Mathematics of Gambling?

After coming back from Vegas… I did a lot of ‘post-combat’ analysis on my gaming in the casinos. Why is casinos unbeatable and if it is unbeatable why do people still flock to play in casinos? Basically, casinos treat their games like an exercise in maths… every rule of a game affects the odds of the game, which we call house edge.

Essentially, almost all games we play in casinos are ‘unfair’ in some way; the rules of the games, the amount of payout per bet and the setup of the game always give the advantage to the house. This means that the house WINS in the long run no matter what. Take for example for my ‘favorite’ game back in Genting, Roulette for example. For a wheel with 38 numbers plus a ‘0’ and ‘00’, the house edge is 5.26% on each bet. Hence, if you have an infinite amount of money, betting for infinite amount of time, you will lose 5.26% of your bankroll.

So what is it about winnings and losses? In mathematical terms they are called variance (sound familiar?). So… bet a large amount of money, you will have high variance aka high win/lose, bet low then you will probably win little or lose a little. In the long term, your winnings and losses will even out to you losing about 5.26% of your total money betted if you bet on roulette!

There are a couple of websites that explains casino games in detail and one pretty good website is www.wizardofodds.com . I guess we should all ‘educate’ ourselves a little from this website if we ever feel an urge to throw some good money away! Rule number 1 for me is: never ever bet in negative progressions... I usually bet double my bets after I lose in a negative progression and I didn’t even know there is a nice name for it: the Martingale System! (a dumb system by the way…). Rule number 2 is: remember Rule 1.

To win in casinos (I mean long term!) you can well play some poker (poker pits players against players, not players against the house, who ALWAYS WINS… did I tell you that before? =P)… so if you are better than the other players, you can take their money! Another way is to card-count in blackjack. But first we got to get our basic strategy right. Basic strategy without card-counting gives a house edge of <1%, which is probably the lowest among all casino games. Now, card counting can turn this 1% to the player's favor, so the house edge becomes -1%!

Card counting can be learnt by anyone! You don’t need to be 双天之尊 to be a reasonable card counter! One simple card counting system is Easy OPP Count System. I think the least card counting can do for you learning it, is at least your memory skills will improve a lot! Still, it takes time and effort to learn it… and it takes even more time and effort to card count to casino play speeds! I guess I won’t be starting on this ‘skill’ anytime soon… but it definitely will be quite interesting to learn something like this!