Archive for August 13th, 2018

Pilot error.

Monday, August 13th, 2018

The Dallas Wings, who are a team in the WNBA, fired their head coach Fred Williams yesterday.

The root cause was apparently not that the Wings have lost eight games in a row: they are 14-17 so far this season, and could conceivably make the playoffs. The root cause appears to have been that Mr. Williams and the team president/CEO got into “a postgame altercation”. It isn’t clear to me if punches were thrown or exactly what the nature of the altercation was: either it was serious enough that CEO Greg Bibb felt compelled to fire Williams before the season ended, or (possibly) Mr. Bibb is just a little oversensitive.

In any case, the Wings are still one game ahead of…that’s right, the Las Vegas Aces.

(Apologies for linking to ESPN, but the Dallas paper was really obnoxious about ad blockers. I couldn’t find any mention of this in the Statesman or HouChron.)

Obit watch: August 13, 2018.

Monday, August 13th, 2018

V.S. Naipaul, noted author.

Dr. Richard Jarecki. He was most famous for hacking roulette:

He and his wife honed his technique at dozens of casinos, including in Monte Carlo; Divonne-les-Bains, France; Baden-Baden, Germany; San Remo, on the Italian Riviera; and, briefly, Las Vegas. He became a regular in San Remo, where he had lucrative runs over several years.
By 1969 he had become “a menace to every casino in Europe,” Robert Lardera, the San Remo casino’s managing director, told The Morning Herald.
“I don’t know how he does it exactly, but if he never returned to my casino I would be a very happy man,” Mr. Lardera said.

According to the NYT, his technique basically amounted to painstaking long term observation of thousands of spins, looking for roulette wheels with biases, and then exploiting those biases.

“If casino managers don’t like to lose, they should sell vegetables,” Dr. Jarecki told The New York Times in an article about his win streak in 1969.