Turning Interests into Hobbies, Part 2

A few months ago I went to Atlantic City for a bachelor party and ended up losing a good amount of money. The first day I played slots and lost hundreds. The second day I played slots and lost again, then I switched to blackjack and ended up making $100 after about eight straight hours of playing.

This experience taught me two things:
1) I like gambling.
2) I hate losing money.

These two, I've found, are not mutually exclusive. If you put in the effort to learn the strategies and mathematics behind every game you want to play, you can identify favorable tables/machines and situations and reduce the house edge to the bare minimum.

Apart from researching the games and memorizing strategies, I am learning how to spot favorable bets, manage my bankroll, minimize risk, quit while ahead, and cover my play so I can keep coming back to the casinos and (hopefully) keep winning.

Gambling author Bob Dancer has this to say:

"In general terms, succeeding at gambling is not significantly different from succeeding at anything else. This was the toughest lesson to learn. Since gambling was so exciting and glamorous and inviting, I figured there just had to be special secrets for success. I've learned that this simply isn't true. To be sure, there are specific things you must learn, such as always splitting aces and eights in blackjack. But that's just one little detail. Overall, the secret is to study harder than everyone else, concentrate on what you're doing, save your money, and keep your mind and body fit" (Dancer 2003:20).

Just as I'm studying sociology, I'm studying gambling. And I find that the two are not unrelated.

In sociology, concepts such as the Central Limit Theorem and Law of Large Numbers come into play when discussing statistical sampling. Generally, the bigger the sample, the more likely some parameter of the sample equals the "true" expected value of the population parameter. For instance, if you wanted to know how the people of Maryland feel about a particular candidate or law or issue, you could ask one random person, or a dozen, or hundreds, or thousands; the more people you poll, the closer the average of their opinions will be to that of all of Maryland.

The same concepts are at work in games of chance. The longer you play (that is, the larger the sample), the closer your results will get to the mathematical "true" expected value. Most games have a house edge, which means a negative EV as time/hands/plays goes to infinity, which means you should expect to lose money in the long run.

In sociology, you typically want the LARGEST possible sample so you can get as close to the expected value as possible. In gambling, you typically want the SMALLEST possible sample so you can stay as far from the expected value as possible. The more random chance a game has, the less you should play it. And in all cases, you should learn how to quit when ahead and when "ahead" is enough ahead.

There are many books on the subject, and I've read a few over the past couple months. I've been to a couple casinos and I'm keeping a journal to track my results, note my mistakes and their bearing on each outcome, and figure out how to improve my performance.

Most importantly, I know my limits and I'm careful not to exceed them. For all the work I've put into studying gambling, and figuring the math myself so I understand it, and learning the strategies, and practicing them for hours before wagering a single dollar, and tracking my mistakes, and reading up on all the psychological aspects, I already have something to show for it. And I've had a lot of fun so far.

Dancer, Bob. 2003. Million Dollar Video Poker. Las Vegas, NV: Huntington Press.