Can you win in Las Vegas? by Dmitry Pavlov

Added January 26, 2006

Dmitry Pavlov

I guess the answer is clear, you can, with Lady Luck being in love with you. However, if Lady Luck is not your type of girl (or vice versa which is alas more likely), is there anything you can do? I would like to offer you a strategy and a couple of thoughts for consideration, and these got to be akin the ones you can buy in a fight on Ebay :-).

Page 2

and a Little bit of Math...

All right, lets start with the definitions. We play blackjack (house has the least edge) and So let me toss out a few numbers just to support the ideas above. Assuming in every session you are looking to make a profit of 1$, the session of length N will require you to wager the following amounts wager(1)=1$, wager(N+1)=wager(N)+..+wager(1)+1$. The addition of all previous wagers is needed to recoup the losses of the previous wagers in a session, while the extra buck is to make a profit of 1$. It is easy to see that this series 1 2 4 8 16 32 ... is a geometric progression 2^{N-1}, and in case you are not well familiar with it, here is a Wikipedia link. One of the properties of this progression is that it grows very fast (i.e. read you wager grows very fast), and you will have to come up with 512$ if you want to try winning in the 10th game (i.e. read you lost the previous 9!). And if you still keep going, you will be looking at wagering a million at the 20th unsuccessful game. Now, if you, like casino, had unlimited resources, it won't matter, cause eventually you are going to win back all the losses and make 1$ but I doubt you are going to be in good mood to risk a million for that.

Finally, before you try it out, let me cover how likely it is that you will not make a single win in N games. As I mentioned above, you should play a decent strategy, maybe not like a pro but decently, meaning that the chances of your winning each time are going to be close to 50/50. Say, the probability of your winning is 0.49, a good round number as one of my friends say. This is just to give the house a little edge. Now if you loose N times and the games are independent (they probably are), then you are looking at (1-0.49)^N (to the power of N) chance that you are going to not win in N consecutive independent games, which means that the chances are dropping exponentially, so that not winning a single time out of 20 consecutive games is going to be close 0.000001, which is pretty small, however not impossible.

Of note also the limit that most tables in casino are going to have, and I am talking about the upper, not the lower limit. The upper limit is going to play the role of early stopper so that you may never actually bet a million to win a buck.

Try the Demo! and see how it works in practice!

Read on for advice on Slots and Roulette...

Shop for Win In Vegas books and products on Amazon!

Page 1 Page 2 Demo! Page 3 Page 4