If a gambler and the casino keep going forever, how come the casino is always the winner?
In: Mathematics
The game is always set up so your odds of winning are slightly less than “the house”‘s odds of winning.
A simple example: imagine there’s a coin toss game in the casino. They would set it up so you make a bet, the dealer matches it, the house keeps 1%, and if you win you get the 199% of your first bet. This sounds really good!
But it means your odds are not 50/50, they are 49/51. If you play this game long-term, you will always leave with less many than you started. You can leave while you are ahead, but if you keep playing you will lose. There are some betting strategies that can mitigate this, but 2 factors prevent that:
1. Casinos usually put a maximum bet at the table.
2. If you follow the betting strategy you very quickly need to be able to bet massive sums like $100,000 to stay ahead.
Every casino game is set up with a little “trick” like that that will make the casino be the winner in the long run. If the game allows players to place bets, there is almost always a rule in place to prevent strategies that always favor the player.
There are some cases like Blackjack where if a person is good at “card counting” and other strategies they can actually beat the house. Casinos are prepared for that, and if a dealer gets suspicious someone is counting cards they are asked to leave the table. If they move to another table and it happens again they are asked to leave the casino.
That’s the final line of defense: if someone starts winning “too much”, every casino intervenes. They either offer to put the person in a comped hotel room to entice them to keep gambling thus lose their winnings *or* they simply ban the person from the casino, assuming they’ve managed to somehow cheat without being detected.
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