Won $110 in 2 hours yesterday.

[Cardcounter]

I know the house always has the advantage. What I don't get is why people always say, "you will eventually lose money in the long run because of the house advantage." A buddy of mine is like +2000 dollars over the past 2 months. What prevents a player from winning $100 or more each time they go to the casino? It doesn't seem impossible.

Yes, like I said, I understand the house has the advantage and you're expected to lose, but I just don't understand why everyone says you will lose money in the long run. Are you just basing that statement on the house advantage? I can see a player going and winning over $100 each time. I've seen my friend do it so far.

You are looking at too short of a period of time if you play long enough with a disadvantage the variance will get smaller and smaller and it will become impossible to win overall. When you play for 1 or 2 hours there is high level of variance that allows disadvantage gambler to come out ahead. If you play for 1000 to 2000 hours the variance goes way down compared to the amount of money wagered.
If you flip a coin and get heads twice in a row that doesn't mean that you can get a 100 heads in a row which is almost impossible.

 

[Canceler]

Every time you go to the casino, it's a new day. If you win $100 one day, what exactly is going to stop you from winning $100 the next time you go. And the next? And the next? It's a new day each time you go.

Continuing in the same vein as shadroch…

Does something magical happen overnight? Or could I came back in say 12 hours and win another $100?

How about 6 hours?

What if I go have dinner, and then come back?

What if I step outside the casino, and then turn around and come back in?

What if I get up from the table, walk around my chair, and then sit back down?

Now, you may think I’m being silly here. All you have to do is explain why it’s silly.

 

[sagefr0g]

I disabree,"fat tail" events as described in Black Swan are focusing on markets an other systems which are more complicated where basic statistics can't model it.

doesn't sound like you disagree. point being what happens in a casino can be modeled via the gaussian stuff. so where's the luck isn't it all expected? and really luck is constrained to the sense of black swans sort of things if you want to take Taleb's view.

Cards, on the other hand, tend to fall nicely into gaussian distributions, and can be modeled by people who passed and remembered their college statistics class.

exactly.

So, in conclusion, over the short term, it's all luck.

i'd agree it might be construed as fortuitous one way or the other. but if you go there don't you need to introduce human perception, judgement, thought and wisdom into the mix? lol we don't do that in advantage play.

sounds as if you perhaps in agreement with Taleb would banish the concept of luck (as envisioned by Taleb) from casinos but you still want to call it luck. lol.
me i just don't know. it would seem a casino is just a part of the world just like everything else and what ever the heck a madelbrotian view of it would be (totally lost here lol ) needn't rule out the concept of luck as envisioned by Taleb in the financial world. (lol, haven't even finished the book so i'm not sure what i'm talking about).
the point being say if one even wanted to even entertain a fantasy of enjoying luck (black swan in nature sort of thing maybe a mini black swan) in a casino maybe it would need to use the element of standard deviation but also some way of trapping or at least protecting it should it be realized.
that would be precluding other fortuitous events such as stumbling upon some hole card weak game, shuffle trackable tables what ever.
i'm more interested in just plain ole card counting or worse (aka fuzzy counting & fuzzy betting) and the possibility of taking advantage of fortuitious events. the really only thing i can imagiine with regard to that area would be standard deviation and perhaps switching up on how one exposes one's self to risk via card counting. or maybe another possibility is shooting for some goal and actually making it then switching to some other method to protect that goal sort of thing. so i'm not really sure if that's reasonable or possible. so but if was possible then it free's up the advantage of card counting to allow judgement, thought and wisdom. wisdom being one of Taleb's points regarding black swans i believe.
so yeah it's just a semantic distinction i think as to what a couple of people discussing luck really mean by the word luck. that's why i started the thread over in voodoo land. lol where it belongs.
i appreciate that you took the trouble to responde and didn't take offense at the grasshopper joke oh great and mighty Rhino.

 

[sagefr0g]

I still don't completely understand this.

Every time you go to the casino, it's a new day. If you win $100 one day, what exactly is going to stop you from winning $100 the next time you go. And the next? And the next? It's a new day each time you go.

Sure, the house advantage basically says that you will lose in the long run, but it doesn't seem impossible to actually WIN in the long run either. Like I said, it's a new day each time you go play, and it's possible to win something on each of those days.

it's not impossible just improbable.
cards don't care what day it is.

 

[EasyRhino]

Every time you go to the casino, it's a new day. If you win $100 one day, what exactly is going to stop you from winning $100 the next time you go. And the next? And the next? It's a new day each time you go.

This explanation is going to take two different tacks, one with flat betting and one with your money management systems. While I want to emphasize that money management systems don't work, they do have measurable effects.

Flat betting, any session you have in the casino, you're more likely to lose than win. Let's say 51% of your sessions will be losses, and 49% will be wins. The wins and losses will be of similar mangnitude. So, do this every day for a year, and you'll almost definitely have a net loss.

Using your system, you have a better chance of having winning sessions than losing. For simplicity, let's say it's 75% winning sessions, and 25% losing sessions (I have no idea, I just made that up). The downside is that your losing sessions are going to be more than three times as big as your winning sessions. On a dollar-weighted basis, over a year, you'll still have a net loss.

 

[blackjack avenger]

Time Will Tell

As soon as you play a few days you will realize you cannot win everyday.

A progression won't win everyday.
Playing basic strategy won't win everyday.
A highly skilled card counter won't win everyday.

How many have stated you cannot win everyday?

 

[Kasi]

Can you come out ahead playing BJ? Yes,but not by only using BS.I forget the exact number,but the chances of a flat-betting BS player being ahead after 1,000 hours of play are astronomical. If you feel that lucky,you might want to buy a lottery ticket.

Of course you're right in what you say. But sometimes I think the amount of time involved to still be ahead, and the lilklihood of it happening are underestimated.

Like a flat-betting BS player being ahead after 100,000 hands wouldn't be much more than 1 stand dev. So he could still be ahead 12% of the time - be that one lucky player out of every 8. Heck that could be 4+ years of play at 8 hours a week. At a full table lol. Pick up just 100 flat-bet units in those 100,000 hands, obviously this involves, we'll call it in this forum "varying bet size" lol, and your chances increase to 18%. Pick up 450 flat units and you're a favorite to be ahead after 100,000 hands. If those were $10 units, and you chose to switch to a $5 table and flat-bet, you'd have a 90% chance of being ahead in your next 100,000 hands.

Even 200,000 hands, would be less than 2 stan dev, about a 1 in 20 chance. Heck, as luck would have it, I'd be up 200+ flat-bet units in 200,000 hands, had I actually flat-bet every hand, on the internet. It wouldn't be anywhere near 2 stan dev though as most of it was in a much better game than "real-life" games. I picked up enough avg flat-bet units that if I switched my unit to $1, from this point forward, I could play over 9,000,000 hands and still have a 50-50 chance of still being ahead. But that's another subject.

Back to a flat-betting BS player lol, being ahead after 300,000 hands would only be about 2 stand dev, so still better than a 1 in 50 chance.

Being ahead after 650000 hands might be about 3 stan dev. So maybe 1 in 700+ now.

And that might already be more than many might play in a lifetime.

Whether "short-term" or "long-term", whether a flat-betting BS player or a card-counter, it's always luck. Fortunately, it's "luck" that can be reasonably, if not "exactly" lol, measured.

If one can't measure the "luck" after 1 hours play, how is one going to do it 1000 hours later?

I'd say the shorter the sessions the better off you are to see how lucky you were. Certainly it gets pretty messy if a BS player starts playing all kinds of diferent size bets just as it does when a card-counter starts steaming or suddenly changes bets in high counts but the sooner you get to figuring out your luck the more likely you can take a guess at things and maybe adjust for some crazy plays.

 

[hawkeye]

I've had 4 or 5 short sessions in a row where I was up 5-10 units each time and I thought I had stumbled upon a gold mine. Twice in a row after those times I sat down and lost every single hand straight through 15-20 units and I was blown away.

Luck happens. My wife won over $550 playing slots today. That wasn't one pull, that was over a 2.5 hours period of playing tons of slots. It happens, luck that is.

 

[N&B]

Its even luck when you have a 1% edge... statistically that is. However in that infamous long run you stand to be ahead 1% on average. Basic is a loser in the long run, but not nearly as bad as guessing.

My take on the 'human' long run is 10 million hands in a lifetime. Computers... well, 10 Billion is a good start.