Eliot Jacobson is retiring later this year. Depending on your vantage point, it’s either a sad loss for the gaming community or about damn time.
To some, the math wizard’s candidness and flair for brutal honesty will be direly missed. Others will be uncorking the champagne and asking why he couldn’t have hung up the cleats a decade earlier.
What’s undeniable is Jacobson’s indelible influence on the industry, which is well-encapsulated in a simple modus operandi: “I just tell people the truth, and then I get fired.”
“I think 90 percent of the people in the industry would say ‘He’s really great, he’s famous, he’s done big things.’ The other 10 percent are going to say ‘That guy is such an asshole, he’s so arrogant, he’s so full of himself. I hate that guy,” Jacobson said when asked how he’s perceived by the gaming community.
“I would say that there’s nobody in the middle,” he added.
Armed with a Ph.D in mathematics, an organic interest in casino games and a personality that thrives on pushing back against all conventional wisdom, Jacobson quickly became a sought-after yet divisive figure across the gaming world. Casinos worldwide sought his expertise, mathematical cachet and ability to see what others could not. His advice, however, wasn’t always what managers and casino owners wanted to hear.
“I’ve kind of blasted my way through the industry – first as a player and then as somebody who worked for it, burning a lot of bridges along the way, pissing a lot of people off, telling people the truth about a lot of things,” he said.
The end result, he says, is that he’s got “some rough, not so polite opinions about the industry as a result.”
Jacobson, who was a professor of mathematics for 15 years and computer science for another 10, says that he has always been fascinated by advantage play and the general practice of analyzing the logic behind casino games.
That informal interest turned formal in the mid-2000s when he developed a relationship with “Wizard of Odds” Michael Shackleford and, eventually, Jeffrey Compton, and began doing consulting projects for both.
These projects exposed him to all aspects areas of casino operations – from marketing to table games to security and surveillance. Casino life seemed to be a natural fit for his mathematical pedigree.
“Casinos work on mathematics, that is how they operate. You have numbers and math everywhere, that’s what the industry is selling. It’s the only industry whose product is math. Whether it represents itself as craps, or slots or bingo, it’s math,” he said.
Math Deficiency
Jacobson quickly realized that this math background gave him a perspective on the industry that most casino operators didn’t even realize they were lacking, and this vantage point allowed him to carve out his competitive advantage.
“Some of the largest corporations in the world don’t have the first idea of how their games work,” he explained. “They don’t understand the math of their games. They don’t understand how they’re beating players.”
The more time he spent in gaming, the more he realized the extent of this mathematical deficiency.
“In this industry, the number of Ph.Ds in mathematics can be counted on one hand, the number of people with degrees in statistics can be counted on one hand,” he continued. “Your typical casino management has maybe a couple of people who may have taken a freshmen level course on statistics.” This becomes problematic, he explained, particularly when casinos are trying to discern whether or not a hot player is gaming the system somehow or is simply a “lucky idiot.”
Many panic when a player goes on a lucky streak and wins and think ‘We must do something,” Jacobson recalled. “I’ve been hired multiple times to investigate players where my conclusion is ‘This guy is dead honest and he’s just having a lucky streak.’ These old school guys just think that I’m wrong.”
Spilling the Beans
Jacobson soon began to supplement his consulting gigs by controversially publishing articles for free on the internet describing methodologies and strategies to beat casino games.
This wasn’t received with open arms by casino operators, who soon had players rushing in armed with new tactics to beat the house.
He notes his first such article – coincidentally or otherwise – was posted just before Global Gaming Expo 2011, with fireworks quickly ensuing.
“What happened was that this article was published three days before G2E in the fall, and it sent shockwaves through the industry – ‘Oh my god, you can beat this game? What are we going to do?!’ Everybody suddenly was shocked and amazed that this game that had been around forever was so easy to beat. People started accusing me of conspiring with Shufflemaster to ruin the reputation of [the company that developed the game].”
His response to such criticisms was not to take the article down, offer an apology or even quit while he was ahead. Rather, he launched a fully-loaded website – called APHeat – devoted to showing how to beat common table games in as many different ways as possible.
As one might expect, the gaming community was not enamored, he recalled:
“This whole blog thing rocked the industry quite a bit because people realized that every game on the floor can be beaten, and what are you going to do about it? Because here I am giving out the information for free.”
“I pissed off everybody with this blog, he explained. “I pissed off the people who invented the game because I show their game is defective, I pissed off the companies who are marketing or leasing the games because they’re now having to explain that ‘Hey, you can beat my game,’ I pissed off the casinos because they’re saying ‘Hey, I thought you were on our side,’ I pissed off the advantage players because they were already beating these games and now all these other people are coming in and using their strategies.”
While such transparency of game logic and strategies isn’t something casinos want just floating around on the internet, it wasn’t a total net loss, he recalled:
“The people who loved me were the people in surveillance in the casinos because they finally knew what to look for. They finally knew what people were doing, the strategies they were using and so on.”.
Jacobson soon began being hired by casino surveillance departments around the world to do investigations into players and train on-site personnel on ways to watch out for advantage players. He also became a sought-after expert witness in high-profile court cases, such as the Phil Ivey case of 2016 involving ‘edge sorting’ – a technique whereby a player determines whether a card is low or high based on markings on the backs of cards.
Exit Strategy
By 2016, Jacobson decided it was time to wind the business down and move on to the next phase. He began the process of selling off both his blog and his consulting business. He says his post-retirement life will be much slower and filled with less controversial activities, such as walking his dogs, serving as a docent at a local zoo, music and the arts and writing poetry.
Looking back, he is proud of what he has been able to accomplish during his decade in gaming, though a degree of frustration remains – particularly with regard to the cutthroat nature of the industry.
His biggest grievance, he explained, was a culture of “keeping people small,” emphasizing that the old adage “Kick down, kiss up” rings as true in a casino as anywhere.
But he emphasized that he will have no problem putting any past grievances behind him:
“My view is ‘I’m letting go of the industry and glad to be moving on.’ I have no ill will towards the industry in any way.”
For Jacobson, the most rewarding aspect of working in gaming was being able to use his PhD credentials outside of the ivory tower of academia and apply them in a meaningful way in the real world. Thus, not only did gaming offer more feathers to ruffle and sacred cows to tip over, but it provided him a path to career self-actualization.
“As a professor, research and publication and peer review and all those things were a huge challenge. What I found in the industry is that my work got noticed and I was able to make a difference, and I’m happy about that,” he concluded. “In the long run, rather than being some academic publishing in some journal that no one would read, I’ve actually done something with my academic training, so for me that’s the real thrill.”
