The Roulette Caper
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The Roulette Caper
Here is a way of making money in a casino, if you don't mind sitting by a roulette table all evening watching a white ball going round and round inside a spinning wheel before bouncing up and down a bit with a kind of a pingy pongy, clattering sound.
Now this isn't a foolproof, can't lose situation.... but for long enough it
will probably be just that, and statistically you can probably look forward to
many safe evenings at the table. This caper does have a bust in it (naturally),
but on average this happens only once in a blue moon in what would otherwise
actually be a can't lose situation. Let's take a closer look:
The Caper
This little 'procedure' is called a Martingale, and it's a system which works like this:
What you need to start is a pile of gambling chips (naturally), all the same
denomination. You place these all together in your pool.
Next, bet only on a roughly 50-50 situation, such as red or black, or that the
ball will land on an odd number,
or an even number.... as long as it's approximately a 50-50
bet.
So, I'm sure you'll agree that if you lose on a turn, then it won't be long
before you win one, right?
Now to keep it simple, let's bet on just red. All evening.
Now, place one chip on red. Make this the house minimum bet, or at least
such a low bet that its less than 1/200th of the house maximum bet. As for why,
read on... Now let the wheel spin. Suppose you win. Great! That's what
we're here for. You get your chip back, plus one chip from the house.
Place this chip that you won, in a separate collection called your bank.
And don't worry, it won't have to come back out of there until you decide to
cash it in.
But what if you lose? Well that's where it gets interesting...
If you lose, double your next bet -- bet 2 chips. And then, if you win, your previous loss will also come back to you!
Likewise, if you lose again -- double up again, bet 4 chips. And if you lose again, bet 8 chips. And if you lose yet again, bet 16 chips, etc.
But remember, each bet is approximately 50-50 so it won't be long before you win one, and all your previous losses will come back to you with that win.
Now, after you win one -- go back to the beginning and bet one chip.
And that's all there is to it. Bet one chip after each win, and double up after each loss until you win one.
If there is enough in your pool to cover a particularly unlucky run of consecutive losses, and if the upper limit for a bet is very high (casino rules) -- you can't lose. I would recommend that the ratio between the house's upper bet limit and lower bet limit is at least 200, (i.e. min bet $10, max bet $2,000). This is so that you can keep doubling up during a bad run, without hitting the house ceiling.
Ok let's practice (you don't need a wheel).
From a deck of cards, take out 18 red cards, 18 black ones, and a joker (for the
0). That's your roulette wheel. Now get a bag of pennies to use as your pool and
another bag for the casino. Now shuffle the pack and randomly pick a card. Red or black?
Then just follow the rules. Bet 1 after each win and double up after each loss
until you win a game.
Too good to be true?
Very certainly yes in the long run, almost certainly no in the short. Remember that 'bust' situation? I shall explain...
Now suppose the house minimum bet is $10, and suppose you are very unlucky and have a straight run of, say, 8 consecutive losses, meaning that you lose $1,280 on your last bet. Now this is very unlikely (only 1 single chance in 256). But to get it all back, your next bet, another double up, will have to be $2,560. But suppose the upper house limit for a bet is only $2000? You're not exactly screwed, because you can still bet the $2000 .... but you won't now get all your losses back if you win, and suppose you lose again? Then you are screwed.... wiped out. Let's call this the Big Bang.
Now statistically there's a 50 per cent chance of this every 143 games. Averaging your results out, from one spin to the next you will win 18/37 ths or about 48.6 per cent of the time (because the wheel has 37 numbers on it, 18 of which are red), meaning that if your basic bet is $10 (i.e. you're using $10 chips, 1 chip = $10), your average return, per game, win or lose, works out at $4.86 (plus your $10 back). So in this example, by the time the Big Bang happens, on average after your 143rd game, you will have won approximately 143 lots of $4.86 = $695 -- but then the Big Bang will cost you a fixed $2,560, which is all that you wagered over the last 8 losses ($10 + $20 + $40 + $80 .... 8 bets) -- an overall loss of $1,865.
Now the Big Bang, which again is a run of 8 straight losses of almost 50-50 each, could happen at any time, but at just 1 chance in 256 per game, you'd have to be extremely unlucky if it happened too soon, and in the meantime you can only coin it in, in what is otherwise a no-lose situation. Mind you, having said that I once began one evening and ran at once into a Big Bang. Another time, however, it just didn't want to happen and after 2 days I cashed out (online betting this time) with $14,850 from basic $10 bets.
Ok...recap time.... bet 1 after each win, double up after each loss, make sure the casino's upper betting limit is at least, say, 200 times the minimum bet, so that you can keep doubling up without hitting the ceiling before your next win, and have enough in your pool to begin with, so that you can ride out a bad run. But remember.... the iceberg is out there and it's got Big Bang written on it.
So it's a case of coining it in before that happens.
A small modification to the Caper -- the Can't Lose Supercaper.
At this point perhaps I should still say 'almost' can't lose because there still remains a 1 in a trillion chance that
you could lose every single game until your dying day.
Now remember that the reason you Big Bang is because you have hit the house's upper limit for a single bet, so you can't keep doubling up until you win one. But if you could just keep doubling up, without limit, then it's only a matter of time before you win one, which will return all your losses --- and so, in the end, you can't lose.
There is a way, however, of raising the maximum house bet limit without the house even knowing. Having 2 or 3 accomplices sat around the table will effectively triple or quadruple the house limit. If you hit the ceiling with an exceptionally bad run, then your accomplices, who are keeping an eye on your game, can place bets themselves, secretly on your behalf, which takes your total bet way above the house limit.
For example suppose you lose 8 in a row, very unlikely but it does happen. You would now need to double up yet again, and bet $2,560 but the house upper limit is only $2000. So you place $2,000 and your accomplice, seeing all this, places $560 down on red, the same as your bet, to bring your total bet up to $2,560. In this way you can keep going. You just defused your Big Bang. If you lose again, you may need a further accomplice so that you can keep doubling up ... but given the funds, you are Big Bang proof, and so again, in the end you can't lose.
Just to make it interesting!
Now here's a little extra thing that I do. Once you've been playing for an hour
or two,
and your bank (winnings) has built up, take a few chips from your bank and place
them on single numbers on the wheel at 36/1, just as a sideshow. If you win.... whoopee! And if you
lose, remember it's the
casino's money
you just lost (remember your bank contains the casino's money that you
won, while your
own, original money is in your pool) -- and before long your bank will have
built up again. So effectively you keep getting a free shot at a big win.
Apart from all this there is also of course the possibility of bagging a rich partner, a common occurrence at these places!
So, get your deck of cards and your bag of pennies out, get some experience -- and welcome to your latest boring pastime! (Apart from the rich partner. That might not be too boring).
--- Michael Alan Marshall
Note: Other safe bets.
It's often said that there's no way to beat the house in gambling. But that's
not actually true and there are of course professional gamblers, usually
qualified in math and in game theory, who exploit this for their livelihood. But
without going into the complexities of their various modi operandi, here are a
few suggestions which anyone can do:
1.... Soccer. Just bet on Glasgow Rangers, not to lose (i.e. win or draw). Every match. Same wager for each home game, half that for each away game and avoid matches against Celtic. Apart from Rangers and Celtic, everyone else in Scottish football is generally of a significantly lower standard and statistics over recent seasons reveal a profit for each season if you do this.
2.... Horse racing. Bet on the current Champion Jockey for a place. Never, ever back a horse to win -- in case it doesn't! Most punters don't know anything like as much about horses as they need to -- but the jockey does. He knows which horses to accept for a ride, based on the distance, the going, the handicap, etc., and he knows which tactics and strategies to employ from one race to the next. That's why he's the Champion Jockey. Naturally you won't win them all, but you should show a profit over the season.
3.... Phone-in tv talent shows. These are about the closest thing you will ever see, to betting on a certainty, (apart from finding crossed odds -- see below). You see, at the bookies, the favourite, second favourite, etc, in the talent show are sorted out according to how many people are placing bets on each. But then on the night of the final, the viewing audience votes for each contestant, and declares its own 1st, 2nd and 3rd in the contest. But as any statistician will tell you, if the sample sizes are large enough, i.e. millions of tv voters and millions of betting punters, the 1st 2nd and 3rd will be the same at the bookies as the result was on the show. This is not only because, no matter whether they vote or not, the overall sympathy among the great mass of the people, for this contestant or that, will even out to be the same between the viewing population and the betting population if the populations are large enough, it's also because the same public placed their bets, and then rang in and voted on the show. And so, the next time there is one of these talent shows, go to the bookies earlier on the day of the final, and look at the 1,2,3 posted on the betting board. Although the final hasn't happened yet -- you are probably looking at the result.
4.... Crossed odds. This is a situation which, if you can find one, is an absolute, cast iron, 100 per cent cert. Empty your bank account, mortgage the house, take a out a huge loan.... It works like this: to keep it simple suppose there are two teams, A and B, in a sports event such as a tennis match or a soccer game which has to be decided on penalties at the end...ie no draw is possible. Now suppose you go in the bookies and A is 3/1 to win, while B is even money 1/1. Now put $10 on A and $25 on B. If A wins, you win $30 and lose $25 (so you're up $5), and if B wins you win $25 and lose $10 (so you're up $15). But in the real world, of course, no self-respecting, competent bookie would ever set such odds; he'd be filing for bankruptcy within a week. However, if you shop around, different bookies, you might be able to get the odds on A from one bookie and the odds on B from another. After all, the bookies vary their odds depending on how much money is going onto A and B -- which will be different from one betting shop to the next. And so, as a bookie tweaks his odds a little bit to cover himself, he may create a crossed-odds situation between himself and another bookie. Now back in the day, the bookies were all generally small businesses, independent of each other, and it was often possible to shop around and find crossed odds. But these days the bookies are almost all franchised, and get their odds from a single centralized source. This means that finding crossed odds between 2 bookies is becoming extremely difficult. But nevertheless, if you can find them, once in a blue moon -- sell everything and get yourself down the bookies.
Professional gamblers know all this -- but (apart from crossed odds) its amazing how many bookies don't and in the main they don't generally care, because they make all their money from ordinary, uninformed people in their millions who just fancy a flutter.