Whatever you think of gambling, its regulations are mesmerizing. Gambling is outlawed in one way or another in all 50 states, but almost all — except Hawaii (surprisingly) and Utah (less so) — have exceptions. Most offer state-run lotteries. Thirty allow Indian casinos. Seventeen have full-scale non-Indian casinos (New York and Massachusetts are poised to join that group.) In each case, government officials limit the number of casinos and determine where they will be located. … Economically speaking, these anticasino regulations are the single greatest profit generator for casino operators. By limiting the number and location, and therefore artificially keeping the market underserved, governments essentially guarantee outsize profits for those in business. (The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, which limits cab licenses, ensures a similar regulatory oligopoly, as do many state liquor-distribution regulators.) If there were unlimited licenses, each casino operator would have to compete — like every restaurant or movie theater — with all the others.

Despite a slowdown in China, the world's largest gaming center is doubling down on its future. ... Barely 10 years ago, Francis Lui and his family were building a relatively modest fortune largely from quarrying rock in Hong Kong and processing slag from blast furnaces on mainland China. Today, in the Chinese enclave of Macau, they preside over two palatial casinos that alone generate vastly more gaming revenue than the entire Las Vegas Strip. They're also acquiring a stake in the Monaco royal family-controlled company that operates the Casino de Monte-Carlo. ... the soft-spoken, U.S.-educated billionaire is in the process of placing a far bigger bet than any of the high rollers who wager as much as $250,000 a hand in the Galaxy’s most exclusive VIP rooms. Having just spent $3.1 billion doubling the size of the Galaxy, he’s now pressing ahead with another $7.4 billion worth of investments. And that’s just a part of the $27 billion that global casino companies such as Las Vegas Sands, Wynn Resorts, and MGM Resorts International plan to spend over the next few years in the world’s largest but most-troubled gaming market. ... Macau’s gaming revenue plummeted 37 percent to $15.2 billion in the first half of the year. During the 18 months ended in June, the decline wiped more than $100 billion from the value of six of the world’s biggest casino companies. ... Macau’s fate may be tied to developments on Hengqin, an island triple its size that’s located across a narrow strait. Galaxy is the first of Macau’s six casino licensees to acquire land on Hengqin, which is part of Guangdong province and which Beijing wants to develop into a nongaming leisure destination full of golf courses, Disney-esque theme parks, and other family-focused attractions. ... It all sounds like a pharaonic exercise in overbuilding. And yet tiny Macau, with only 27,000 hotel rooms, compared with Las Vegas’s 150,000, attracted 31.5 million visitors last year, two-thirds of them from the mainland and many of them day-trippers. The new construction aims to add 19,000 more rooms by 2018.

Most cities exist as a consequence of commercial or strategic utility. Atlantic City is more of a proposition and a ploy. The town fathers of Cape May, the first American seaside resort, weren’t interested in a railway, or perhaps the class of people who’d ride in on one—the well-to-do arrived from Philadelphia by boat—so a group of investors built, in 1854, what became known as a “railroad to nowhere,” to a spot a little way up the coast that was more or less the shortest possible distance from Philadelphia to the sea. Over the decades, and with the industrial-era advent of leisure time and disposable income, this forsaken wedge of salt marsh and sand became “the world’s playground”—a crucible of conspicuous consumption and a stage for the aspirations and masquerades of visitors and entrepreneurs. In some respects, Atlantic City was where America learned how to turn idle entertainment into big business. For a while, it was home to some of the world’s grandest hotels (the Marlborough-Blenheim was the largest reinforced-concrete building in the world, and was later imploded in the music video for Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City”), as well as some of its more ardent iniquities and diversions. The night clubs were as often as not fronts for backroom gambling halls, intermittently tolerated by the authorities. ... Legalized gambling was supposed to rescue the city from its obsolescence as a resort and convention town ... When word gets out that a city is on the skids, people seem eager to imagine post-apocalyptic desolation, a rusting ruin at Ozymandian remove from the glory days. But American cities don’t seem to die that way. They keep sopping up tax dollars and risk capital, thwarting big ideas and emergency relief, chewing up opportunists and champions. ... “We will keep it in litigation for years. No one will get Revel.”

If everyone believes it’s a bargain, how can it not have been bought up by the crowd and had its price lifted to non-bargain status as a result? You and I know the things all investors find desirable are unlikely to represent good investment opportunities. But aren’t most bubbles driven by the belief that they do? ... Logically speaking, the bargains that everyone has come to believe in can’t still be bargains . . . but that doesn’t stop people from falling in love with them nevertheless. Yogi was right in indirectly highlighting the illogicality of “common knowledge.” As long as people’s reactions to things fail to be reasonable and measured, the spoils will go to those who are able to recognize this contradiction. ... Smart fantasy football participants understand that the goal isn’t to acquire the best players, or players with the lowest absolute price tags, but players whose “salaries” understate their merit – those who are underpriced relative to their potential and might amass more points in the next game than the cost to draft them reflects. Likewise, smart investors know the goal isn’t to find the best companies, or stocks with the lowest absolute dollar prices or p/e ratios, but the ones whose potential isn’t fully reflected in their price. In both of these competitive arenas, the prize goes to those who see value others miss. ... rather than judge a decision solely on the basis of the outcome, you have to consider (a) the quality of the process that led to the decision, (b) the a priori probability that the decision would work (which is very different from the question of whether it did work), (c) the other decisions that could have been made, (d) all of the events that reasonably could have unfolded, and thus (e) which of the decisions had the highest probability of success.

For years, Phua has navigated the globe in an ultra-long-range business jet, its tail designation -- N888XS -- a nod to the Chinese belief in lucky number eight and the overindulgence that often accompanies a gambling windfall. With billions of dollars reportedly at hand, Phua has erected a gaming empire, touching down in Hong Kong, Las Vegas, London, Melbourne and anyplace in between where there are casinos, nosebleed poker games and gamblers ready to place max bets on the world's most lucrative sporting events. ... an unassuming 51-year-old Malaysian and the reputed principal owner of the world's largest sportsbook, IBCBet. ... What follows is the story of Phua's rise from a Borneo numbers runner to the biggest bookie around -- as well as the most powerful figure in poker. And how the FBI finally hooked him, only to watch him walk away a free man. ... According to trade estimates, IBCBet handles roughly $60 billion of betting per year. With a 1 percent take, the book clears $600 million annually. An IBCBet source in Manila says Phua owns 70 percent of the enterprise. ... By 2013, Macau's annual gaming revenue had grown to more than $45 billion. This growth -- which Adelson and Wynn publicly fronted -- was propelled in part by Phua, who for the moment remained unknown to those located anywhere but at the center of the industry.

One study concludes over 20 first-round pro tennis matches are fixed every year. Why? Because it's almost too easy to throw a match. ... The bookies knew something was up. Eleven bettors, nine of them based in Russia, had just put millions of dollars via the English sportsbook Betfair on Martin Vassallo Arguello beating Nikolay Davydenko in their match at the Orange Prokrom Open in Sopot, Poland on August 2, 2007. The wagers, which pushed the total betting volume to 10 times past average, came in after Arguello, ranked 87th in the world, had dropped the first set 6-2 to Davydenko, ranked 4th in the world. Davydenko eventually retired from the match in the third set, citing a stress fracture in his left foot. ... If the fix was in, no one was bothering to cover their tracks. ... Tennis is the third-most bet upon sport in the world and, between the ATP and the Women’s Tennis Association, there are 126 tournaments making up this year’s tour. The sheer volume of betting and matches makes spotting suspicious activity virtually impossible in all but the most obvious and reckless cases. ... Then there’s the sport’s inherent vulnerability to “spot fixing.” European sportsbooks allow bettors to wager on not just matches, but sets, games, and even individual points. ... Travel expenses alone can cost a tour player more than $100,000 per year, and a full-time coach starts at around $50,000 per year.

Secret files exposing evidence of widespread match-fixing by players at the upper level of world tennis can today be revealed by BuzzFeed News and the BBC. ... It has been seven years since world tennis authorities were first handed compelling evidence about a network of players suspected of fixing matches at major tournaments including Wimbledon following a landmark investigation, but all of them have been allowed to continue playing. ... The investigation into men’s tennis by BuzzFeed News and the BBC is based on a cache of leaked documents from inside the sport – the Fixing Files – as well as an original analysis of the betting activity on 26,000 matches and interviews across three continents with gambling and match-fixing experts, tennis officials, and players. ... Players are being targeted in hotel rooms at major tournaments and offered $50,000 or more per fix by corrupt gamblers. ... as the 2016 Grand Slam season begins on Monday with the Australian Open, former integrity chiefs from within world tennis are breaking ranks to accuse the sport of failing to stamp out match-fixing.

Most gamblers were still asleep, and the gondoliers had yet to pole their way down the ersatz canal in front of the Venetian casino on the Las Vegas Strip. But early on the chilly morning of Feb. 10, just above the casino floor, the offices of the world’s largest gaming company were gripped by chaos. Computers were flatlining, e-mail was down, most phones didn’t work, and several of the technology systems that help run the $14 billion operation had sputtered to a halt. ... Computer engineers at Las Vegas Sands Corp. (LVS) raced to figure out what was happening. Within an hour, they had a diagnosis: Sands was under a withering cyber attack. PCs and servers were shutting down in a cascading IT catastrophe, with many of their hard drives wiped clean. The company’s technical staff had never seen anything like it. ... The people who make the company work, from accountants to marketing managers, were staring at blank screens. “Hundreds of people were calling IT to tell them their computers weren’t working,” says James Pfeiffer, who worked in Sands’ risk-management department in Las Vegas at the time. Most people, he recalls, switched over to their cell phones and personal e-mail accounts to communicate with co-workers. Numerous systems were felled, including those that run the loyalty rewards plans for Sands customers; programs that monitor the performance and payout of slot machines and table games at Sands’ U.S. casinos; and a multimillion-dollar storage system. ... In an effort to save as many machines as they could, IT staffers scrambled across the casino floors of Sands’ Vegas properties—the Venetian and its sister hotel, the Palazzo—ripping network cords out of every functioning computer they could find, including PCs used by pit bosses to track gamblers and kiosks where slots players cash in their tickets. ... This was no Ocean’s Eleven. The hackers were not trying to empty a vault of cash, nor were they after customer credit card data, as in recent attacks on Target (TGT), Neiman Marcus, and Home Depot (HD). This was personal. The perpetrators wanted to punish the company, or, more precisely, its chief executive officer and majority owner, the billionaire Sheldon Adelson. Although confirming their conjectures would take some time, executives suspected almost immediately the assault was coming from Iran.

The video game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, in which players form teams of terrorists and counterinsurgents and shoot at one another, is a favorite of the professional e-sports circuit. A tournament in early April sold out Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio, where the NHL’s Blue Jackets play, and generated 71 million online views over four days. In May, TBS and WME/IMG will launch their own league for CS:GO, as the game is called, streaming games online and broadcasting them on TV on Friday nights. ... The game’s current success has made it easy to forget that CS:GO wasn’t an immediate hit for game maker Valve. It was the latest in the aging Counter-Strike series and came out at a time when there was no shortage of other shoot-’em-up games to choose from. Everything changed when Valve introduced something new: decorative virtual weapons, known as “skins,” that could be acquired in the game and sold for real money. ... In-game purchases weren’t new, but the cash trade was Valve’s special twist. Within two years, the number of people playing CS:GO had grown 1,500 percent. Today, there are 380,000 people around the world playing the game at any given time. ... People buy skins for cash, then use the skins to place online bets on pro CS:GO matches. Because there’s a liquid market to convert each gun or knife back into cash, laying a bet in skins is essentially the same as betting with real money. ... By one estimate, more than 3 million people wagered $2.3 billion worth of skins on the outcome of e-sports matches in 2015. ... The best way to get players deeply engaged in games, the company had determined, was to give away virtual items of random value and encourage a robust market to trade them.

Grosjean specializes in finding vulnerable games like the one in Shawnee. He uses his programming skills to divine the odds in various situations and then develops strategies for exploiting them. Only two questions seemed to temper his confidence in taking on this particular game. How long would they be allowed to play before being asked to leave? How much money would they be able to win? ... Many casino executives despise gamblers like Grosjean. They accuse him of cheating. Yet what he does is entirely legal. ... because regulated casino gambling now takes place in at least 40 states, casinos compete for customers in part by introducing new games, some of which turn out to be vulnerable. ... Common advantage-play techniques include “hole carding,” in which sharp-eyed players profit from careless dealers who unwittingly reveal tiny portions of the cards; “shuffle tracking,” or memorizing strings of cards in order to predict when specific cards will be dealt after they are next shuffled; and counting systems that monitor already dealt cards in order to estimate the value of those that remain in the deck. ... Teams of advantage players — which usually require one person to bet and another to spot dealers’ hole cards (those turned down and not supposed to be seen), track shuffles or count cards — have become so prevalent that they often find themselves in the same casino, at the same time, targeting the same game.

Mercier did some quick arithmetic. He figured if he wanted to sit out and not play the last two hours of the NLHE tournament, he’d need about 40,000 chips to survive all the blinds and antes he’d forfeit. He was given 15,000 chips when he entered. If he could turn his 15,000 chips into 40,000, he could leave this tournament and go play the Pot-Limit Omaha and the Triple Omaha events in the Amazon Room simultaneously and know he had enough chips to play the second day of the NLHE. He had done this before, but only online, where it was possible for him to play in 10 tournaments at once. This wasn’t online. This was real life. To pull this off — three high-stakes tournaments at once — it would require more than just spinning up his stack and sprinting down the hall. It would require his brain to work on overdrive. He’d need discipline, focus, and a reliance on instincts he’d never tapped before. It didn’t really matter how hard or stupid it was. He had no choice. And he had 40 minutes — no, now 39 — to make it happen.

At its peak last summer, a daily fantasy get-rich-now commercial aired every 90 seconds on television. Combined, industry leaders FanDuel and DraftKings plunged more than $750 million into TV commercials, radio spots, digital ads and other promotions. In the weeks leading up to the 2015 NFL season, the two startup companies spent more on advertising than the entire American beer industry. ... Daily fantasy's meteoric rise -- breathtaking for its breakneck speed, avalanche of investors' cash and ever-spiraling valuations -- spurred the two companies' endlessly annoying, record-shattering arms race for new customers and industry dominance. ... The two companies processed a combined $3 billion in player-entry fees in 2015. ... as quickly as it boomed, the industry bottomed. One year after their headiest moments, FanDuel and DraftKings are still not profitable. Both privately held companies' valuations have been sliced -- by more than half, according to some estimates. The companies have hemorrhaged tens of millions of dollars in legal and lobbying expenses. (DraftKings' attorneys fees once ran as high as $1 million per week.) And the fog bank of the industry's uncertain future has made it nearly impossible for either company to raise new money.

Salerno is up against many things — startup costs, consumer whims, a complicated and inefficient regulatory apparatus — but most immediately, he’s up against FanDuel and DraftKings, behemoths that have dominated the industry for the past half-dozen years. You know them because you’re one of the millions of customers who assemble football or baseball lineups on their sites, hoping to score payouts worth hundreds or thousands, maybe even millions. ... Or perhaps you’ve followed the regulatory crackdown that, since last October, has driven the industry to the brink of extinction. Like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb, other self-described disruptors that operated in legal gray zones and got in trouble, daily fantasy sports companies are now at a major moment of reckoning. ... Salerno thinks he’s come up with a daily fantasy game that does right by everyone. In his model, customers wager in a style that resembles horse-race betting, one already legal in most of the country. If Salerno is successful, he’ll have not only staked out profitable territory in the high-risk, legally ambiguous, crowded, and very, very lucrative world of daily fantasy sports, he’ll have invented a fairer — and, crucially, more legal — way to play the game, showing two of the world’s hottest startups that it pays to play by the rules. ... He was among the first operators to allow people to place bets over the phone. In 1984, he co-developed hardware and software that let patrons trade their betting slips for computer-generated tickets and cashiers instantly look up every bet and payout; the first-of-its-kind system became a virtual monopoly across Vegas when Nevada required all race and sports books to be computerized. In 2002, Salerno developed one of the first self-service kiosks where gamblers could place sports bets 24 hours a day.

Scientists are beginning to understand why these ‘mini Wall Streets’ work so well at forecasting election results — and how they sometimes fail. ... Experiments such as this are a testament to the power of prediction markets to turn individuals’ guesses into forecasts of sometimes startling accuracy. That uncanny ability ensures that during every US presidential election, voters avidly follow the standings for their favoured candidates on exchanges such as Betfair and the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM). But prediction markets are increasingly being used to make forecasts of all kinds, on everything from the outcomes of sporting events to the results of business decisions. Advocates maintain that they allow people to aggregate information without the biases that plague traditional forecasting methods, such as polls or expert analysis. ... sceptics point out that prediction markets are far from infallible. ... prediction-market supporters argue that even imperfect forecasts can be helpful. ... People have been betting on future events for as long as they have played sports and raced horses. But in the latter half of the nineteenth century, US efforts to set betting odds through marketplace supply and demand became centralized on Wall Street, where wealthy New York City businessmen and entertainers were using informal markets to bet on US elections as far back as 1868. ... Friedrich Hayek. He argued that markets in general could be viewed as mechanisms for collecting vast amounts of information held by individuals and synthesizing it into a useful data point — namely the price that people are willing to pay for goods or services.

Carleo wasn't without models for how a man might get ahead in life. "My father, my stepfather, my uncle – they all had money. Nice suits, nice cars, nice houses," Carleo says. "But they all worked hard to get it. Me, I didn't have time for that. I was too impatient." ... Eventually he began plowing all his money into buying up rental properties, signing for loans with balloon payments that would kick in after a couple of years. When the financial crisis hit, Carleo was left holding the bag on a series of underwater mortgages. Now deeply in debt, he was forced to sell his own house and let the properties go into foreclosure. In May of 2009 he filed for bankruptcy. A few months later Carleo scraped together $30,000 by liquidating what remained of his possessions and made the 12-hour drive to Vegas to start his new life. ... By robbing the Bellagio, Carleo had achieved something he hadn't been able to do in a decade of striving – he had made himself a millionaire. But, because he had stolen chips instead of cash, he was really only a millionaire inside the Bellagio casino. He would have to park his car in the casino's garage, ride the casino's elevator and walk the casino's marble floors under the watchful eyes of thousands of cameras. He would have to hand the casino's chips to the casino's cashiers and hope that they would give him money rather than call the police. And because trying to redeem too many chips at once might bring unwanted attention, he would have to do it over and over again.

If in his public life Hanson gave the impression of an ambitious young man who worshipped money and emulated pro athletes, his downfall as a kingpin, to judge from court records, stems from a need to develop a more sinister self-image, building his empire through ruthless intimidation, paid beat downs and baroque death threats. In his criminal shadow life, he even went so far as to adopt an alias befitting a mafia don. … The story of how Robert Cipriani became entangled with Owen Hanson – the story, that is, of how a vigilante gambler unwittingly helped bring down a USC athlete turned accused crime boss – can be appreciated from any number of angles: as a clash of misguided egos, a glimpse into the turbulent psyches of former athletes or as a cautionary tale, quintessentially American, about what can happen to a certain breed of individual bent on chasing the sort of dreams that burn especially bright in places like Las Vegas and Los Angeles. It begins, however, in Sydney, where back in 2011 Hanson, inhabiting his alter ego as DeLuca, showed up at Cipriani's room at the Four Seasons with $2.5 million in Australian dollars (worth $2.7 million in U.S. dollars at the time) stuffed into suitcases. ... Hanson was a member of Beta Theta Pi, a fraternity that was banned from pledging on campus. They briefly reformed as an underground society known for throwing wild parties called the Stumpos Raiders – so named, according to rumors, because they were raided by an LAPD officer with the last name Stumpos.

The first-person-shooter game pits terrorists against counterterrorists and was played by an average of 342,000 people at once in 2016. Its biggest tournaments, such as the ELeague Major scheduled for Jan. 22-29 in Atlanta, can have million-dollar prize pools and as many as 27 million streaming viewers. An estimated 26 million copies of the $15 game have been downloaded since its debut four years ago, helping make its manufacturer, Valve, the world's leading distributor of PC titles. ... While other titles such as Call of Duty offer similar gameplay, one distinctive feature has helped fuel Counter-Strike's growth: collectible items in the game called "skins." Although they don't improve anyone's chances of winning, the skins cover weapons in distinctive patterns that make players more identifiable when they stream on services like Twitch. Users can buy, sell and trade the skins, and those used by pros become hotly demanded. Some can fetch thousands of dollars in online marketplaces. ... Valve controls the skins market. Every few months, it releases an update to Counter-Strike with new designs. It decides how many of each skin get produced and pockets a 15 percent fee every time one gets bought or sold on its official marketplace, called Steam. Valve even offers stock tickers that monitor the skins' constantly shifting values. ... Some $5 billion was wagered in skins in 2016 ... roughly $3 billion worth flows to a darker corner of the internet -- one populated by fly-by-night websites that accept skins for casino-style gaming.

A mathematical prodigy, he worked out how to “beat the dealer” at blackjack while a postdoctoral student at MIT. After he published a book in 1962 revealing how to count cards, he became so famous that casinos banned him from playing — he says one even resorted to drugging him. Many changed their rules to thwart people using his counting system. ... Next came an attempt to beat roulette, using a contraption tied to his foot that is now described as the world’s first wearable computer; after that, an expedition into Wall Street that netted hundreds of millions of dollars. ... Thorp’s then revolutionary use of mathematics, options-pricing and computers gave him a huge advantage. ... “Adam Smith’s market is a whole lot different from our markets. He imagined a market with lots of buyers and sellers of things, nobody had market dominance or could impose things on the market, and there was a lot of competition. The market we have now is nothing like that. The players are so big that they control the levers of financial policy.” ... “One of the things that’s served me very well in life is having an extraordinary bullsh*t detector.”

The boy whose teen and young-adult years were ripped from him by the murderous Nazi rampage through Europe would show millions of children and adults how to play, how to squeeze more fun out of their lives. ... Orenstein now speaks English with a borscht-thick European accent that’s just one notch above a whisper. He is still alive, still gambling and still winning most of his bets. Glancing out the window of his New York City pied-à-terre, which offers sweeping views of Central Park, he leans forward and rests his elbows on the large poker table in front of him. ... The story of how Henry Orenstein went from a small town in Poland, through five concentration camps, all the way to his 24th-floor apartment on one of Manhattan’s most expensive strips of real estate is the stuff of fiction, and science fiction. He bluffed and cajoled to survive the Holocaust, and just a few years later, armed with unrelenting drive and rare creativity, he tinkered and hustled his way to the top of America’s toy industry, helping to put dolls, race cars and one of the most successful action figures in history into the hands of generations of children. Then he transformed poker from a game played in dimly lit rooms to a billion-dollar business.

Financial markets accommodate both prudent insurers and reckless gamblers. They provide investors with an opportunity to diversify their portfolios, and allow gamblers to bet on future movements in interest rates. The coexistence of the two can allow speculators to make profits by stabilising prices—buying when markets are fearful, and selling when they are greedy. But when the gambling motive overwhelms the insurance motive, speculation becomes destabilising and then risk, far from being minimised by careful management, becomes concentrated in the hands of those who understand least what they are doing. And when regulators perceive insurance when they should see wagering, their actions magnify a crisis rather than minimise it. Such destabilising speculation, mischaracterised by regulatory authorities as prudent risk assessment, is what caused the global financial crisis of 2008. ... The coexistence of insurance and gambling goes back to the earliest days of markets in risk, and the interaction of the two has been central to financial history. But it was four developments in the second half of the 17th century that combined to frame the way we think about risk, and the institutions we have for dealing with it, through to the present day.

As big as it was, the heist could have been a lot bigger. The hackers originally intended to funnel $951 million of Bangladesh Bank’s money into phony accounts, according to various investigations. Via Swift, they fired off a series of messages to the New York Fed to do just that. The theft of the full amount was only averted because, after the initial payments had been made, several transactions were flagged “for sanction compliance review,” ... Since then, Philippine authorities have recovered almost a fifth of the stolen money and returned it to Bangladesh, but most of the rest, after flowing through a series of accounts, a ­money-transfer company, and into local casinos, disappeared into the muggy Manila air. ... All but cut off from the world and hamstrung by sanctions imposed by the United Nations, the U.S., South Korea, and Japan, North Korea needs convertible currencies to finance imports, among other things. It uses a shifting array of agents, shipping companies, and brokers to bring in illicit cash

They use phones to record video of a vulnerable machine in action, then transmit the footage to an office in St. Petersburg. There, Alex and his assistants analyze the video to determine when the games’ odds will briefly tilt against the house. They then send timing data to a custom app on an agent’s phone; this data causes the phones to vibrate a split second before the agent should press the “Spin” button. By using these cues to beat slots in multiple casinos, a four-person team can earn more than $250,000 a week. ... Determined to find a way to score one last payday before shutting down his enterprise, Alex reached out to Aristocrat Leisure, an Australian slot machine manufacturer whose vulnerable products have been his chief targets. ... ideally, a PRNG should approximate the utter unpredictability of radioactive decay.