Doyne Farmer famous the world over for successfully turning the odds of roulette against the house has broken his decades-long silence about how he achieved the coup.

In the 1970s, Doyne Farmer, then a graduate student, used the world's first wearable computer to beat roulette tables in Nevada, but never revealed how he did it. Now he has decided to break his long silence after a pair of researchers, inspired by his story, developed and published their own method of beating the house. "I kept silent because I did not want to communicate any information that might prevent anyone from taking the casinos' money," writes Farmer, now at the University of Oxford, in a draft paper that he showed to New Scientist. "I see no good reason for staying silent any longer."