Dalton left the house exultant. Even if he didn’t commit, he knew in his own mind he was superior. The hot Nevada afternoon sun had set behind the distant Sierras. The temperature would soon be tolerable, and his car had working air conditioning. He turned it up while he thought about his next lucky strike.

He could go farther south to Carson City, the capital of Nevada. Now a piss-poor city that competed with the likes of Juneau, Alaska, and Helena, Montana, as the smallest state capital west of the Missouri.

No need to drive there, Reno was better. Unfortunately for Dalton, the casinos there were well run, and his plan needed some place on the edge of insolvency. Even a casino can certainly have hard times. There were also a few near the state line with California. They had become more run down over the years, but they still saw tourists and whatnot from the ski resorts around Tahoe. For Dalton, casinos were the place to experience statistics. To him, casinos was a first-hand encounter with statistics.

He would go east to Fernley, Nevada. The tourists didn’t stop there, and he had a sufficient allowance of his monthly miles. It was one perk of being in the specialist class and also working for the trillionaires. You got off the ration hook. One could even use the VIP lanes.

The car drove itself up VIP-80 past the mass of hot homeless fighting for shade and getting their bathing water straight from the Truckee River. Far above the road near the top of the hills, small enclaves sat, probably empty, either owned by an investment corp, or run as weekly rentals for the upper managerial class. They’d probably fight the traffic just to get there on their two-week allowance of vacation, meanwhile their executives vacationed somewhere far more palatial, actual lakefront Tahoe.

News ads continued to scroll through the cars’ infotainment feed. Was one that tugged at Dalton’s attention.

He hovered over it with his finger and a fly-out box summarized the article in TL;DR format: If China finds life or a technosignature they would govern the scientific process for the next century. He flipped through to another item of interest. China had continued to invest in big scientific instruments, while the West new big-sci projects ballooned with cost overruns while old facilities languished and decayed.

He couldn’t save the world, nor did he want to; he just wanted his name to be known. Dalton scrolled through more to a topic more of interest: gambling.

The light continued to fade, and he kept the car on autodriver while he checked his gear. He pulled out a specialized pair of glasses, which let him passively see in infrared. High-tech glass used in the space industry that could change the wavelength of IR light into high energy blues through a process called ‘photon upconversion.’ Industry originally built the glass nanostructure to squeeze more gains out of solar arrays—like those that orbited Jupiter. The material absorbs two infrared photons and pushes out higher-energy blue photon. They looked like normal sunglasses, but would show a world of blue people and heating vents. Dalton put them on and opened the window. Parking lots and bare cement were blue in baked Nevada. This technology was not commonplace, but when combined with his statistical knowledge and cloud processing, he could develop a system to beat the house.

Or so he thought. He was still working out the bugs. The unforeseen always existed.

The first casino he checked out was in Clark, Nevada, at a combo KFC and gambling den. Not really combined—they were next door in the same strip mall. Some locals had called it the Cluck’n’Buck.

Once inside, he took a gander at the tables with his passive glasses, but struck out. All the roulette wheels looked cool. Previously, he had relied on choosing the wheel closest to the door, but the table was covered.

Maybe this place is getting used oil from the KFC. Dalton smirked. He’d needed a wheel with friction he could see. He’d need an establishment with less maintenance.

Most roulette wheels in the United States have a double-zero, which gives the house a 5% advantage. You’d get better odds at video poker or blackjack, but since those are digital (and wirelessly managed) the heat didn’t affect them.

Poker with humans was out. Possibly a professional might have been able to leverage Dalton’s glasses into a winning strategy by adding body temperature as another fact. A bluffer might run hot, or someone’s cool hand might mean great cards. Dalton, however, was terrible at reading social cues of acquaintances, let alone a table of eight strangers.

He wanted to play against the house.

Dalton left. Plus, the clientele here was not to his liking: poor and slovenly. He had worked his ass off to not be around those kinds of people. If they would just work-out or study, or study while working out, they could be like him, he thought.

The next stop was a mid-tier casino in Fernley. The town had been no more than a cheeseball ranch and ag town. It would have been little known except that two trillionaires had built facilities nearby. Where one built, the other liked to have investments, that way they could pressure the legal structures together or harass the other, whichever was needed at the moment.

The vehicle pulled into the exit, up the ramp, and stopped at the red light. A beggar was at the corner with a sign reading: “Hot! $$ for H2-Oh pleaz! God Bless.”

The bottom had a large QR code that automatically popped up a donation link on a cars nav screen (or would have if Dalton hadn’t pressed ‘cancel’ so deftly). The down-and-out man wore a tattered NASA shirt that was one size too big. His shoes were dirty, and he had holes in his pants. Distressed wear was out of fashion.

Dalton kept looking forward—unmoved. If the man had put H2O in proper chemical format, he might have felt some sympathy. Regardless, night was falling and the destitute would cool off. He kept thinking about why there were homeless in Nevada; it was freezing in the winter and blazing in summer. Move west to the coastal states. Oregon and Washington had much more mild temperatures to be homeless in.

The light went green and Dalton’s car drove on to his target: Lucky Lady Seven.

This casino was free-standing, with the same cheap stucco over steel frame that passed for architecture in Nevada. Square buildings built as cheaply as possible. One with no thought to anything else, like longevity, ambiance… or airflow. The casino management ran it well and was the kind which might have a two-bit musical act from three decades prior. Music you’d recognize either the name, or a hit’s chorus, but it was your parents’ music so’d never go to see them. A minor act even in their time and your parents wouldn’t have been in the band’s heyday, let alone here in the musical afterlife of the casino circuit.

Dalton walked in, past the signage advertising its players’ club rewards, one of which was a free stay in the Motel 8 across the parking lot (which nowadays ran $88888 a night). On the I-80 run from Salt-Lake to Reno, this location attracted the more well-off with a nice ration of miles to drive and dollars to roll. Not like him, but better dressed. The populace here was image conscious.

Glasses on, he walked over to the roulette aisle and took a deep gaze at each wheel, hoping to spy the small signs of friction: infrared glowing blue. He also looked for any tables that were busy, but he didn’t need technology for that. A busy table was critical for two reasons, first it allowed him to place bets after the spin, and second, a busy table kept the wheel moving (maybe once a minute) giving him more data to power his system.

Table three checked the boxes. Six around it, not including the dealer, and close to an automatic door, letting in that sweet Nevada heat.

He went to the bathroom and eyed the farthest stall from the door, the largest one enabling handicapped patrons to do their business. Via a small application on his phone, he started up his cloud compute instance. A hidden buzzer would give small vibrations in each ear to signal the highest probability bet. Each buzz was perceptible only to him. He connected everything to his phone, and no casino can (legally) force you to unlock that.

With chips in hand from five thousand in fiat, he moved toward the ‘hot’ table.

There were two methods to exploit a roulette wheel.

First was visual ballistics. Using his a lapel micro-camera and his phone, the system could accurately predict where the ball would land. Not perfectly, but he only needed five percent better than the house to make money. The deep learning system he created he could boost existing payouts above that. He had to write it himself, as some existing ‘open source’ code on the internet was adversarial software covertly placed by the casinos to trick the tricksters. Sly devils they were. The world had moved fast from a misinformation age into the century of covert code. Even the ratings systems for open-source software had been co-opted. The most innocuous software could be a key logger with twenty thousand good ratings. Good free software was buried like a rock in a landslide.

The table hadn’t cooled down. Manual wheel, running hot, and full of people. In an unexpected bonus, the frets didn’t drop towards the center, which could allow the ball to make a final frantic jump out of its correctly predicted number. All he had to do was aim his hidden camera at the ball’s release. The image recognition he had worked on automatically picked up the orientation of the ball.

His glasses pushed data into the cloud, and within a second his system buzzed back the estimate. Dalton slapped $100 down on a split between the nine and twelve, then $50 on the top column and another $50 on the first dozen. Nothing huge. Tiny bets to test.

The ball continued to roll.

It dropped, hit a fret, and bounced into the eight.

Almost. Twelve wasn’t far.

One person cheered, another groaned, the rest said nothing.

The dealer mucked the chips in and paid out any winners, which Dalton got $100 back besides his $50 bet. But he had spent $200 on other bets. $100 couldn’t buy much, but he was warming up.

“Hey partner, ya won something!” The man next to him said. Except the partner came out like ‘par’nar.’ A big man, not obese, but he’d see a boost to longevity by losing twenty pounds.

“I, uh, didn’t want to lose my shirt on the first roll—spin.” Dalton replied, tugging at his collar.

There were eight others around the table, but it seemed like only six were placing bets. Dalton surveyed, trying to gauge how many others would bet after the ball was released.

One lady, a woman in her early thirties, placed corner bets immediately. A second woman seemed to be connected to her gentleman and advised him on ‘lucky’ numbers. The three other bettors were all gentlemen, one skinny and old, one fat and young, and a third squarely between. An eighth person seemed to enjoy the company of the middle-aged, middle-sized man for a few minutes until wandering off to lose money on slots or video poker.

Dalton made a few more bets each time after the dealer had cast the ball forward onto its supposedly random result. He got close and had some spreads that hit nicely and some others that lost. Soon though, he was in the money, but a thousand up would not be enough to attract attention. Casinos were more patient and understood the percentages better than the average populace.

But Dalton wasn’t average. He thought of himself as at least three sigmas above.

There was one glaring problem with the visual ballistics system. It required him to put money down after the ball had already started. Doing it was a dead giveaway, and he’d eventually be asked to leave the building.

The second method was bias analysis. Since this table had a dealer and wasn’t automated, Dalton could use data and statistics to find a bias. Even with counter-rotating spins, tendency could be discovered. Bias was like a leak in a dam in a torrential downpour. Dalton only needed time to compound the slimmest of error. The female dealer had high probability of being right-handed, resulting in one roll would be slightly awkward than the other.

Though the casino implemented though alternating spins to foil the bias method, in practical usage, it usually meant that for one direction, more examples were needed, but for opposite, the spin most awkward for the dealer, it magnified it. And the casino did not have dealers dedicated to one game. They’d work an hour or two, then take a break, then rotate to another game. Management did this to limit the personal bias, but again practice, a dealer had less experience rolling. Over two hours (one roll a minute), a single dealer might see 120 spins of the wheel. With only thirty-eight outcomes (1-36 plus 0 and 00), and reams of data streaming into the cloud, software could see a slight bias. Dalton could make money even without visual ballistics.

The players watched the spins and relished in the thrills. More spins collected more data. By the time the next dealer cycled in, he had just north of one hundred spins of data. By this time, he stopped mid-roll betting.

Dalton briefly glanced at his phone. All it showed was a cryptic notification: . It showed total spin count: S, Dalton’s advantage for dealer counter-clockwise bias and clockwise bias (with confidence scores) and total wheel bias (WB).

Countermeasures lowered the total bias of the entire data, but for a sliver of data, bias increased. Casinos thought a 60-60 data split was an insignificant sample size to exploit. But wheel bias remained even if the dealer left.

More spins and data. Dalton’s logic side began to detach as he was swept up with the crowd. Mentally, he kept having to stop himself and swim away from the tide of the nonstatistical fervor others at the table sweated out. Dalton had read casinos planted patrons to bet big in order to increase the betting of others.

Gamblers left, and new money came in, including a young Asian woman. He was not immediately aware of her and concentrated on the table.

Now his system wedged his sliver of advanced into a gulf. Dealer and wheel bias became more acute. Dalton planned in the next hour to make a few large bets and beat the house. He’d withdraw his blessing from the church-of-statistical-experience and the RNG gods and head home.

That was the plan, anyway.