81–90 of 170 posts
A while ago I wrote a similar interactive article to prove that the martingale betting technique at the roulette doesn't work : [1]. The martingale is when you bet 1, double the bet each time you lose, start again at 1 when you win. The aim was to create a single page anybody could link to that proves without a doubt the abysmal odds of making money off the roulette with the martingale technique. Instead of pre-writt…
It's more complicated (worse) than this. That the house has a small edge only tells a small part of the story. When people go to vegas for a weekend, they might have a number in their head they are willing to gamble. If they dont, then that number is their bank account balance. Then they start flipping coins, and often they keep doing this until they go bust. They rarely cash out when up but they always lose when the…
For those that do like to gamble and are not addicted, craps and live 4-8 no-limit hold'em table, 1-2 if you are new. As for pulling out the phone, Liverpool has given me a lovely year.
I made an effort to download previous draws form my local lotto website [1] And parsed them and applied a montecarlo method to see: 1. If I could find an optimal way of playing the game to maximize my profits. 2. If I could find a bias towards certain numbers. The result was: 1. I found a way with 1/3 chance of winning big and paying back all expenses you played for the past 20 years. It is a significant investment a…
AFAIK uniform distribution means any number is equally likely to be drawn, regardless of distance to your other picks.
Just to check if I got that right: does that mean that playing 333333 and 666666 in a 6 digits lottery had a higher chance of winning that picking 333333 and 333334? If so, why? And, since playing more numbers will reduce the overall gap. Does that mean the optimal strategy is playing a single number?
Did you test your method via simulation? I can't see how it works with my little knowledge of statistics. Can someone chime in?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All true, but also this article is about Monte Carlo numerical methods rather than actual casinos. "Flipping a coin until you get enough tails in a row" is a really good way to describe long term gambling, though. I'm gonna borrow that.
The history of probability theory and risk management is filled with mathematicians who were gamblers or had patrons that were. Introducing monte carlo methods with gambling seems very appropiate considering the history of the topic!
I have a pet peeve about Monte Carlo methods; although it might be more fairly characterised as a rookie mistake I saw once. MCM are not strong if the tail variance isn't an important feature of what is being modeled. I've seen simulations where the modeler starts with an analytic model - from which they could trivially calculate the mean and variance of a KPI - then used a MCM simulation to find out essentially what…
It's more complicated (worse) than this. That the house has a small edge only tells a small part of the story. When people go to vegas for a weekend, they might have a number in their head they are willing to gamble. If they dont, then that number is their bank account balance. Then they start flipping coins, and often they keep doing this until they go bust. They rarely cash out when up but they always lose when the…
You hit the nail on the head. If you simply play the pass-line and free-odds on craps, the house edge is extremely small. And yet, most people lose far more than predicted by the odds. The problem is exactly as you stated - people don't have a defined exit-strategy, and their implicit exit-strategy is to keep playing till they lose everything. Which is guaranteed to happen 100% of the time even if the house-edge was…
I also the approach you mentioned above, never more than say 20 bucks with maybe another 10 as hard reserve. Quit when I'm ahead by a factor of, again like you, roughly 2x. And playing smaller amounts, meaning not everything at once but reasonably high, provides enough entertainment gambling for at least an hour. So in the end, even if everything is lost, I had my fun. And let's be honest, 20 bucks for on hour of fun isn't that bad a deal.
Fun fact: In total I'm like 100 bucks on top right now, paid for a pair of Nike sneakers for my son back the day!
It's more complicated (worse) than this. That the house has a small edge only tells a small part of the story. When people go to vegas for a weekend, they might have a number in their head they are willing to gamble. If they dont, then that number is their bank account balance. Then they start flipping coins, and often they keep doing this until they go bust. They rarely cash out when up but they always lose when the…
This opposed to physical, direct investments which are much easier to control, but more labor intensive. Control stock (as in having a control stake) is in-between, and extremely rich people game.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a common misconception about why casinos win. That 'casinos have infinite bankroll so they cannot lose' isn't actually an argument because casinos have limited bankroll. If they would allow me to play a +EV game I can crush them even if they had infinite bankroll by varying my betsize. The 'random walk' argument only works for fixed bet size.
I actually made a simulation of this because it seems obvious - you can actually double your bet each time you lose, and this basically guarantees that you eventually win each time! Turns out, you have to go surprisingly high for this to be true/effective on the long run. And the casino will cut you off way below the limit (i.e. there's of course a maximum bet). Plus, with this strategy, each win is a small one... bu…
But it's only a part of the problem. Second part - money and gaming easily can be addictive like drugs.