I like maths a lot but most of all I like anything that has to do with a probability. But what really amazes me is how probability is connected to human perception. People are not robots and they don’t act always in a logical way. What sometimes might seem as reasonable can also be impossible if you put it down to numbers. How strong you feel that something might happen is totally different about how possible it is to actually happen. Based on that theory there are a lot of businesses created all over the world. Casinos are one of them.
I don’t know if you have ever been at a casino but if you haven’t you should visit one. Be careful though… go there not for the obvious reason (winning/losing money). Go there to see and analyze how people act knowing the probabilities of winning a game. You will be amazed on how stronger the emotions are from logical thinking.
That being said, I am going to describe my method of playing which most of you will find stupid and boring. I call it “I am very happy once every 18.5 days”. But first let’s do a flashback. Remember when you where a child and you had a small piggy bank? Probably most of you had one and you were collecting money frequently. When there was a special time like your birthday for example you had to broke mr. piggy and you could use the money to buy anything you wanted. Note that you were not disappointed when you put money into mr. piggy because you knew that some day you would take them back but you were very happy once you got them all together.
So this is my method: Play only an amount that you are comfortable of losing (I play 20 euros) and play it only once on the roulette (I split it into two numbers). Believe it or not I am only playing once each time I visit a casino and I don’t go there often. But once every 18.5 times I leave the casino very happy because one of my 10 euro bets gives me 360 euros. The rest of the times I am just leaving the casino happy knowing that the 20 euros were a reasonable amount to spent to have a drink (which by the way is free at the casino). Over time, the experience to be very happy costs you 10 euros for every time you are very happy (this is what the casino makes from paying you 36 times the bet and not 37). Well, that’s the cost of breaking mr. piggy!
But why once every 18.5 times?
Well, obviously if you had split your bet over red or black you would be happy once every two times. But you wouldn’t be much happy. You would just double your money. It would happen more often but you wouldn’t get the excitement of a *36 return on investment:) Depending on how often you visit a casino and how you set your happiness level you might want to change this. On another point of view, if you play at a lottery the most chances are that you won’t win even if you played everyday for 1000 years but if you do win you will be a lot happier than winning 18 times your money at the roulette.
So as a final advice: Setup your happiness levels and don’t play out of them. At a range of 1 to 10, 1 is losing a reasonable amount of money (not more than what you would have paid for a typical night at a bar) and 10 multiplying your money by a great factor. Remember though: Always leave happy. Because if you do the mistake to play that reasonable amount of money several times the same day you won’t leave happy!
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