards that come out.
In fact a higher number of decks can improve one's advantage when counting because when the count turns in your favor it can happen with more of the deck left to come (so a longer period of advantageous play)
That's nonsensical. The EV of an hour would depend far more on the table limit than any other factor. If I could find a table that would let me vary the bet from $1 to $10,000 a hand on a two deck game they could have Parkinson's patients with oven mitts on shuffling with chopsticks for all I care.
The practices of the Oregon lottery seem wrong to me. Government should be in the business of helping people and providing uncorrupted resources and facts, not marketing dreams and hope to people while taking their money hand over fist. John Oliver just did a good segment about this too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PK-netuhHA
It similarly struck me as strange that many US states decide gambling should be illegal because it's a vice, or because it's taking advantage of people, but then turn around and give themselves a monopoly on offering it. And in some places, like New York, they advertise it very heavily - TV ads, billboards in the subway and on bus stations, quirky upbeat characters and themes ... But still, it's a bad thing and thus illegal for private companies to offer. So weird.
> It similarly struck me as strange that many US states decide gambling should be illegal because it's a vice, or because it's taking advantage of people, but then turn around and give themselves a monopoly on offering it.
That describes a huge portion of what government does. Heck, that's essentially the basic definition of government in political science.
I remember when the Oregon and California Lottery were passed in the early 80s. I was highly controversial, but advocates really pitched the "more funds for schools!!!" angle.
What legislators didn't tell the public is that after the bills passed, the existing education budget would be cannibalized for other expenditures, thereby not actually improving the education situation and in fact, making funding more volatile.
all government lotteries should be banned. they exploit the poor. its really depressing to see how much money some spend on these tickets.
In Georgia less than a third is actually reaching the designated programs, it was by law 35% but terms in there let it fluctuate to payout to instant tickets.
Not sure about other states but MN even has online "virtual" scratch-offs that you can buy. They even have "subscriptions" to this crap. It's disgusting.
Yeah, it's really ugly in MN. The MN leg even plans for gambling proceeds for future funding. They planned for video gambling in bars to pay for their $500MM donation to billionaire Zygi Wilf's sports team, and fell all over themselves when it didn't[1].
Because it's better than the old system where people were blatantly ripped off and lent money that if they didn't pay back would result in their legs being broken?
...how is that different than today? Someone can find a loan shark and an illegal craps ring if they want. What you are describing is not happening in Las Vegas today, which has legalized gambling run by private entities.
It's easy to sit back and act like government's all corrupt, hur hur, but guess what--you can talk to your elected officials and try and shape government more to how you think it should work.
If your elected officials don't give you access to them, work to put in office, some who do.
Do you even know how much time an elected official spends fund raising? Many members of congress fund raise every day, every day they are walking out of capitol hill and across the street to be glorified phone bank monkeys begging some rich guy for money.
Do you know what gerrymandering is? Have you looked, actually looked at gerrymandered districts? They're like something Escher would draw, they certainly don't reflect communities, geographical constraints, or anything besides the best statistical slicing to ensure the status quo prevails.
I'm all for Ghandi's "be the change you wish to see", but being critical to someone who points out the ills in the world is shooting the messenger.
You recall what platform Obama ran on? Hope and Change, how did that work out? The political process in America is broken and voting will not solve the problem of corruption.
Hope and change was one of the Obama campaign slogans, not a platform. And in major addresses, that slogan was contextualized with Ghandi's "be the change you wish to see". How did it work out -- better than I expected, worse than I'd hoped.
> The political process in America is broken and voting will not solve the problem of corruption.
"Getting involved" is not limited to voting. GP didn't say "If your elected officials don't give you access to them, vote for those who say they will." He said "...f your elected officials don't give you access to them, work to put in office, some who do."
That includes voting, but goes far beyond it. Run yourself, or get people to run. To the extent that the electoral system and the perverse incentives and limited selections it offers are a barrier to getting the kind of candidates you want elected (and if you want something different than what the major parties keep putting forward, that's probably a pretty significant barrier) educate yourself about it and work to change it; sure, you may not get buy off from lots of incumbents in office, but if you live in a state with a citizen initiative process, you don't need that support to change electoral procedures at the state level. (Of course, in such a state, you can also work to directly attack problem policies through the same process, which limits the effect that problem politicians have even before they are replaced.)
You're only getting "involved" by voting according to the government's definition of "getting involved".
Your parent post just put forward an argument which you did not address:
"You recall what platform Obama ran on? Hope and Change, how did that work out? The political process in America is broken and voting will not solve the problem of corruption."
Please address this argument. No need for "we'll see who gets more done" future arguments, this is a present-day argument. What should we do when, after people go out and "get involved" and "get more done" to elect the right representative, they don't follow through on their promises? What should we do?
In the sense that I'm saying, be a part of the democratic governance process, yes, that is a definition the government would put out there, but I'm not saying, "toe the line and choose between a big mac and a quarter pounder," I'm saying, "work to make the world you want."
I want to live in a country with a democratically-selected government, not one with a government instilled by revolution (and definitely not one without any government at all), so being involved and involving my fellow citizens is my tool of preference.
Repeating the word "involved" in different contexts does not explain anything. I still don't know what you mean by "get involved" besides voting. Can you list a few actions in the real world that exemplify what you mean by "get involved"?
No offense, but the way you put it, it sounds like empty rhetoric.
Paint me a scenario where a bunch of people like you "getting involved" succeed in stopping corruption and keeping politicians from breaking the promises they made to their people.
Actually, that's great, I like that you're asking questions.
I also note in this response and in another you made, that you're zeroing in on corruption and broken promises--which is kind of a shallow way to view politics and citizen involvement in civic life. (It's ok to be shallow about politics, but it will limit your perspective and your ability to do anything about your world.)
What do I mean by get involved? Couple of things I've done in the last few years:
Volunteer on a local political campaign. Don't just show up and ask for a task, talk to everyone you can, get to know them as people, make friends and make connections. You'll quickly discover that you see the same people again and again. Lots of people don't make political involvement a priority for whatever reason, so you'll see the same faces in a variety of contexts (supporting a candidate, supporting a cause, etc).
I say "local" because it's the best place to start. You'll have a lot of chances to talk to and get to know the candidate for office, and it's easy to get involved, depending on what you can bring to the table (skills, connections, etc).
(And it's kind of neat, if they win, and you've made a friend of them, to get to brag to your friends, "I'm going to go have coffee with my pal, State Rep Jones," and then you get to stay in touch with your politician who you helped get into office, and you find out what new pressures they're under to compromise...)
What else?
Go to civic groups, chamber groups, and association meetings, especially when politicians are going to give talks. Walk right up to them, bluster your way into a conversation, and just start talking with them. Everyone you meet, and I do mean everyone, ask them, "is there anyone else I should meet? I'm interested in x and y, and I'd love to talk to anyone who I can help advance these issues."
I've gotten connected with so many people at a variety of local government agencies this way. We sit down for coffee, they tell me what their agency is all about, I tell them what I'm doing and what's important to me, etc.
The best way to keep their attention is to frame whatever you want in terms of how it will benefit them: "Open-sourcing more of your agency's projects would be good for you, because of these benefits.." or "Providing an API to your agency's data would be good for you because it would let people like me build interfaces to make it more accessible to underrepresented groups X and Y.."
Now, if you're scoffing and thinking, "well hur hur so you got some small agency to sponsor open-source and open their data sets, that's not solving real problems," then you're right, my efforts haven't single-handedly gotten the U.S. out of the middle east, nor have they gotten single-payer health care instituted as a national policy.
But do these matter to me, as a fan of free software and open access to data, and everyone else like me? You bet.
And you know what? It doesn't stop here. Every year I get to know more people, and every year more people call me up out of the blue to pick my brain about, what do you think, should we do this? Should this be a policy?
Where's it all going? What's it going to look like for me in 10 years? I dunno, but it's exciting.
If you think it's all pointless, good, fine, stay home. I don't really care what you do--and if that's your attitude, it's better that you stay home and remain uninvolved.
Generally speaking your two choices are democratic process and revolution.
Democratic process despite its flaws has had some moderate successes. Revolution is a much more mixed bag, and while I believe that there may well be a time when it's necessary it's not something to enter into lightly, and almost certainly modern day USA is not remotely in need of a revolution.
Happy to hear of other options, but enough people being negative about the possibility of democratic change (again, despite its flaws), will reduce its possibility, playing into the hands of the status quo and the revolutionaries.
As Kennedy said "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable". Unless you actually want violent revolution you should be doing all you can to keep people engaged in the democratic process.
You sound like someone who has never challenged your own opinions. Some of the first US presidents would argue this government is in huge breach of its original contract with its people.
"Some of the first US presidents would argue this government is in huge breach of its original contract with its people."
I've never heard this argument made in a way that wasn't ahistorical, irrelevant, or both.
I also have no interest in revering people who lived centuries ago, as though they had the answers and we just have to follow their golden path--what they got right, great, let's go with it, but what they got wrong, let's ditch without sentimentality.
Governments are for the living--for us, not for some ancestor-worship.
This study from Princeton University says in its abstract:
"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism."
In other words, they are arguing the people have little to no impact on the government's policies. I don't want to put words in their mouths but they're essentially showing the government is a bunch of cronies and corporate special interest groups that care not a jot about the people.
Well, if that's what you're asking for, come right out and say it - it is a position that can be debated on its merits. Moaning about democratic processes without being clear about the alternative you're proposing instead is negative because it comes across as a message of despair which if anything makes the problem you're complaining about worse.
You said the two choices we have are democratic process and revolution.
You then complained that I'm not being clear about the alternative, which is fair.
However, I'd like first to name the options correctly. Do you still stand by the name "democratic process" in the face of the paper linked above and if so, what is your rationale for calling this "democratic" when the paper shows that most people cannot impact the system? Or maybe you have a refutation to the paper that can show that in fact people do impact the government a lot and the paper is wrong.
Because you see, sine qua non to the process of proposing an alternative is understanding why the status quo is flawed. And in my opinion, which is argued with evidence by the paper linked above, the flaw in the current system is that it is not democratic despite its name; it is oligarchical.
"Geez, I already paid for route 284 and Interstate 99. Do I have to pay a separate weekend surcharge for the 1000-feet onramp? I mean, come on!"
OK, not exactly a reaction on people's deaths, but people react to deaths in a more or less similar way whether it's on a government-managed railway or privately operated 747...
The payment system is a completely separate discussion, and not one at all relevant to my point. I disagree with your claim that the reactions are similar. It's my impression that the reactions to the dangers of public road systems is not remotely close to the reactions toward the dangers of private transportation systems, especially when normalized for the scale of the dangers.
Many States deflect criticisms of for profit lotteries by advertising that some of the proceeds go toward schools and other 'public' goods.
It is well known that lotteries pray upon the poor and uneducated, ironic really.
Instead of monopolizing gambling, or giving sweet-heart deals to those close to the government, or trying to outlaw it completely so we can see tragedies like cops shooting people over playing fantasy sports, the state should get out of the way, maybe provide counseling and treatment, and gasp let people do what they want with their property.
It's always about power, and ensuring most people don't have any.
Humans have weaknesses that can be abused. This is clearly the case in gambling. The government must protect in some areas. For example with financial advice, there are countless cases of people giving inappropriate financial advice to the elderly, even getting them to sign away their property while dying in hospitals. Sure it easy to say 'and gasp let people do what they want with their property'. But what about this scenario? Would you be OK if that was your relatives being manipulated on their deathbed to give money to a previous stranger cause it is what they want to do with their property at that moment in their life. Or, back to gambling, is it fair on the children of the father/mother who gamble away their pay check each month leaving the family destitute?
Above is more extreme but real examples to clarify a point. In my mind saying people can do what they want with their property is overly simplistic and assumes a more perfect world than the reality.
>Or, back to gambling, is it fair on the children of the father/mother who gamble away their pay check each month leaving the family destitute?
However bad it might be to prey on people by trying to trick them into gambling, it's a trillion times better than just taking their money (the other way of raising revenues).
> and gasp let people do what they want with their property.
Are you so out of ideas on how to actually defend your positions that you have to pretend that anyone who disagrees with you is an idiotic child? Because everyone can do that, and it doesn't get us anywhere. We just go round and round being condescending to each other and nothing really gets said.
It's annoying and stupid. Let's stop this right here.
Is anyone else horrified by that demographics chart? The "income" pie chart has a line that splits it almost perfectly in half, yet one side contains 61% and the other 39%. The 24% piece is clearly way over 1/4, and the 25% way under. Are they drawing these by hand?
The conclusion that a lower payout means more money for the lottery and less for the players is wrong. If a player receives a lower payout than expected either through bad luck or cheating on the part of the video machine they are more likely to stop playing. There is an online gambling company here in the UK who strive to maintain a 95% payout across all their games because it is deemed the most profitable long term strategy. The chances are that a higher payout for video poker will result in higher earnings for the lottery company which means there is a possibility that the auto hold behaviour is as a result of lazy programming rather than deliberate maliciousness.
Yeah, they just have to keep you there long enough to get all the money you are willing to gamble with. Changing the odds a few percentage points one way or the other won't make any difference. The only reason the house needs an edge at all is to discourage investors with huge bankrolls.
What if they claimed and displayed 95% payout, but actually only paid out 92%? Don't you think that would be more profitable? Because that is basically what they're claiming is happening here. Do you think enough people will keep track of their winnings for long enough to catch the discrepancy?
That's hard to say. In the case in the article, the machine is obviously mis-leading players by suggesting a less than optimal strategy. At the same time, if the manufacturer of the machine wanted to lower the payout without indicating anything to the player, they could simply adjust the probabilities of the cards as they are dealt (I assume that is how most video poker machines work anyway). I don't believe that individual players will have any idea whether or not they are receiving the advertised payout, they can only respond the the outcome of the game. Gambling companies do often advertise high payouts but I suspect this is only attracts new players while the real odds affect how long the players continue to play.
if the manufacturer of the machine wanted to lower the payout without indicating anything to the player, they could simply adjust the probabilities of the cards as they are dealt
Having a different payout than the advertised one is definitely illegal in the US. What Oregon seems to have done is to find a neat loophole to get around that law.
(I assume that is how most video poker machines work anyway)
At least based on how I understand the law, you cannot tinker with the randomness of how the cards are dealt. The only thing you can use to alter payout percentages is alter the actual payout amounts for different events.
Do the machines' operator in the UK need to be competitive? How about in Oregon? I am sure question 1 is Yes. Just from reading the article, I guess only the State Lottery can run machines in Oregon.
There's plenty of evidence that gaming machines in the UK are set to far lower than a 95% payout, namely that each machine displays this percentage on it, and they are almost always below 95%
The people installing these machines aren't fools, they know that lowering the payouts increases their profits.
I would guess there is a difference between the effect of various payout percentages in online games vs physical machine games. I would assume online players tend to have more time to spend playing on average which gives them more time to hit their spending limit.
I would love to give a source for the 95% figure but I only have that info second-hand from an ex-employee.
Regardless of whether or not you believe that statement, you should see that the logic that lower payout ratio equals a lower payout amount simply doesn't hold. Imagine if the payout turned out to be 50% rather than 90%. Would you expect the company make more or less money? Even if players believe they were simply unlucky, that will still be enough for some of them to stop playing. The optimal payout in terms of revenue for the company is something that can only be determined by real world experiments and there is no evidence in the article about this case that the lottery company determined that an advertised payout of 90% and an actual payout of 87% by experimental analysis. Hence my tendency to believe this was not an act of deliberate deception.
tl;dr: Oregon poker machines advise players to make moves that favour the house, and couple those with an autoplay feature that accepts house recommendations - recommendations that are inherently unfair to the player. At least, this is what the lawsuit alleges....
You don't have to qualify that with "At least, this is what the lawsuit alleges".
The lottery is not disputing they make recommendations that are not optimal for the player. The question is are they obligated to give the best advice?
I recently attended a talk by the team that approximately solved the two player head's-up limit hold'em variant of poker. Their strategy is close enough to optimal that a perfectly exploiting opponent would take millions of played hands to expect to extract 1 big blind's worth of value.
The Oregon lottery should be held to a qualitatively similar standard. They should state how many cents an optimal player would expect to lose, per hand, by following the default advice instead of playing optimally. Also, there should be regulations about how high that opportunity cost can be.
... not that I think the machines are a good idea in the first place.
They are obligated to display the odds on each machine, so people have at least a fair chance of evaluating their changes (even if they odds are always in the house's favor). In this case, the odds they posted didn't take into account the poor suggestions given by the autoplay feature.
So the question is, does the fact that the player has a choice that would allow them to improve their odds to what was posted mean that they met their obligation in posting the odds, or does an autoplay feature that most users choose, because it speeds up the game and requires less thought, determine the odds that they are statutorily required to post.
The rules (http://arcweb.sos.state.or.us/pages/rules/oars_100/oar_177/1...) state: "A close approximation of the odds of winning some prize for each game must be displayed on a Video LotterySM game terminal screen or a help screen. Each game also must display the amount wagered and the amount awarded for each possible winning occurrence based on the number of credits wagered on a game play." So this will likely depend on whether this is determined to be a close enough approximation, and whether autoplay suggesting a sub-optimal play that reduces your odds is considered to be a problem, if you do have a choice that would let you avoid that.
> The question is are they obligated to give the best advice?
I didn't get this from the article.
I understood the issue to be:
1. It is undisputed that the lottery is required to display odds (return $$s per $$s spent).
2. It is undisputed that the lottery displays the theoretical maximum return given optimal play
3. The lottery supports a feature that does not play optimally
4. The issue: Should the lottery be required to display the rate of return given the use of auto-play?
I feel like government-run ventures are obligated to not try to intentionally mislead me. If this is incompatible with gambling machines, then the entire venture seems unethical. Well, I won't beat around the bush, I already think government running gambling machines is incredibly unethical for a number of reasons, so the fact that they also have intentionally shitty defaults and misleading instructions is just more proof to me.
I think no. Video games traditionally give tips - these are designed to help out players who aren't sure what to do. They are not designed to be the best possible move.
If the game autoplayed the best possible moves, what would be the point of learning poker? Where would skill come into the mix?
This lawsuit seems frivolous to me. I would never expect a game to give me the most optimal hint - only a hint for how to get closer to winning.
The way to give helpful tips, as opposed to best possible moves, is to be more vague, not to recommend a specific less-than-optimal move. Imprecise help like "hold onto your high cards" or "don't gamble on drawing one particular rank" could work, but if the Auto-Hold feature is advertised as a faster way to hold onto an optimal set of cards, then that's what it should be.
The guy's in software but then he acts dumbstruck that the machine wouldn't tell him the optimal move? Wouldn't you be happy if there was at least some player skill involved which would contribute over time help you lose less.
That's not usually the social contract in gambling. The house usually goes out of its way to make sure you know the technically correct play (i.e. the one that 9 out of 10 experienced players would make). These are meant to be games of chance, not games of skill. At least at the level that you would never draw to an inside straight, if given the option not to -- that's just dumb. As others have mentioned, there are times you might turn in a winning hand in hopes of drawing a royal flush, since so much of the return is in the jackpot -- that's less clear-cut, and I wouldn't expect a video poker machine to make the jackpot-seeking recommendation, since it's not how you would play in a 5-card draw table game.
My understanding is that state lotteries were initially justified as means of putting criminal numbers rackets out of business. People were going to play one way or the other, so give them an honest game and stop funding hoodlums. That makes sense.
But there is no justification for state lotteries as revenue raising streams, nor for behavior maximizing those revenues. They shouldn't advertise and shouldn't be creating new games to increase their take. These are just taxes on mathematical illiteracy and risk factors for people with gambling problems.
Of course, the revenues are more important to the politicians than the general interest, so here we are.
I avoid most video machines, but an anecdote from some time I spend in Helsinki in the early 2000s while working for a company there.
Gambling, in a sense, appeared to be legal in Finland. In Helsinki there was one Vegas style casino (similar odds, $10 minimum -- memory serving me right); but many bars had 21 tables. The trip in the "bars" was a tie was not a push, but went to the house.
Given I was a loner in a country known for it's lack of gregariousness (a stereotype, I had friend's there, but many focused on family and those outside the city didn't come in during the week), playing the odds was an interesting gambit.
Giving up the natural odds in a tie is a push for 21 was a hard one to digest. However, I offset some of it by always taking the #1 position. Not ideal overall, but a help.
In the end, after 6 months there, tabulating pure gambling stakes, I ended up a net positive by about 15%.
On my return to the US, my first trip was with friends to Vegas. My skewed methodology of playing, assume no tie, for 21, permeated my game for the first few hours. It resulted in unhappy players, but saw a slight uptick in my own earnings.
I wish I had the time and energy to more fully document this period, but playing games that expect one skew and then coming into another that expects something else, at least for me for awhile was a benefit.
I see a lot of comments here about suboptimal play. These are missing an important point.
The machine is not playing poker. The machine is presenting a game that superficially resembles poker, to achieve a slot machine payout rate of 90%.
As a slot machine, it is a game of chance, not skill. If the actual payout of a machine advertised as 90% is 85%, that is fraudulently advertised odds, period.
So the lottery posts a notice on the machine that user interactivity may reduce the odds of winning. Relying on that information, everyone just hitting the "play" button like a robot--treating this particular type of slot machine like a regular, non-interactive slot machine--should realize the posted odds.
They did not. The owner of the machine was aware of this. The Lottery made false statements to its customers, harming them by its deception and profiting in the process. That's fraud.
It is true that the Auto-Hold function does not need to recommend the optimal Draw Poker play. IT MUST RECOMMEND THE PLAY THAT ACHIEVES THE ADVERTISED SLOT MACHINE PAYOUT.
OPTIMAL strategy for video poker is hard. (assuming standard 9/6 JoB paytable)
For example, what do you hold with
(1) AH QH TH JD 3H
vs
(2) AH QH TH 9D 3H
On (1), you hold the 4-flush.
On (2), you go for the 3 card royal. (Reason: Discarding the jack makes it slightly less likely to draw the straight, tipping the otherwise close decision to favor the 4-flush.)
In the article, the machine was advising plays anyone with basic competence would never make.
Optimal strategy for a given hand isn't that hard to calculate, either. There are 32 choices of how to hold. 5 of them have 46 possible outcomes, 10 have 2070 possible outcomes, and the remaining can be looked up in a table with less than 13.5k entries.
That is the kind of distinction Alenn Kessler would make! I wouldn't expect the 'auto-hold' feature to allow everyone to play mathematically perfectly, but I would expect it to automate routine decisions for speed. Giving advice that halves a players % to win is disgusting.
I don't think "advising" is the best description of what happens. The players do not have to select which cards to turn in based on the "advice". That is done for them.
This is completely unacceptable, but the State will probably get away with it.
If the study he found showed the machines paid out _more_ than it should (but still positive to the State) you bet there would be audits of the machine.
Don't even understand how this is an article, they flat out have a disclaimer:
> Auto-hold strategies vary by game, based on the particular features of a game and do not necessarily result in theoretical payouts
On smart phone games auto is often not the best strategy, just the easiest (Summoner's War with 30 million downloads, I'm looking at you).
Sounds like the guy was just ignorant and thought auto was something it was specifically declaimed not to be. If it was labeled "Best" I might feel something for him.
... Or the guy was just like so many average humans and assumed that the machine was doing something more than randomly picking cards to hold. If the machine said it was auto-picking the worst cards, we'd all be mad. If the machine said it was randomly picking the cards, we'd all be surprised: why even do that? Who does it help? Therefore, from an implicatures pov, the only reason for the machine to pick cards (or "suggest" cards) is to recommend a good hand. Since the computer can often pick the best hand, why would we not assume that it's doing so, to give us mere humans "a fighting chance", so to speak? Why should we assume that it's not picking the computably best cards to hold, other than our belief that the machine "cheats"? And that's what the article examines.
I don't think it's ignorance on our gambler's part; I think it's the standard "Black Hat UI" issue mentioned on HN so often: We assume that sw does somethign to maximize utility for the user, based on the design or experience, when it's instead doing something to maximize profit for some other entity.
Yes, it's a gambling machine; we all understand that it's designed to take our money. But offering a feature as part of the experience that appears to help when it doesn't (or to a lesser degree than would be expected via presentation), would be deemed misleading by any reasonable person, small print and disclaimers aside.
I'm waiting for "quick pick" lotto draws to be reviled as not actually random but the machine picks numbers least likely to win because they recently won.
You'd like to think they're independent and fair, but thats kind of the whole point of the article.
To quote the state director in the article “I don’t think we’ve ever represented that the auto-hold gives you the optimal result,” he says. “The idea was that it gives you a good result.”
You'll get a perfectly good result if the lotto balls are loaded. Might not be optimal, might not be random, but it'll be a good result, as in not some random negative integer or a float or wrong number of balls.
I agree with you that lottery might make lotto draws unfair. For example, they see in advance which combination of numbers is NOT played and somehow they cheat and draw exactely that numbers. Lottery can do that for several weeks in a row, thus making the prize pool bigger and bigger and atmosphere between players hotter and hotter. As a side bonus, lottery can use fresh cash (from stakes) for several weeks at 0% interest rate.
But, can they really do it? Manipulating lotto balls and drum (mechanical devices really) is much harder than manipulating software behind some video poker game. I don't say it's impossible, but harder.
The Oregon commission is clearly in the wrong but I'm not sure determining the losses is very straightforward. I'm guessing the lower payouts mostly result in more time spent at the machines with nearly the same losses.
I was developing online gambling games for 6 years and I'm totally on Justin Curzi's side here. Oh, and if anyone's interested in how those games are made feel free to AMA.
And finding documents marked "confidential" that say the machine has a certain winning percentage means nothing. You cannot say that a confidential document that was unknown to gamblers before Cruzi obtained it from a public records request mislead anyone. If people do not know about a document there is no way it can mislead them.
Since the article is quiet on the two questions listed above it seems very likely that their answer is "no". In that case that Cruzi person, as glamorous as the article makes him, probably has no case. If the machine is not required by law or by previous advertisement to give out a certain percentage, I do not see how the fact that the advice it gives results in a lesser percentage than other possible advice is at all relevant.