Worried About Blowing Your Cover?

In a recent Gambling with an Edge episode, Richard Munchkin and I were interviewing “Math Boy,” a Ph. D. in mathematics who for years used that knowledge to beat casinos. Math Boy told of the time in 2003 or 2004 when he met me despite his best intentions.

Math Boy wanted to stay “low profile” to other Advantage Players (or APs). The reason for this was that if he was playing a game, he didn’t want the rest of us to closely check out what he was playing and maybe decide that if Math Boy thought it was a good play, then maybe we should sit down too.

I understand this desire for anonymity, but since tens of thousands of people have attended one or more of my classes, any desire that I personally have for this kind of invisibility has long since vanished.

I have no recollection of this event, but I believe Math Boy’s version of the events. What he claims I said sounds very much like something I would say. I was playing Deuces Wild on the long-gone $1 Ten Play NSU machines at Harrah’s New Orleans. There was a lady sitting next to me, Math Boy’s wife, that I’d never seen before. Very likely there was no communication between us. I usually play quietly and concentrate on the game. Since I didn’t know the woman, there wouldn’t have been a friendship issue that could have sparked some conversation.

Math Boy recognized me and wanted to get his wife away from me without me taking any notice of him. He told his wife that he was hungry for lunch and wanted to go to the buffet. She told him that they would be serving breakfast for another half hour and then they could go to lunch.

Math Boy responded that if they went right then, they could get in for the breakfast price and after a few minutes they’d put out the lunch food which they could eat while paying the lesser price. Although it had nothing to do with me, Math Boy said I piped up and said: “That sounds like an advantage play to me!”

Math Boy went away cursing himself. He figured he had outed himself and that I then knew he was an AP. For the last 15 years or so he has believed that I have known who he is and have been on the lookout for him to find out what he’s up to.

He’s been worried about nothing.

Although I use the same timing ploy sometimes to get buffets for a lesser price, that is hardly evidence that somebody has all the skills to successfully exploit casinos. This is a fairly elementary move that many, many people know about. I probably didn’t even look to see who made the comment because it certainly wouldn’t have told me this penny pincher for lunch was knowledgeable gambling-wise. Or even if he were knowledgeable, he might well play for different stakes, or even play a different game.

If he played, for example, $5 15-9-4-4-3 Deuces Wild, which pays 0.8% less than NSU, I would have ignored him. At that time, I didn’t know that this “lesser” game had a MUCH higher theoretical, on some of the machines anyway, and you’d receive MUCH bigger mailers if you played it. There were possibly other players in the casino that day whose presence at that machine would have caused me to sit up and take notice. But not Math Boy, as he was “invisible” to me.

Sometime a few years later, another player I respected told me about the difference in theoretical. Possibly Math Boy knew this at the time, and possibly he played that game that day, but I need far more evidence than being frugal at the buffet to realize that he might know about the theoretical of the various games.

Apparently, though, Math Boy fretted about this event for many years. Too bad. Still, a lot of us regularly take precautions because we never know when somebody else is paying close attention. Better to take precautions when it doesn’t turn out to be necessary than to fail to take precautions when it actually does matter.

Author’s note: I sent a copy of this to Math Boy and asked if he wished to comment on it. His response was:

Sounds good. Only I live in a stochastic universe. I wouldn’t say I fretted about it for years. Or that I was sure I outed myself. I knew there was a probability that I might have outed myself. I’ve seen you a few times over the years and you’ve never looked at me with recognition. So the probability went from perhaps 20% down close to 0% over about a year.

Good. I’m glad he didn’t fret about it. Still, since this type of thing applies to a lot of situations and there just might be a lesson there for some players, I decided to leave it as written.