I
was reading some posts in one of the gambling chatrooms on the internet
and people were expressing their various money management techniques
for playing casino games. Each poster took turns describing his own
self-styled method of "turning the odds in his favor".
One
person emphasized the importance of quitting while ahead. Another painstakingly
detailed his "push/pull" method of betting. The variations
went on and on.
Finally,
somebody logged on and asked which betting method would be the best
way to double his money at the roulette wheel. I didn't hang around
for any replies, but the answer to that question is very simple: just
bet all your money on the first spin – and never play again!
Sound
too wild and crazy? Let me put it to you this way. Roulette carries
over a 5% house advantage with an inanimate wheel that never has any
numbers removed from it. You just can't overcome that. If you bet on
"red", you have a 47.5% chance to win your first bet. The
longer you keep on betting, the more likely it becomes that you'll win
47.5% of all your bets – making you a loser. After 10 bets, there's
roughly a 40% chance you'll be ahead. If you bet 50 times, you're down
to a 35% shot. After a long while, you'll have almost no chance at all.
So your best shot at doubling your money is to step up to the table
and go "all in" – then leave, win or lose.
The
thing of it is, this gambling principle doesn't apply just to roulette.
It applies to any game where you have an overall disadvantage. At the
beginning of a playing session, a little good luck may put you out in
front. But as time goes by, luck has less and less to do with it while
the real percentages begin to take over.
Because
this is true (and for a few other reasons), all "money management"
betting systems go for naught. All this nonsense about sizing your wagers
according to how you're doing, or using strategic quit points to end
your session are just that – nonsense. They can't improve your
year-end bottom line one iota.
Okay,
I know that wagering your whole stake on the first bet is not a very
fun way to play, whatever your game. You'd like to stay in the hunt
a while. That's why gamblers devise so many different betting strategies.
Just understand that none of them can help you become an overall winner.
No
doubt, many of you reading this just aren't buying it. Down deep inside,
you feel there must be some way to manage your money so as to turn a
disadvantageous game into an advantage. Many past articles in these
columns have dissected and exposed the futility of betting progressions,
so I won't revisit that area of money management today. But I will present
an interesting riddle to challenge those of you who insist it pays to
quit when you're ahead. It's called...
The
Quit Winners Riddle: You and your friend work at the same office and
agree to bet on the flip of a coin every afternoon during your coffee
break. You'll play for $1 per flip – even money. You can quit
anytime you want, be it after the very first flip, or when your 20-minute
coffee break is over.
Being
a staunch believer in quitting when you're ahead, you decide in advance
that you'll quit anytime you get one bet in front for the day, then
come back tomorrow with the same game plan in mind. Using this rigid
"money management" technique, it's a fact that you'll actually
end up a winner on over 80% of your coffee breaks. But the important
question is, what will be your financial status in this game at the
end of a 25-year career?
Answer:
Chances are you'll be even, within a couple tenths of one percent. How
can that be if you were a winner over 80% of the time?
Having
more winning days than losing days is no big trick. Since you'll generally
find yourself ahead at some point on the vast majority of the days you
gamble, all you have to do is quit right then. In fact, you can almost
select whatever session win frequency you want.
If
you quit every time you got either one flip ahead or one behind, all
your sessions would be just one flip long and you'd win 50% of them.
If your stop-loss point was two units while still quitting whenever
you got one unit ahead, it can be easily demonstrated that you'd win
66.6% of your sessions – but – each losing session would
be two units vs. one unit for each winning session. And if you put no
ceiling on your daily losses, but still quit the instant you got ahead,
your session win rate would climb to over 80%. Through it all though,
the one thing you can't get away from is that you're eventually going
to end up winning 50% of your flips. And where does that put you?
Quitting
just to lock up a winning day amounts to stopping and admiring our progress
at a favorable hand chosen interval, without altering that progress.
It's like driving down a long hilly road towards an ultimate destination.
We can nearly always choose to stop and rest on a hill rather than in
a valley – but the road is still taking us to the same place.
This
article is provided by the Frank Scoblete Network, John Robisonmanaging
editor. If you would like to use this article on your websiteplease
contact Casino City Press, the exclusive web syndication outlet forthe
Frank Scoblete Network.
