On Dec 31, 2008, at 4:06 AM, Terry Blanton wrote:
On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 1:45 AM, Horace Heffner
<[email protected]> wrote:
On Dec 30, 2008, at 3:13 PM, Jones Beene wrote:
At casinos, over 999 out of 1000 regular players are net losers.
That is
no secret. And it is of almost no deterrence to the losers.
Those odds are not fixed, but vary with time gambling.
Except where required by law:
http://www.insidervlv.com/slotspayouts.html
Terry
No! No! No! I see I have somehow miscommunicated, despite the
obviousness of what I am saying.
The percentage of losers in a fixed population *increases with time
gambling* with a very high probability. Not only does the percentage
of losers increase with sufficient time, if each gambler starts with
some finite amount of money (a necessity because there is a finite
amount of money in the world), then the number of *broke* gamblers in
a fixed population also trends upward with time.
When you say 999 out of 1000 regular players are losers, that implies
*an approximate amount of time* gambling. The longer the time
interval, the higher the probability of an even larger percentage of
losers. The longer the time interval of playing slots for a given
population, the higher the probability *everybody goes broke*,
assuming the payout is not equal to or greater than 100%. I think
the amounts of time required for a given population of gamblers to go
broke is much shorter than most people realize.
The casino takes (expectancy) for video poker, keno and slots in the
list you provided varies from roughly 6% to 8%, which is even worse
than roulette, which can be 5.263 percent. Below are some fairly
precise probabilites for a bettor with a 10 bet purse playing at a
house percentage of 5.263 percent:
Number of bets in better's starting purse 20
House percentage = 5.263 percent
Bet Prob. Alive Expected Value
---- -------------- ---------------
100 0.881083267382 14.891433066690
200 0.619848498510 10.952448130541
300 0.435274926086 8.199805170679
400 0.313261560357 6.245178037378
500 0.230621461565 4.823106110599
1000 0.062016797315 1.514700202615
2000 0.007334798455 0.206508730270
3000 0.001127300806 0.034033899035
4000 0.000195968405 0.006173086380
5000 0.000036627971 0.001187554885
6000 0.000007182650 0.000237810615
6900 0.000001707388 0.000057358537
The roulette gambler at a 5.263 percent house take and a $100 to bet
at $5 a bet can expect to be
broke in less than 3 hours. In fact, from the table, you can see that
at bet 300, about 3 hours, he
has a 43.5274926086 percent chance of being alive. He has about 1.7
chances in a million of
lasting 6900 bets, or about 69 hours of betting during the month, and
only a small fraction of a cent
expected purse value by that time.
At $5 a bet and 100 bets an hour he can be expected to lose 0.05263 *
$5/bet * 100 bets/hour =
$26.32 per hour. If he has 100 hours to gamble in the month, and does
so, he can be expected to
lose about $2,632 per month. The estimated 100 bets per hour may be
high, and a lower bet rate
will reduce the expected loss per hour.
The above numbers also reflect what happens to a population of
similar bettors. If that population is a thousand gamblers, then the
probable time involved to reach only 1 remaining gambler not broke is
less than the time it takes to make 4000 bets. At 100 bets per hour
that is a mere 40 hours of gambling. At 7000 bets less than one in a
million of those gamblers can be expected to survive. Some machines
have betting rates higher than 100 per hour, so the gamblers go broke
much faster.
I think it would be a great idea for a big hotel to sponsor a two
week slots tournament for 1000 competitors. Give each competitor a
20 bet purse and the last competitor broke wins. When it gets down
to the final few competitors film it all for broadcast. Each
contestant pays $100 to enter. Winner takes all the booty,
$100,000. The sponsoring hotel gets the room rents plus broadcast
fee. The hotel might have to plan for the possibility of a much less
than 2 week stay on average.
Again, for a more complete discussion, see:
http://mtaonline.net/~hheffner/Gambling.pdf
http://tinyurl.com/7arsxo
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
