If a gambler and the casino keep going forever, how come the casino is always the winner?
In: Mathematics
Because the games they play are balanced in their favor.
Take roulette, for example. If you bet on a single number, the payout is 35-1. Bet $100, win $3,500. But there are actually 37 or 38 numbers on a roulette table, depending on location, because they’ll add a 0 and sometimes also a 00 to the wheel. So you aren’t going to win 1 out of every 36 bets, you’ll win 1 out of every 37 or 38. And that’s true for every other bet as well. Betting on a red or black number pays 1:1, but it’s not a 50/50 shot, because the 0’s are green and either bet will lose if one of those comes up. You can, of course, bet the 0’s if you want, but their odds follow the same pattern as well. The payout is less than the true odds, so given enough time, the casino will win on average.
Every casino game works the same way – if you compare the payout to the “true odds” of a particular spin of a wheel or roll of a dice, you’ll find that the payout is always less than the actual odds. There are only small exceptions – blackjack card counting works by finding a game with good rules (how many decks, how long between shuffles, how much a blackjack pays out, etc.) and increasing your bet when there are more “good cards” left in the shoe than bad cards. But even then, the odds are only slightly in the player’s favor, and they still have a chance of losing big on any given day, even if they might win over the long term.
An individual person might win in the short term, but the casinos know that whatever one person wins, they’ll make back from the dozens of other players lose. And, of course, it’s fairly likely that the person who wins will still keep playing and wind up losing the next time they play. They set the rules of the game, and they set them in their favor.
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