There, Alex and his assistants analyze the video to determine when the games’ odds will briefly tilt against the house. They use phones to record video of a vulnerable machine in action, then transmit the footage to an office in St. These agents roam casinos from Poland to Macau to Peru in search of slots whose PRNGs have been deciphered by Alex. Armed with this knowledge, he can predict when certain games are likeliest to spit out money-insight that he shares with a legion of field agents who do the organization’s grunt work. The venture is built on Alex’s talent for reverse engineering the algorithms-known as pseudorandom number generators, or PRNGs-that govern how slot machine games behave.

The time had come for an exit strategy.īut Alex couldn’t just cash out as if he owned an ordinary startup because his business operates in murky legal terrain.

He pined for the days when he could devote himself solely to tinkering with code, his primary passion. Petersburg firm was thriving, he’d grown weary of dealing with payroll, hiring, and management headaches. Late last autumn, a Russian mathematician and programmer named Alex decided he’d had enough of running his eight-year-old business.

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