Once upon a time there were two gamblers who both believed in fairy tales and betting systems. They met at a high stakes Craps table.
âHow you been doing?â said one.
âTerrible,â said the other. âNow according to my betting system, Iâve got to put a thousand dollars on the Pass line. This is the end of the progression, the ultimate bet. But according to the book, this only happens once in a blue moon, so it canât possibly fail.â
âThatâs funny,â said the other. âWe must have read the same book. Iâm in exactly the same situation, except Iâm betting on Donât PassâŚâ
If you have a favorite betting system, and you think that some variation of this story couldnât apply to you, please think again.
Why Betting Systems Donât Work – The Law of Independent Events.
Most gambling games are composed of random âindependent events.â You might flip a coin and get âheadsâ a hundred times in a row. You then might assume you are more likely to get âtails.â But ask yourself this. Does the coin ârememberâ that it just flipped âheadsâ a hundred times? Would it matter if you put the coin away for ten years? Would it even matter if you used a different coin? No. Obviously, the chance of the next âheadsâ is still always 50-50.
How the casino stacks the odds. In a coin toss, because of the law of âindependent events,â no betting system can guarantee a win, even though the odds are exactly 50-50. In a casino, there is not even the same chance. In single-zero online Roulette, for every 18 even-money decisions that cause you to win, there are 19 decisions that cause you to lose. I.e., if you bet on black, there are 18 blacks vs. 18 reds plus one âzero.â
In offline roulette, usually it is twice as bad because there are two zeros. It is these âzerosâ that cause the casino inevitably to come out ahead. In Craps, if you stick to âPassâ or âDonât Pass,â there are about 69 ways to win vs. 70 ways to lose. This makes Craps much better than any Rouletteâbut still on average, âthe more you play the more you lose.â
It doesnât matter if you have lost all day. It doesnât matter if you have won all day. It doesnât matter if you bet $5 on the last game, and now bet $500. It doesnât matter if you have changed tables. In Craps, your chances on that next decision for a line bet always are approximately 69 ways to win vs. 70 ways to lose.
Card Games are Different
Card games are slightly different. The more high or red or even cards are drawn from a deck, the more chances of a low or black or odd card, etc, so long as it is the same deck.
In traditional Blackjack, you can count down the favorable vs. unfavorable cards and even if you do not, on average there is a slightly greater chance of winning after each loss. So long as the deck is not shuffled, a card game is not composed of âindependent events.â
However, this is why the deck is never used to the endâand after a new shuffle, there is little if any relationship to all the games that went before. Also, exactly how much you can know by counting the cards is somewhat limitedâand in online Blackjack, there is a simulated shuffle after every hand.
Therefore whether online or offline, from one shuffle to another, and usually from one hand to another, for all practical purposes, once again you are playing against âindependent events.â
Betting Systems Are Not Helped by Imperfect randomness
If you knew the precise force applied and length of flight time, you might predict a coin toss. Similarly, dice manipulation, âshuffle tracking,â and âwheel timing,â under rare conditions and with great effort, might achieve a bit of predictability for Craps, Blackjack, and Roulette.
In online gambling, hackers sometimes decipher the random generator. Perhaps for a few people, human âintuitionâ might even achieve such things subconsciously. Even so, however, this does not affect the independence of events.
I.e., in a âball-and-cupâ game, the cup-switcher knows which cup the ball is under. If you are eagle-eyed, perhaps you can know also. However, for those who do not know this, if the ball was last seen under cup no. 1, now is it more likely under cup no. 2? No, this is still an âindependent event.â Ten losses in a row still do not make a win more likely. âImperfect randomnessâ and ânon-independent eventsâ are like apples and oranges. Just because you have one, does not imply that you have the other.
Prominent misconceptions
Here I will refute the most prominent types of incomplete logic often used to promote betting systems.
âIf not for table limits, you could keep raising bets until you won.â Baloney. If you lose at a low limit table, you can just move to a high limit table, it doesnât make any difference and it wonât do you any good. Bunionâs Horseshoe is famed for its no-limit Craps.
One wild gambler almost âtook over the casinoâ through luck and daring. Finally he lost and never won like that again. Then there was the man who âbroke the bank at Monte Carloââand then went broke himself, trying to do it again.
Casinos place limits on tables, the better to manage these fluctuations of pure chance, and the better to watch for cheatingâbut not directly to foil systems players.
âJust quit while you are aheadâŚâ Sure thatâs fine if you happen to start out winning. However on average, for every 1,000 times that you start out winning, there will be at least 1,010 times that you start out losing. Thatâs how gambling and the âhouse advantageâ work. On average, the sooner you quit the less you lose so this is good advice. However the best such advice is, âJust donât gamble,â and this certainly wonât help you to win either!
âComputer analysis proves that if you could always raise your bets one unit until you break even, this would require a huge bankroll but you would win.â Well this was not my computer analysis, which proved the opposite. I even invented an improved variation that raised bets more cautiously according to total net loss.
Does it make sense that Harry should bet $500 when he is only $200 behindâmeanwhile Bobby using the same betting system ends up betting $500 when he is $2,000 behindâŚ? When this ambiguity is removed, you actually can play for years with little chance of losing. However as proved by my simulations, you still can lose and it would be quite a lot. Meanwhile even if you win, it would be so little that you would be better off collecting bank interest.
âWatch for the unnatural red-black-black-red pattern, then bet against it happening twice.â I also tested a roulette theory of this type. My long-range simulation results were clearly negative. I then plugged in a record of several thousand decisions from my play at an online casinoâand this also was negative.
Then an enthusiast provided me with a record of thousands of non-virtual roulette decisions. The results were positive. If assured of an accurate record, I wouldnât mind studying this further. However, there was such an extreme scarcity of zero decisions in this record, that it was difficult to believe the record was accurate, even if some âhuman elementâ might have a special effect.
âFor 20 years I never lost with using these betting systems âŚâ Mathematically speaking, some people must exist who are just plain lucky. Also some when examined closely, periodically break their alleged system according to some âintuitiveâ guidanceâi.e., I have discovered that they are not doing what they say they are doing.
Maybe they have somethingâbut this doesnât come from the system and doesnât do you any good. Usually in fact, you eventually will find that the bigger the mouth, the smaller the purse. If they are wealthy, it is more likely from selling the system than from playing with it.
Every day, every casino on earth stakes millions of dollars on the faith that there is no winning systemâand they win. There is no doubt about this, so I would suggest that you pay no attention to doubtful anecdotes from systems players.
Why Betting System Might Work for you
Now that I have somewhat debunked the typical systems player, out of fairness I must apply the same criticism to some of the standard anti-systems rhetoric.
Often you will hear that it is âinevitableâ that âthe odds will kick inâ to defeat the player using betting systems. This is just as false as to say it is âinevitableâ that you must flip âtailsâ after seeing a hundred âheads.â
The fact is, it takes at least 100,000 and preferably 500,000 decisions to be certain of achieving âthe average.â This is more gambling than most people do in a lifetime.
Even then, you are likely to be inaccurate by several thousand decisions. I.e., out of 200,000 coin tosses, you might see 102,241 heads and 97,759 tailsâor vice-versa. These several thousand non-average decisions might never âgo awayââeven after millions of decisions.
They can remain but simply be overwhelmed by the average until they are relatively insignificant.
It may be good advice to say, âLosing is inevitable,â but strictly speaking this is incorrect. If you only play the better games, such as Craps and Blackjack, then it is inevitable that the vast majority will lose gradually according to the averageâit is inevitable that a small minority will lose much faster than averageâand it is equally inevitable that another small minority will not lose.
With this understanding and the right betting systems, so long as your luck falls within the average, you actually might convert a lifetime of gradual losing into winning.
To find out more about this topic, you should read the Big Bet Theory.
Source
Basic strategy will minimize the casino’s advantage in land-based and in online casino blackjack. Below is a ‘universal’ basic strategy, modified very slightly for simplicity. There are more precise variations that require you to change according to the different rules of each casino. However for online blackjack, this is more trouble than it is worth because the improvement in results is not very significant. Print this universal strategy sheet and follow it whenever playing Blackjack at an online casino.