Kit Chellel - Lucky Devils

[music] Good afternoon. You're listening to "Gambling with an Edge." Now here are your host Bob Dancer and Richard Munchkin. Good afternoon. Welcome to "Gambling with an Edge" Bob Dancer. And I'm Richard Munchkin. Today we're speaking with Tit Shalell, a senior writer for Bloomberg about his new book, Lucky Devils, which is a biography of Bill Benter, Rob Wrightson, and Bill Nelson. Tit Shalell, welcome to "Gambling with an Edge." Thank you for having me. Before we get into the book itself, tell us a bit about your background. What kind of writing do you usually do and where are you based? Well, I'm a journalist by trade. I've been a journalist for 20 years. Doing various different jobs, latterly in a best executive journalist looking at, big crime war corruption stories. And then the last few years, I write solely long magazine features and books. And I tend to hone in on subjects that are poorly understood, hidden behind layers of secrecy. Secret worlds is what draws me in. Could you give us an example of some other than gambling? There's plenty. I wrote a story a couple of years ago about deep-sea treasure hunters, which is this kind of unique subculture of tech-minded. Normally people who work in Wall Street and in finance who decide, you know, just as a hobby, to spend their millions using undersea robots to find sunken Spanish galleons and warships carrying bars of gold. And like a lot of things I write about, they were quite keen for the wider world, not to know what they were doing. But as I heard about them doing it, I kind of had to know more. Absolutely. Yeah. When I get that sheet, I must know more about this than I know it's a story. Well, part of the problem, don't they have, if people know they found things, aren't governments of various countries trying to say that belongs to us and you can't have it? Yeah, you got it. Finding the treasures the easy bit. It's keeping it, that's the challenge. It's just like gambling. You know, you're not getting a net, you're easy, but learning how to get the money out of a casino is difficult. Once you find a Spanish galleon loaded with gold de bloons, suddenly everyone starts claiming it. You'll have 10 or 15 different people coming out of the woodwork. The Spanish government will claim it, you know, some Peruvian tribal claim it. Various other shipwreck hunters will say we found it first. And yeah, that was a fascinating one. But lots of things like that. It's huge, a hacking, corporate spying, sort of organized crime. It's those sorts of things that I, that I attend to Lermian. And you're based in London? Yeah, I'm based in London, which is a good place to explore the world. It's also kind of a good place to write about gambling. I think the gambling revolution that we, that happened in the US more recently, the UK was a few years ahead. We embraced universal gambling quite early on. And as a result, you know, we've got one of the more developed betting markets in the world. So lots of big online companies are based in the UK. And there's a big betting scene here. And that's kind of what got my attention start with. So how did this particular book come around? And how did you get these guys to talk to you? Well, I can click accident. I stumbled across the world of advantage gambling. A few years back when I heard about Bill Benta, who of course is the godfather of, of computerized betting on horses. He was doing it long before anyone else really. He sort of pioneered the scene. I heard about him in a conversation with a friend who works in sort of venture capital. In London, over a couple of beers, and he said, we were talking about horse racing, and he said, you know, there are these guys in Hong Kong who do it like a hedge fund. They use algorithms and high power computers, and they made a billion dollars. When I heard that number, it sounded fantastical, but I went away and did my thing, and spent a few months calling people and trying to find out. And I found out about these computer syndicates, and it turned out the rumor was largely true. You know, there was this American team in Hong Kong who had done really well. My god, the name Bill Benta. And once I met him, I was hooked really out. How did you meet him? I just booked a flight to Pittsburgh. Yeah. He wasn't very keen to talk to me at first. Maybe he still isn't. You know, as you know, being an advantage gambler, you have to have a level of discretion. It helps to be hidden from you, and actually, publicity can be a big hindrance. I got to Bill towards the end of his career, or he'd been doing it a long time. And I think once he realized that I wasn't trying to steal his formulas or compete with him, I was interested in his job. I was interested in the sort of the work that he'd done to build his model. I think like anyone else, you know, this was his life's passion. And you know, someone who was genuinely interested in it. And someone who showed up largely uninvited in his hometown. I think he just thought it'd be easier just to talk. And Bill was my gateway into the community. He's been really helpful introducing me to other people. It was through him that I learned about roulette prediction. And I got into poker bots. Once you realize there are people who do this for a living, you start seeing it everywhere. And it opened up this whole world that I didn't know existed. So Bill introduced you to Bill Nelson and to Rob Wrightson. Is that how you met them? I can't remember if Bill introduced me to Bill Nelson. That may have happened indirectly. But he made me aware of Rob Wrightson's existence. And then I had a whole other challenge with Rob persuading him that it would be a good idea to spend some time with me, which is maybe even more difficult than Bill Benzer. Because Rob didn't love the idea of being in the media again. Well, he has. You know, I think he has a great ambivalence. You know, he likes it, but he realizes that maybe it's not the best idea. But yeah. Like I said, there's benefit to getting people towards the end of their careers. I mean, look, when you're 20s and you're starting out and you're desperately seeking an edge, you know, I think you're very unlikely to sit down with a journalist or a writer and talk about it. But once you've been gambling for decades, you know, anyone as they get towards the end of their career, they become reflective. They start thinking about what it means to do the job they do. It's natural. They also have a kind of unique perspective that I found really interesting. They've been betting at an elite level since the. In some cases, the late 70s, but early 80s onwards, you know, four decades worth. They know this gambling industry kind of inside and out. They have a perspective that almost no one else in the world has. And look, right now, we have an American president who's a former casino owner. We have people betting on the second coming of Jesus. The gambling world has changed so much. It's spread into popular culture and the economy in sports in a kind of an unprecedented way. So speaking to people who have done this for a whole lifetime was fascinating. You know, I wrote a book that was a collection of interviews with professional gamblers called "Gambling Wizards." And I got the idea I was on a plane to Hong Kong to do some work for Bill. And you talk about it in the book where the Jackie Club in Hong Kong had stopped accepting phone bets. And so he needed people to run to the bet shops. We had these enormous printers and we would print the tickets and run to the bet shops. Anyway, when that happened, I was reading a book on the plane going over to Hong Kong called "Market Wizards" that's a collection of interviews with commodities and futures traders. And I was like, "You know, gamblers are way more interesting than these people." And so when I got there, I said to Bill, "Hey, I have this idea." He had a copy of "Market Wizards" there in the office in Hong Kong. And I said, "I want to do this with professional gamblers." Well, you do an interview. And he was like, "I can't handle that kind of exposure." But you know, Allen will do it. And I was like, "Oh, okay." So I called Allen. He was like, "Yeah, okay, sure." And yeah, so I just was 25 years too early. Yeah, I do think that's the gambling community, I think, is not treated as seriously as it might be by the wider media. You know, gambling is often dismissed as being a vice or a disease or a societal problem. And I keep, you know, I see it time-time again the way the mainstream media cover this subject. And for me-- Well, also, they just get so much wrong. They just-- Yeah, you know. And often they will equate professional advantage players with cheats. Or-- Yes, yeah. There's just no end of the mistakes they make. It's like they don't really do their homework when they write these articles. Well, it's-- I think the tendency is to view it as a problem. And I just disagree with that approach fundamentally. I always have, you know, I think gambling is an incredibly important part of human nature. We've been doing it since we lived in caves. It is ingrained in us. Actually, you can argue it's one of the reasons that as a species we've become so successful, our ability to imagine complex risks and-- and calculate probability, that's why we got in boats and traveled across oceans to populate new land. That's why we developed technology. It's the reason that we travel into space. A lot of the good things that we do as human beings come from our ability to tolerate risk and do those formulas in our heads or using a computer. No other species can do that. So it isn't inherently negative. It's just like anything else. It's part of us. I wanted to write a book that paid attention to gambling as a very human trait and developed that and interrogated that rather than dismissing it as a cancer on society. Well, your book also seems to be about this moment in time when gambling went through this massive shift because of computers. The way that people approached it, trying to get an advantage, I mean, people had always tried to get an advantage gambling. But suddenly with the abscess to computers, everything changed and it changed in your book. You show the way it changed in horse racing, in sports betting, in roulette, and in poker. I think this was a genuinely amazing moment. In the history of technology, I really believe that. You know, you've got thousands of young, highly intelligent, mostly men, it must be said, descending on Las Vegas. They're all mathematically minded. They've all read Ed Thoughts, Peter Dealer. They're all card counting. And that moment happens just as the home computer became a household object. This technology was just starting to creep into the regular consumer economy. And so you had those two things coming together at the same time. And the result was some really remarkable technological innovation. I mean, if you look at the devices that were being made back then for the purposes of beating casino games, they're amazing. You know, you can go to the Barona Casino outside San Diego and San Diego. And you can see these ancient wearable computers and the thing made in the 1970s or 80s, the surprising thing about them is how good they look. They look, they don't are dissimilar to Apple devices from the 1990s. They're small, you know, they're functional. And they were made in people's garages and apartments, you know, using bits and pieces that they cobbled together. So, you know, it was, it was this flourishing of a certain type of talent. And one of the reasons that advantage gambling is a small community is, I think, a lot of the senior members of the community can trace a lineage back to this time and place. And they spread across the world and their ideas spread across the world. That's what I think made me pay attention. This didn't just stay limited to Las Vegas, Bill Benta went to Hong Kong, Bill Nelson took his roulette technology around Europe, Rob Wrightson, his pokeball empire, you know, span the globe and these ideas permeated the gambling industry from a quite a small start and point. So we mentioned Bill in Allen Woods in Hong Kong. So for our listeners who aren't generally familiar with that, what they did, they started out as partners had it falling out. And your book describes the falling out from Bill Benta's point of view, said she couldn't talk to Alan because he's dead. And so what exactly did they do in Hong Kong? Well, their approach was to look at horse racing as a statistical problem. To instead of betting using instincts or a sort of vague assessment of the form guide or tips, they, you know, they said, you know, this is, this is a collection of data point that we can analyze using a computer. And if we do that, we will have an advantage over anyone else who's gambling. And back then that was true. You know, in the early 1980s, there just weren't people using computers to analyze horse racing data. They, they were the only ones doing it. And of course, Hong Kong was and remains one of the biggest horse racing markets in the world. They chose it purely because of its size, because they wanted somewhere where they could operate and not be noticed, not a track extension. So yeah, they, they flew to Hong Kong with free bulky K pro computers in their luggage. They hold these machines over there. They spend a couple of years collecting data from the racing books. And then they built this thing from scratch. And, you know, they, they both Alan Woods and Bill Benta benefited hugely from being first is the same, the same in, in markets. It's, you know, if you're the first options trader to use the black skulls model, you go a huge advantage over everyone else. And you get a golden period with a few years before the rest of the world catches up with you. And because Bill Benta Alan Woods was so early, they, once they got the model working, they, they had some really, really profitable years. It still do, I believe. Well, it's, it's, Bill Benta's still, this is still his job. He's still tweaking his model. These days, he, he's, he will be using artificial intelligence models rather than his, you know, his guesswork and try on error. But fundamentally, he's doing the same thing he's always done, which I find fascinating, I mean, to, to have the focus and the dedication to spend your entire working life on an equation for horse racing is a remarkable thing. Well, one of the reasons they selected Hong Kong, I believe, is the horses didn't come and go. The horses stayed there. You didn't ship in a lot of horses to Hong Kong to go to the races. And so you could build up data about all the horses in the market more easily later when Bill was in Pittsburgh. This is not the case. It is very possible to truck in horses to and from Pittsburgh. And so there's not the same database of horses that you have. There's always new ones that you don't know about. And some of the ones you have all this data on have moved away. So, well, it's, it's actually also that in Hong Kong, there are only two race tracks and far fewer horses than there are here in the US. You know, many, many more tracks here and many, many more horses to keep track of. But if you have a, a small pool of horses to deal with, then it makes that job easier. What they were doing was experimental science. You have to remember back then, this just simply didn't exist. There was one academic paper, but it was kind of half-assed. I mean, they, they did it as an intellectual exercise. They didn't do it to make a profitable business. They did it to see if it could be done, you know, what mathematical lessons they could learn. So, this was something new to the world. You can imagine the appeal of having a contained environment to do your experiment. But, you know, what you're talking about is a data problem. And once, once you have, once your method is proven, you can apply it anywhere that where there's horse racing. And of course, now, you know, any race track in the world will have advantage players using computers to calculate odds and try and beat the market. Okay. We're so we spoke about Bill, Rob Wrightson, started on in Blackjack and then moved to other games. So, how did he use computers to help him in Blackjack? Rob was part of that advantage playing generation that was quite quick to adopt wearable technology. So, he and his friends would use the aft wearable computer, which was a sort of homemade gadget made by an enthusiastic but quite religious fella who sort of soldered them in his attic and sold them to gamblers who wanted to use them. And they were just, it was car counting plus. It was just a way to be extremely accurate and efficient in the way you counted cards, inputting data using a toast switch, receiving data back through an earpiece or through a buzzing patch somewhere on your body. And I think once Wrightson and his friends realized just how good that advantage was, you know, it wasn't a big leap to say, well, if this works in Blackjack, we can do it in other games as well. And of course, Rob took the technology that he had used to beat Blackjack and started thinking about poker. Poker had been his passion since he was here. Anyway, you know, poker is fundamentally a sort of mathematical problem at its heart. And I think he recognized very early before many people that the way poker was played back then was inefficient and suboptimal. You know, he could, early on he could see the way the pros, even the pros played the game. I had flaws. And so he spent many, many years and an enormous sums of money building a building as some of the world's first poker bots functionally. You know, he had MIT graduates and math professors and programmers and he had a whole team dedicated to doing this. It took a long time to pay off. Poker is an enormous challenge, much harder than Blackjack. But he got there and you know, he ended up making a significant amount of his career earnings in poker. And again, he got there first. You know, later we heard all about game theory optimal in these various other people who were working on programs to solve. But again, he got there first. And rather than write an academic paper about it, he used it to make a tremendous amount of money. Well, he had the incentive that the academic center have, which was that, you know, the stakes for him were real. This wasn't an intellectual exercise. This wasn't some arcane challenge that he took on. This was his way to make to make his fortune. So, you know, his incentives were, were make or break. And he had a gift for it. And, you know, he's very proud even now to talk about how his early poker bots would beat the academic models out of Carnegie Mellon University and Albertia and Canada, those are the two universities that were at the forefront of poker AI. And Rob used to test his model against them. And his were better. And, you know, you can imagine why he, his testing ground was real life. The academics tended to do a lot of their experimental work. In the university, Rob would take his theorems out into the poker rooms in LA and around California. You know, he knew the game better and he had this gift for mathematics and he had a particular talent for attracting the rights people to his operation. I think one of his gifts was recognizing that he needed expertise in certain areas. So, he assembled this team. He had real world poker experience and his early bots were really good. I mean, they were better than anything else out there. Well, he was part of a company that did on the provided games on the internet. And he would put a lot of bots out there. And at the time, there was no law against it. Later on, there are a lot of sites have tried to stop that. But at the time, it was a new idea and very successful and profitable to him. Yeah, Rob was there at the turning point. This technology was a quirky curio throughout the 80s and 90s. There was sort of a vague awareness that computers were trying to play poker, but honestly, they played it badly. The wider gambling industry didn't take it that seriously. So, Rob got in before the penny dropped, I think, that this was an effective way to play poker and could potentially lead to a superior software that could be almost any human opponent. But then, I think it was late 90s and early 2000, it was the moment when the bots got good enough that people started noticing their existence. People who played poker online would notice that they were playing against opponents who didn't seem to be human. They didn't play like human beings. They played differently. They didn't chat. The platform started noticing it and this backlash happened quite quickly against the idea of competing against the bot. And you can imagine why people were upset by it. If I finished work after a long day and I log onto my computer to play online poker, I want to play all the human beings, prove my metal against other players. If I'm playing against software, it's no fun and it feels unfair. So, Rob was right there at the forefront when that backlash happened and it was a really interesting moment in poker history because the game hasn't really been the same since. Yeah, I know at that point, he trained a bunch of women how to play. And people, the online poker sites, thought the women were bots. And I remember at the time, there was one in particular who set up a webcam showing her playing because one of the sites, I think it was full tilt, had stolen a bunch of money of hers claiming she was a bot. He could teach the humans to play as well. Well, he taught them to play like machines, though. That was the difference. The woman you're talking about, she was a poker machine. I mean, she didn't have much poker experience before she met Rob Wrightson, but she trained hour after hour after hour on his software that taught her game theory optimal poker. She was a good sponge for that knowledge. She learned to play very much like a bot and it made her an extremely effective player, but she played just like a computer. And she thinks about poker like a computer. She thinks of the game in terms of, "All I up over 500 games, not am I going to win this hand." So she's got this very mathematical approach to the game. It was ironic that at that moment Rob had this empire of poker bots, thousands of them deployed on all the main poker platforms using various software tricks to hide the fact they were bots from the operators. But the ones who caught heat, the ones who had their money seized were the humans that he trained to play like computers. Do you know if she's still playing? She is still playing. As far as I know, I met her a couple of years ago. She likes to go to, there's this tiny Chinese lady. She likes to go to poker rooms full of men and take all their money. Did you talk much about core the banking operation in California? Yeah, that's part of the book. But the focus of the book is advantage gambling and the player banking thing was a source of income for Rob a good one. But I wouldn't categorize it as advantage play. It was just smart business. Right. Yep. The third subject of your book is Bill Nelson. Coming in when I started reading the book, I had not heard of Bill. Although we very possibly came close to each other when I was doing graduate work in economics at UCLA, he was in the business school at UCLA. We're in their next door to each other. So we very likely passed by each other. But I did not know who he was. So how does he fill into your story? Yeah, he's not as well known to the others. But he has sort of separated himself from the community of professional gamblers. He's become disenchanted with the life over the years. So he doesn't go to blackjack ball. He doesn't remove in those circles now. He lives in relative peace in Poland. But the reason I wanted to write about him was that he did remarkable things in roulette. Back when this was an experimental technology, he made it work. He spent most of his career as a roulette specialist, predicting roulette first with wearable computers. And then he learned to just do basically the same thing in his head, which was far easier and far more profitable. And then later on his career, so transitioned into bias wheelplay going right up into 2010 when he had a big night in Caesar's casino, just finding a wheel that was a bit too predictable and hammering it for 18 hours straight. So he's had a fascinating roulette career. And I thought I had to include roulette. Roulette is the game that most people struggle to understand how it could be beaten. You walk into a casino and you find your average gambler and you say there is a way to beat roulette. There is a way to reliably make money from roulette. They won't know what you're talking about most of them. So that was the one that had the big surprise factor. Bill also happened to be part of the computer team, which was maybe the world's first data driven sports betting operation out of Las Vegas. So he was part of that operations. Well, so he was away into different areas, the gambling world that I wouldn't otherwise have got to see. He was actually instrumental in the whole group. My understanding is he's the one who introduced my Kent to Midland, which my Kent was the one who developed the software to analyze and beat sports. And Midland was the one who put together the group of gamblers who were betting all across the United States. Yeah, he was arguably a founder member. I mean, at the time, the funny thing was that he was fixated on roulette. You know how it is with professional gamblers. They find a challenge and then they will dedicate their entire life for two years to solving the problem of roulette. So he was fixated on roulette at the time. But he met Mike Kent in Vegas in the late 1970s, very early on when he first arrived and introduced him to the people that would become part of the computer team. He was also prosecuted by the FBI, along with the other members, and went through that whole experience of feeling the might of the American federal government bare down on him for betting on sports. And that was also a fascinating memory in the history of gambling. You know, it's easy to forget now that these days when you can bet on any game in any way you want a thousand different ways, it's so wide spread, it's so available. But back in the late 70s and 80s, the sports betting was niche and mostly illegal. If you wanted to do it, you had to know basically a crook. Or if you were in Nevada, you had to go to one of the sportsbooks, which were not glamorous places to go and put money down on your game. So it was very different back then. And the attempt to prosecute the computer team was indicative of a moment in time when America was still railing against the idea that people might want to bet on sports for leisure. There was still this pervasive attitude that it was somehow sinful or that it might damage the sporting events themselves. And of course, that's gone away completely in the last few years in the states. But back then, it was a real issue. It was criminalized. Well, so actually, my understanding is that the FBI could not believe that any group of people could be making that much money. just by betting and assumed that they must be bookmakers. And that was really the problem because the person making the bet, I don't think is committing a crime. It's the person accepting the bet. Well, that was an open question back in the 1980s to be fair. The FBI didn't have a clear answer as to whether the act of making a bet was illegal. I think another issue that the computer team had was there because they operated in Las Vegas and because this was the tail end of the mafia era of Las Vegas, some quite senior members of the mob, they came aware of what the computer team were doing and of course they wanted a slice. And so the FBI had wiretapped everyone more affiliated in the Las Vegas area and they heard these guys, these wise guys talking about the computer and what's the computer doing. I need the computer's tips and of course if you're an FBI agent and you hear that, it sounds bad. It sounds like the mafia are into this. You don't know who's behind it. It's betting on sports. It sounds criminal. So I think that started them down a path that the FBI probably should have turned back from but once there was that mafia that the width of organized crime, they couldn't seem to stop themselves and they carried on this prosecution. The turn out to be a huge embarrassment of the agency, I think. Yeah, you know, I got exposed to the world of roulette a number of years ago and was really shocked because the world of professional blackjack players, it's not that big and people all tend to know each other. And then I found out there was this whole world of roulette players out there. That the venn diagram of the intersection of those two is tiny. There just is very little overlap. I mean, Bill was in the blackjack world 50 years ago or whatever but yeah, it's really interesting that there's still a big subculture of people who are out there trying to beat roulette. Well, I mean, roulette goes back to Ed Thorpe. Yeah. And as he was sort of developing card counting as a systemic method using his computers to weigh the shifting odds in blackjack, at the same time he was doing that, he spent a long, he spent many years working on a roulette computer that he said was effective and worked but he couldn't quite get it to work in a casino. But he wrote about it in the book that everyone read. Find me an advantage, Gambler who hasn't read Be the Dealer. They still read it. I'm sure they must. But anyway, back in the day, yeah, back in the day. He talks about it more in his recent book, Man for All Markets. Yeah, he goes into more detail about who he was working with. It turned out to be Claude Shannon, who is the father of information theory and an incredibly influential scientist. So it tells you something that these two men were so taken with the idea of roulette that they dedicated years of their life and considerable resources to making a computer. I think it comes from the same mindset but yeah, there was a diversion to some point. I think roulette is a big game in Europe. So at some point, the knowledge that roulette could be beaten spread and when I was looking professional roulette specialists, my search led me to all over Europe, to Germany, to Croatia. I heard there were a group of Chinese players in Macau who were predicting roulette using a computer. This knowledge sort of disseminates itself through the very small and closed off worlds of professional gamblers. And if it works, it spreads and roulette prediction, that definitely happened. Actually, I've quoted Bill Benter back in about 1980. Sooner or later, everyone has a roulette project because Bill had been working on roulette as well before he ever got to horses. Yeah, Bill tried roulette. You can see the appeal. roulette is an amazing puzzle. The idea of predicting roulette feels like a superpower. The idea that you could have a computer that could tell you a section of the wheel that the ball will land in. It feels superhuman. But actually, writing this book, I learned some of the most effective roulette methods are low tech, essentially low tech. Buys wheel play, I believe, has diminishing recent years because the wheels have gotten much better and then much better at spotting discrepancies. But Bill Nelson had a lot to do with that. They had those old wheels all over Vegas and they smacked a number of casinos and so they came out with this wheel called the Starburst where the ball just scatters all over the place. Him and a couple of others, a couple of other very good roulette predictors, led to a change in the design of the roulette wheel. We can still see today going to any casino anywhere in the world. Look at the shape of the wheel. The shape of that wheel is different to how it was 40 years ago. And the only reason for that is because people have predicted roulette. So the industry had spent a lot of money replacing old wheels. I mean, these things aren't cheap. I think that's proof if anyone needed that you can roulette is beatable. But it speaks to this arms race that's still going on between the gamblers who want to make a living from gambling and the casinos and the bookmakers and the operators who don't want them to make a living. And I feel like the gamblers I write about and their modern equivalents, they tend to have an advantage because it's all they do. They will spend years of their life developing a system for a 5% advantage in a casino game or in a sports book or whatever it might be. And there are thousands of them, maybe millions. I mean, no one knows the numbers. But they're all very smart. And I always feel like the industry is always a couple of years behind. But there is always a moment when they realize they're losing so much to advantage players that they need to adapt. It happened in roulette, happened in blackjack. It happened in, you know, fangials and draft kings and those sports books. There's always an industry pushback and they tend to change the technology to prevent the advantages that's been paying out for people. And then the gambling community has to find a new edge, but they always seem to. This goes on and on. It'll never end. Right. And I think the reason that the casino is always so far behind is because the people running the casinos now really don't understand gambling. Much like we were talking about the journalist earlier, now it's the people running the casinos are people coming out in business school who really don't understand the games. And it isn't until they really take a beating that they finally go, maybe we should hire somebody to tell us what our problem is. I also think that there's truth in the idea that car counting was really good for casinos. Oh yeah. Yeah. The idea that is possible to beat a game that should be waiting against you is very compelling. And it inspires a lot of people to try their luck. And though the reality of car counting and any advantage gambling system is it's extremely difficult to make it work. It takes dedication, intelligence, bankroll management, mathematical ability, but all sorts of things have to be in your favour to make it pay. Lots of people burn out. But I don't know what the precise numbers are, but have what's the number of failed car counters for every one car counter that makes a living out of it? You know, the casinos make more money from failed car counters than they lose to successful ones. I don't know if that's true for any advantage system. So, you know, if you're a marketing professional for the gambling industry, the existence of an elite 0.1% who can make a living betting is a boon for them because it sets an example for the something to aim for is aspirational for the rest of the world's gamblers to come and try and of course most of them fail and the casinos make money. It's like a cost of business. It's like the price they're willing to pay to hoover up the billions of dollars that they make from their regular business. You're absolutely willing sometimes. Yeah, right. Your book is called Lucky Devils. What is the genesis of that new? Lucky Devils, I wanted the book to be about people, not systems and there's kind of a religious theme in the book or at least a moral theme in the book. Gambling is evolution from being a sin and a vice and something undesirable to being entirely mainstream and corporate the way it is now. That was a sort of cultural, ethical revolution that's happened in America and around the world that I wanted to just sort of reflect from the title of the book and also the idea of luck, of course the lucky devils, they're not lucky, they make their own luck. Lucky is the opposite of what they do. Luck is what I do when I go into a casino and I put $100 on black at the red table and win all lose. That's my only bet of the evening. What advantage gamblers do is large numbers. It is more a akin to a hedge fund or a market operator. than it is to a true gambler who relies on luck. So there's a bit of irony in that title too. Yeah. So there are a number of other gamblers out there that are successful, different games than were done by Bill and Rob and Bill. Do you plan to write one or more additional biographies about other gamblers? I don't know. I was interested in the culture of Advantage Play and I felt like there was something to learn from these people and the way they work, the method, the mindset, you know, the way they approach risk and uncertainty, I think is interesting, the way they can separate their emotional half of the brain from the rational part of the brain. They don't celebrate when they win a bet. You know, when Bill Benters and Qt is a betting in Hong Kong and he hits a long shot, but he doesn't wopen cheer. You know, it's a very different way of thinking about the world. It's cold calculus. So I was fascinated by that. Look, the gambling world is changing so rapidly. I mean, the latest thing is prediction markets, which of course claim they're not gambling, but of course are. And that's a whole other phenomenon. And you could write several books about what's happening now in prediction markets. People betting on wars when they have inside knowledge of military strikes that are about to happen. The idea of people betting on the second coming of Jesus or against the second coming of Jesus and only a five to 10% return every year. The idea of sort of securitising the future. It's all very strange and unfamiliar. So yeah, maybe, maybe. If any of our listeners wanted to get in touch with you, how could they do that? I'm on X, formerly Twitter. I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me on the Bloomberg website. All my details are on there. I would just discourage anyone to ask me for gambling advice. I always think that some of the worst qualified people in the world to dish out financial advice or journalists, even financial journalists, never ask a financial journalist for financial advice. We don't know any better than you, but that's particularly true when it comes to gambling. I write about it. I like the stories. I am a terrible gambler. I'm not good at it. So I'm happy to share stories with people, but I don't have the secret source. Yeah. I don't think you have that, Deb, worry with this, our audience. I think our audience, many of them are knowledgeable gamblers. If they had questions, they would probably direct them, but either Bob or me and that would be a wise approach. Richard usually asks people their favorite restaurant in Las Vegas. Have you been here enough to have one? I do have one. That's not in, usually I qualify that as one that's not in a casino, but since you're not here very often. No, well, I've spent a lot of time in Las Vegas and I'm just having to look it up because I haven't been there in a while. It is the original Lindo Mit Chouacan. Oh, I'm getting on the other lead road. Lindo Mit Chouacan. Yes, Lindo Mit Chouacan. That's the one. Yeah, I've come to Vegas a bunch of times in the last few years researching this book. I also wanted to know the town better. I mean, it is the place where this whole world sprang from. I didn't know it well. I wanted to see the sides of Vegas that tourists don't go to. So I wanted to go spend some more time downtown. I wanted to spend some more time seeing how people actually live. But yeah, that Mexican restaurant, phenomenally good, great fun and a real scene. That's my spot. Yep. I often, when I'm meeting people, I often meet them at that restaurant. So yeah, it's a good one. All right. Bob. Very good. Thank you, Kit. Thank you, Richard. Go out and hit lots of Royal Flushes, everybody. Good day. 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