How dose the house always win? Are they simply cheating?
In: Mathematics
Let’s play a game. We’ll shuffle a deck of cards, and you randomly draw a card. If you draw a black card, I give you a dollar. If you draw a red card, you give me a dollar. If you pull a joker, you give me a dollar.
If we play this game according to the rules, what do you think will happen? If I set these rules, and these are the only rules I will agree to play by, am I cheating? Are these rules fair?
If we play this game, it’s possible that you will only draw black cards, and I will have to give you all my money. But that would be very unlikely. There are just as many black cards as red cards, so you will also pull red cards and have to give me money. In addition, there are also jokers. That means that there are slightly more cards where you pay me. What that means is that over time, if we play many, many rounds, I will win slightly more often than you, and will slowly get all your money.
This is why “the house always wins”. The house makes the rules, and they carefully make the rules such that they win slightly more often than the customer. The house doesn’t win every bet, but they win more bets than they lose, because the rules of the game are always tipped slightly in their favor.
Is that cheating? Is that fair? Well, in general, casinos have to publish their odds. As long as their games stick to those odds, they’re not “cheating”. Is it fair? Well, by gambling in the casino, you agreed to the rules they set. Even if the chances are in their favor, you agreed to it, so that’s “fair” (in some sense).
That said, stay away from casinos. They’ll just suck up your money. If you do go to casinos, set a budget, assume you will lose the entire budget, stop when your budget is depleted, and consider the money spent as your admission fee to play the games.
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