I'm sorry, Horace. I understood. I was merely pointing out that luck plays no part with the one-armed bandits over time. Slot machine income is quite predictable.
But a friend just returning from Lost Wages says that the Casinos there are empty. She said that she was inundated with free drink and meal chits while she played slots. Terry On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 11:33 AM, Horace Heffner <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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/ > > > > >
