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About Willamette week. (Portland, Or.) 1974-current | View Entire Issue (March 4, 2015)
cont. win you your 25 cents back. A royal flush—the highest and rarest combi- nation—would win you up to $600. Unlike slot machines, video poker gives the player a sense that strat- egy matters. In reality, if you play long enough, the machines are geared to eventually take your money, no mat- ter how many wins you record. Still, the sense that a player can outsmart the game is part of its allure. What caught Curzi’s attention was a feature on the draw poker games called “auto-hold.” The feature puts the word “hold” over cards it suggests players should keep. Players can reject the suggestions at any time. But auto-hold has a second, less obvious function. It allows players to play faster, because they don’t have to stop to think about what cards to hold before hitting the button to draw again. That’s important because faster play translates to more money for the Oregon Lottery. Before he got a response from the lottery, Curzi returned to Quimby’s, wondering whether the game’s bad advice had only been a fluke. He shoved a $20 bill into a machine to play the same Jacks or Better game. Within 10 minutes, the game was again advising him to hold cards that cut his chances of winning in half. Curzi says he just wanted a simple explanation. “I certainly didn’t think,” he says, “I would discover what I know now.” C urzi grew up as a spor ts- focused kid in small-town New Jersey, the son of a prominent lawyer and a stay-at-home mom. Curzi—who played football despite his small size—also wrestled, played baseball and graduated near the top of his high-school class. He played wide receiver at Amherst Col- lege, where he majored in economics and history. That led him to New York City after graduation. “I thought the only two jobs on earth were investment banking and consulting,” he says now. He landed his first job selling investments. Working on commis- sion, he’d target an office building, climb to the top floor, then work his way down, knocking on doors. “I was 21, looking like I was 16, asking peo- ple to give me their money,” Curzi says. He soon climbed the monthly leader board. His boss told him he was one of the youngest salespeople to reach the top. He wasn’t destined for a tradi- tional job. A sticker on Curzi’s apart- ment door showed a group of people heading one direction, and one person walking the other way. “Routine,” it read. “The enemy!” In 2003, he moved to Brazil and quickly immersed himself in the culture, teaching himself Portuguese within months. “You feel like the guy has been there two or three years,” says Ken Barrington, a college friend who visited him. In Brazil, Curzi met an American computer prog r a m mer work i ng on a way to help accountants share QuickBook files. The two teamed up and sold the program, cold-calling potential clients from Rio de Janeiro on an Internet phone line. “We must have sounded like we were speaking through tin cans,” Curzi says. They called the business Emochi- la—mochila means “backpack” in Spanish and Portuguese—and it blos- somed to 30 employees. In 2011, Curzi and his partner sold the company to Thomson Reuters in a private deal; Curzi declines to say for how much. But friends describe him as wealthy. “I’m not Elon Musk,” Curzi says of the co-founder of Tesla and PayPal. Curzi moved to Portland in 2012 with his then-girlfriend (and now wife), who grew up in Tigard, and now lives in a $565,000 Victorian in Northwest Portland. He consults for private clients, provides microloans to entrepreneurs through the website Kiva and drives a 1996 Isuzu Rodeo “whose crowning feature is where a dog chewed the back seats.” Friends say they are not surprised WHO PLAYS OREGON LOTTERY GAMES? Female 45% Grad school degree College grad 7% 17% 10% 20% INCOME EDUCATION Unknown 0 Some high school 3% 18% High school grad $50-$99,999 25% 36% Less than $49,999 $100,000+ 15% 23% 32% College/tech school 24% Refused/ Don’t know S o u r c e : 2 0 1 3 data , O r e g o n L ot t e r y Male 55% AGE 18-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 65+ Curzi—who’s just as likely to want to discuss North Dakota’s fracking economy as the business model for Purringtons Cat Lounge—zeroed in on something as small and seemingly innocuous as a quirk in a video poker game. “So many times in life, people just overlook the obvious,” Barrington says. “Justin has a knack for pointing those things out.” man vs. machine $ in / $ out Justin Curzi’s sleuthing turned up Oregon Lottery documents that show several video poker machines were paying out at lower rates than advertised. Here’s an example of what he discovered was happening in 2008: O regon Lottery officials were slow to respond to Curzi. So on Feb. 3, 2014, Curzi wrote again. “[S]imply following up to see if you had a resolution for me,” he wrote. Marlene Meissner, a spokeswoman for the lottery, drafted a response. Auto-hold, she wrote, “is based on optimizing the player’s opportunity to win the best (highest prize) rather than simply increasing the odds of winning any prize.” But, as Curzi later discovered, lottery officials guided Meissner to a different answer, so she revised her email before sending it. “In your case, the terminal did advise a strategy — granted not the only strategy — for you to have an opportunity to win with the cards you were dealt,” she said in her email to Curzi on Feb. 3. In other words, the lottery was backing away from telling Curzi auto- hold offered the best option. Curzi wasn’t satisfied. “I know your inter pretation of the law is that you only have to sug gest ‘a’ winning combination, but why not the best one?” he wrote in an email the next day. The lottery’s response? “Crickets,” Curzi says. Curzi turned to Jay Zollinger, a lawyer who had helped negotiate the sale of Curzi’s business. Zollinger sug- gested a public records request might turn up some answers. On Feb. 20, 2014, Cu r zi a nd Zollinger formally asked the lottery for documents concerning the Jacks or Better game Curzi played at Quim- by’s, plus any correspondence, studies and reports about auto-hold. The lot- tery responded on April 8, saying it would take 30 hours of staff time just to review the records Curzi requested. The lottery wanted a $2,350 deposit to cover its costs. That fee would have stopped most people. But Curzi’s lawyer paid it. The total bill for records eventually came to $3,581.49. Six months after his request, in August 2014, Curzi received the first of five batches of records. By September, Curzi had hun- dreds of pages of emails, memos and spreadsheets. He made a copy of the originals, arranging one set chrono- logically and the second by topic. He took notes on his laptop in a file that grew to 4,800 words. cont. on page 16 90 The Jacks or Better game by WMS Gaming was supposed to pay out about 90 cents for every $1 played. The machine actually paid just around 87 cents. Curzi says auto- hold is to blame. Those extra 3 cents went back to the lottery. 2 That year, players logged (according to estimates) about 50 million rounds of Jacks or Better games in 2008. From just that one game, that translated to $1.3 million the lottery wasn’t returning to players. S o u r c e : Data 2 0 1 3 , O r e g o n L ot t e r y Willamette Week MARCH 4, 2015 wweek.com 15