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 :-).

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About Roulette...

Here is one interesting observation that I would like to share as it was something I was bugged with some time ago. In most casinos, they have the screens where they show N=20 or so last numbers that roulette produced. Now having thought about it from a mathematical perspective, one should play the low variance games, i.e. the ones where the chance of loosing are about equal the chances of winning and the payoff is low. This corresponds to betting, say on a color. An alternative clearly is that you can win a lot for the same wager but with much lower probability. Bothe games are (about) the same in expectation but you are much mroe likely to loose all of your money in the latter scenario than in the former, as betting on a, say, "zero" only have a 1/37 or 1/38 chance of being realized versus 18/37 or 18/38 for color betting.

Now suppose that you do bet on color, have fun and stretch out your budget and suddenly look at the screen and notice that it is mostly red, i.e. the last 20 numbers are mostly red and so you should?.... Do what?

Tricky? Tricky. There are several theories about it. One is that the roulette might be biased (hey it is giving the reds!) and so you should bet on the red. Another is that by the Law of Large numbers if the roulette is unbiased (which it likely is), you should expect to see roughly equal amounts of reds and blacks in a big enough sample. The trick here is big enough (and you only see 20) and expect -- variations still possible. Also, the fact that you see a lot of reds could be a compensation for a lot of blacks that you didn't see in the past. So is this information that the casino is eagerly sharing with you really helpful? I don't think so, and you?

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