Is Gambling for Idiots?

[andyandy]

I don't see the attraction of slot machines or roulette either. Pure luck is no fun if the payout is small.

I know there is some skill in card games and that I would enjoy. I saw a show with Larry Flynt (Hustler magazine) playing blackjack in Vegas. He demands a solitary table with just him and a dealer away from the crowds. He bets heavy and has some strategy. He plays for 24+ hours straight and usually leaves with more than a million of the casino's money. I think he does it once or twice a year. I can see spending the time to figure out a strategy and playing it this way, but I don't have the capital to get into a game like that.

is there skill in black jack - i mean more than just knowing to stick on 16 or above.....(or some similar strategy - i admit i'm no expert ) ?
the only skill i can think of is through card counting....but i imagine the casinos would be onto that pretty quick....

 

[andyandy]

Oh, but that is going way too fast. It's much better to play the single numbers (where the bet limit is smaller - you can bet $1 at a time, as opposed to red/black which will have a higher minimum)

My bet sequence is below. 114 spins, with a total drop of $505. There is a 95.5% chance that you will win once in these spins, and if you win, you will at least break even. It's far more conservative than doubling up.

hmm, but 5% happens....and when it does you lose big....

basically any strategy loses money in the long term because of that pesky (and in the US, I believe those pesky) zero(es)

 

[pgwenthold]

I have a deal for you. You win 99.99% of the time! I'll roll 2d100 and if they both come up 42, you give me $10,000, otherwise I give you $0.01.

It's easy to come up with betting schemes that have a high "chance of winning". That doesn't mean they're in any way useful though. Like mine. Will you take the bet? I'll accept all comers.

I never said it was a good thing to do (you take a risk of losing a boatload of money, and even when you win, it is usually not that much, but better than your scenerio). That doesn't mean it can't be done.

In roulette, like any casino game, you are going to lose more than you win overall. The question is do you want to lose a little every time, or win most of the time and then lose a bundle?

OTOH, your game doesn't come with free drinks.

 

[pgwenthold]

hmm, but 5% happens....and when it does you lose big....

basically any strategy loses money in the long term because of that pesky (and in the US, I believe those pesky) zero(es)

No doubt, and as I note above, you play the casino, you will lose. But the question is, do you want to lose a little bit every time you played, or win a little 19 times out of 20 before with the occasional big loss (for the same net loss)?

Moreover, as I note, my betting scheme in principle can be continued if you want to decrease your chance of losing (but then you lose more when you lose)

But it also comes with free booze.

 

[drkitten]

is there skill in black jack - i mean more than just knowing to stick on 16 or above.....(or some similar strategy - i admit i'm no expert ) ?
the only skill i can think of is through card counting....but i imagine the casinos would be onto that pretty quick....

Depends upon the casino; some areas (Atlantic City, in particular, IIRC) explicitly allow card counting, by law. Even if you don't explicitly count cards, a vague awareness of whether the deck is running in your favor or not can be helpful in placing bets. And there is a lot more to good blackjacks strategy than just "stick on 16," since it matters exactly what kind of a 16 you have and what the dealer is showing....

 

[Hawkeye]

As others have said, I don't think gambling is for idiots as long as you’re just playing for entertainment purposes within reasonable financial limits. Personally, I'm a big fan of poker and horseracing. I'm in the green in both activities, for a fair chunk of change, simply because there is skill involved in both. (Admittedly more in poker than in horseracing.)

Skill can also give you an edge in the casino, given that there are “smart” ways to gamble on traditional casino games. In something like craps, there are some bad bets to make, some really bad bets to make, and some bets that are essentially even money propositions. If you know the odds, you can make your bankroll last substantially longer (and perhaps even come out ahead). Blackjack is another example of a game where the more you know, the greater your chances of winning are.

To summarize, gambling isn't a bad idea if you're having fun and you can afford to lose what you probably will lose.

On the other hand, something that I think is a completely bad idea is playing the lottery. I was watching a Frontline special about the California state lottery earlier, and it had some pretty fun statistics:
(Taking these from memory, so they might not be exactly correct quotes).

If you were to buy 50 lottery tickets every week, you would win the big lotto jackpot on average once every 5,000 years.

and

If you got a gallon of gas for every lottery ticket you bought until you won the lottery, you would have enough fuel to drive your car the equivalent distance of about 750 round trips to the moon.

Lottery: the idiot tax indeed.

 

[MortFurd]

Gambling isn't stupid unless you go to far. Most people are aware they probably won't win. They pay for that small rush. "I COULD win a million. You never know."

To me, it is just like getting on a roller coaster or watching a movie. You pay for the internal feelings, not for the material benefit.

Reminded me of an old joke:
Two guys leave the casion, one bare naked the other wearing a pair of under wear. The naked guy says to the dude in the drawers "I've go to admire the way you always know when to stop."

 

[Dave1001]

No matter what I do, I just can't bring myself to go to Atlantic City or Las Vegas. Maybe at some point, I instinctively figured that it was extremely foolish to go to someone else's house and play a game of their choice under their rules for MY money.

Now, I don't mean skill games against other players (like Poker), I mean the normal Vegas stuff like roulette, slot machines, the big wheel, Video Poker etc.

No matter what, there's just NO way you can have a better than 50% chance of coming out on top. They can't allow it. Isn't that obvious? Or am I missing something?

It's idiotic to gamble against the House. They clearly have better information than you or me as an individual player. But it can be lucrative to gamble with the House. That's hard to do with Vegas but may possible to do with Wall Street. Buy when the Street buys and the public sells. Sell when the Street sells and the public buys.

 

[Euromutt]

There's a phrase I learned in math class in secondary school which turned me off gambling for life: (translated from the Dutch) "expectation of negative profit." The object lesson consisted of a cafe round the corner from my school which made most of its money from slot machines. I just hung out there between classes because the coffee was cheap. It had a sign out front: "Our machines pay out up to 80%!" It was meant as a boast, but it told me that if I spent all day on the damn thing, I'd end up with, at best, 80% of the money I started with.

The fact of the matter is that, whether you play the lottery, slots, roulette, blackjack, whatever, the odds are ultimately stacked in favor of the house. Popular mythology to the contrary, casinos don't cheat; they don't have to. Cheating means breaking the rules, and the rules are already written in their favor. For your average schmoe, therefore, gambling is a bad investment. I have known people to become good at working slot machines or the tables and come out (slightly) ahead much of the time, but only after lots of practice and refining their technique, in the course of which they lost substantial amounts.

As other posters have said, if you find gambling entertaining, and don't mind losing a few shekels in the process, that's not idiotic. But if you seriously expect to achieve long-term consistent monetary gain from gambling, you should probably think again.

 

[andyandy]

As other posters have said, if you find gambling entertaining, and don't mind losing a few shekels in the process, that's not idiotic. But if you seriously expect to achieve long-term consistent monetary gain from gambling, you should probably think again.

it's interesting that no-ones really addressed sports (or other) betting - am i right in thinking this is probably because it's illegal in the US?

I think that for such betting it's possible to make a good living....that used to require knowing more about the markets than the bookies...

but the advent of punter-punter sites like betfair now mean you can bet against other punters - which i'm sure some can really cash in on...

 

[BPScooter]

I have a silly Vegas blackjack story. I had read up on the game and was fairly wasted with some gambling friends, and happend to be by myself with a $20 in my pocket. I took the plunge, all by myself, with a rather grumpy looking asian chick as a dealer. She put the cards in the shoe, and looked over her shoulder into the video camera like she was Way too Busy to do such a noble thing for a dickhead like me. I played like 3 hands, and drew a 12 and *didn't* take another card, she busted, .... you get the idea. I got like a hundred bucks on 3 hands, and then walked away and said "thanks" but she was such a non-fun dealer that she didn't deserve a tip. I then went and put 20 of that into quarters, and very quickly got like another 50 bux on a quarter draw from a slot. So I walk back up to my gambling buddies and said, "I'm done for the night" and left them scratching their heads. Know when to hold'em, know when to fold'em. I folded at the peak of my luck!!

 

[Euromutt]

it's interesting that no-ones really addressed sports (or other) betting - am i right in thinking this is probably because it's illegal in the US?

Not so much because it's illegal, but because laws vary by state, plus there's federal regulation on betting when the punter is one state, the bookie in another, and/or the event in (yet) another, and it's all too complex to address the myriad permutations in a brief post.

Also, even if you know the markets as well as or better than those bookies with whom you are legally allowed to do business (which usually menas they have to be in the same state), bear in mind that bookies charge vigorish.

Sure, punter-to-punter sites might defray that to some extent, but Congress is currently hostile to any internet gambling which doesn't result in a state or federal government getting a slice.

 

[LW]

The fact of the matter is that, whether you play the lottery, slots, roulette, blackjack, whatever, the odds are ultimately stacked in favor of the house.

If the House doesn't know what it is doing, then the odds in blackjack are stacked in the favor of the player. This is, of course, a very rare thing to happen in a well-established casino but you might encounter such a game some day.

A friend of one of my acquitances once spent his summer holiday living in a ferry traveling between Helsinki and Stockholm, playing black jack for 3-5 hours every night. He earned enough money to pay for the tickets and food with about as much money left over that he would have earned in a regular summer job.

His method: card counting.

The black jack table in the ship was (at least at the time) run in a way that made card counting possible and profitable. Even with his gouging, the table probably made profit for the operator since 95% of those who play in those night club tables are drunk. One of my friends worked as a black jack dealer for a couple of years and he told that he regularly enocuntered players who were drunk enough to hit on 19.

 

[Ladewig]

I'll agree that gambling on games with huge house advantages is foolish (e.g. most states run Pick 3 games with a 50% house advantage) but small stakes on games with small house advantages can be entertaining.

 

[Bronze Dog]

IIRC, the creation of card counting has actually benefitted casinos: Every idiot out there thinks he can do it easily.

 

[MilwaukeeMike]

No matter what I do, I just can't bring myself to go to Atlantic City or Las Vegas. Maybe at some point, I instinctively figured that it was extremely foolish to go to someone else's house and play a game of their choice under their rules for MY money.

Now, I don't mean skill games against other players (like Poker), I mean the normal Vegas stuff like roulette, slot machines, the big wheel, Video Poker etc.

No matter what, there's just NO way you can have a better than 50% chance of coming out on top. They can't allow it. Isn't that obvious? Or am I missing something?

Even with games like slots you can use some strategy. This would be hard for most people to do, but if you go into a casino and sit and watch how long it takes someone to win on a given slot, do this over and over again, you can potentially calculate in your head what the odds are on that machine. Once you know the odds on that machine, all you need to do is sit there and wait for somebody to spend some time on there without winning. Once they leave you sit down play a couple of games and win. So even the games that seem mindless, can be had with a little strategy.

 

[andyandy]

an introduction to card counting.....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_counting

Bsic card counting assigns a positive, negative, or null value to each card (2 through ace). As each card is dealt, the running count is adjusted by each card's assigned value. There are multiple card counting systems in use, but the Hi-Lo system, proposed by Harvey Dubner in 1963 and later refined by Julian Braun and Stanford Wong [3], is one of the more basic and illustrative systems.

In the Hi-Lo system the cards 2 through 6 are assigned a value of -1. Ten's (and face cards) through aces are assigned a value of +1. Cards 7, 8 and 9 have a value of zero (so they can be ignored).

For example, on a fresh shuffle, the count begins at zero. The dealer then deals the following sequence of cards: 5, 7, 2, Ace, 6, 3, 8, Jack. As each card comes out, the count is adjusted (starting at a count of zero). The adjustment values for the count would be -1 for 5, 0 for 7, -1 for 2, +1 for Ace, -1 for 6, -1 for 3, 0 for 8, +1 for Jack. As each card is delt the count is adjusted by the adjustment values. So the running count after each card is: -1, -1, -2, -1, -2, -3, -3, -2. So the final count, after this sequence of cards mentioned above is -2.

The Hi-Lo system is an example of a balanced card counting system. There are an equal number of +1 and -1 cards in the deck, so a count of all 52 cards would result in an end count of 0. The Hi-Lo system is also an example of a single level system, because cards are assigned only a single value, + or -1.[4]

The average deck always has a zero count, which is an advantage to the casino. Good counts are rare, only 25% of the time will the count usually favour the player. On average a counter will have a 1% edge, if they do not play or minimum bet when the count is bad, and increase their bets when the count is good. This means at a $10 table they would need to play, on average, 100 hands to make $10, which could be 2 hours of play or more.

The variance in blackjack is also very large. While they would win $10 on average for every 100 hands, it would take many thousands of hands to a have a high chance of being in profit. For this reason most casinos do not care about card counters who are playing $5 or $10 games. At a $25 table a good counter can make over $10 per hour (averaged over hundreds of hours), and many can make more than the dealer, which is an obvious problem for the casino. [citation needed]

 

[Dave1001]

Even with games like slots you can use some strategy. This would be hard for most people to do, but if you go into a casino and sit and watch how long it takes someone to win on a given slot, do this over and over again, you can potentially calculate in your head what the odds are on that machine. Once you know the odds on that machine, all you need to do is sit there and wait for somebody to spend some time on there without winning. Once they leave you sit down play a couple of games and win. So even the games that seem mindless, can be had with a little strategy.

That would only seem possible if the machines were programmed with time-based fake randomness. Could someone smart elaborate on this?

 

[Cuddles]

One of the funniest things I've ever seen is the adverts for an online casino where the biggest words, apart from the name, were "Average winnings of 98%" (or somewhere around there).

 

[Starthinker]

Even with games like slots you can use some strategy. This would be hard for most people to do, but if you go into a casino and sit and watch how long it takes someone to win on a given slot, do this over and over again, you can potentially calculate in your head what the odds are on that machine. Once you know the odds on that machine, all you need to do is sit there and wait for somebody to spend some time on there without winning. Once they leave you sit down play a couple of games and win. So even the games that seem mindless, can be had with a little strategy.

Every pull of a slot machine has the same odds as every other pull. "Long Runs" and "Due to Pay Off" are fallacies. This has been discussed many times since I've joined this forum.