Is Gambling for Idiots?

I recall something about guy trying to sue a casino because this one big super-jackpot slot machine had been stingy for longer than one would expect from the odds. Of course, it was actually the laws of probability being stingy.
 
Tax stupidity

I once heard someone refer to the lottery as a tax on stupid people.

I think that when gamblers expect or hoping to win, it's just another form of woo (games of skill excluded). Do the science and math and it's obvious gambling loses in the long run. If you believe you are for some reason privileged above the millions of losers and will be the one in ten million player who wins, your only defense is faith in the supernatural.

One could argue that legal gambling is win-win. Taxing it brings dollars to social programs, and it can financially cripple people who believe they are supernaturally privileged.
 
Mr. Scott said:
I once heard someone refer to the lottery as a tax on stupid people.

I think that when gamblers expect or hoping to win, it's just another form of woo (games of skill excluded). Do the science and math and it's obvious gambling loses in the long run. If you believe you are for some reason privileged above the millions of losers and will be the one in ten million player who wins, your only defense is faith in the supernatural.

One could argue that legal gambling is win-win. Taxing it brings dollars to social programs, and it can financially cripple people who believe they are supernaturally privileged.
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as has been pointed out many people play the lottery not expecting to win, but for the chance to win.....
you're basically paying for hope.....for which £1 a week doesn't strike me as too obscene......so if anything the lottery rather than being a tax on stupidity, is a tax on people who need hope.....
 
Here's my strategy for the very few times I've gone gambling.

I walk into the casino with some money in my left pocket that I'm willing to spend (lose) for the sake of entertaining myself. As I play, any money I happen to win goes in my right pocket. When my left pocket is empty, I'm done, regardless of how much is in my right pocket.

Sometimes I'm ahead, sometimes I'm behind, but at least I always leave fully clothed and in possession of the deed to my house.
 
Slot machines are to me like training an animal to do something. I use operant conditioning to get a horse, llama whatever, to do what I want it to do, and the animal does it eagerly. I use a food reward for the animal, but I don't reward every single time; you get a stronger response from the animal if the reward is intermittent.

Slot machines are set up to reward intermittently, just like in operant conditioning. This is one of the reasons they hold no appeal for me. :D It reminds me too much of me teaching a horse something.
 
Cuddles said:
Has anyone ever trained a horse to use a slot machine? :D
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:D A horse would never do such a silly thing. What horse in its right mind wants a bunch of round hard flat things you can't eat?

Now, if you could get one that dispensed horse cookies........
 
Cuddles said:
Has anyone ever trained a horse to use a slot machine? :D
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Hmm I am seeing an interesting possible experiment with chimps and cookie based slot machines, but I don't think it would work. Animals just seem to not have the ammount of forsite to not eat the starting ammount and risk it for more.

I am basing this on an experiment I saw where a chimp was choosing how many gumdrops a different chimp got. There where two quantities and which ever it choose was given to a different chimp. It failed to gain the reasoning that reaching for the smaller number would give it more, as greed always won out when presented with the gumdrops. When shown numbers it learned to choose the lesser one as that resulted in it getting more gumdrops.

Still if you can get male chips to forgo getting food to look at pictures of female chimp's butts, mabey you could set up chimp gambling.
 
SwissSkeptic said:
Umm, no. The slot machine doesn't have a memory.

ETA: Argh! Beaten not only once, but twice!
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I know slot machines don't have a memory. But they run on odds just like everything else in a casino. If you sit long enough you can figure a estimation of what the odds are on a given slot machine, and then figure out an "estimated" number of times its going to take to win. You can't honestly say that its just three wheels spinning with a bunch of pretty pictures on it that just randomly arrange themselves each time. They have odds programmed into the slot machines. Do you think a casino would give the gambler the chance to have better odds than the house... Hell no. Thats why you sit there and let the "drones":) flush their quarters away and step in when the time is right.
 
MilwaukeeMike said:
You can't honestly say that its just three wheels spinning with a bunch of pretty pictures on it that just randomly arrange themselves each time. They have odds programmed into the slot machines.
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They have the odds programmed into the slot machines so that they will (pseudo)randomly arrange themselves. Unless you can reverse engineer the seed number or whatever used as the basis, you don't know when you'll win.

1/100 odds doesn't mean that it'll go off every 100th time.
 
MilwaukeeMike said:
I know slot machines don't have a memory. But they run on odds just like everything else in a casino. If you sit long enough you can figure a estimation of what the odds are on a given slot machine, and then figure out an "estimated" number of times its going to take to win. You can't honestly say that its just three wheels spinning with a bunch of pretty pictures on it that just randomly arrange themselves each time. They have odds programmed into the slot machines. Do you think a casino would give the gambler the chance to have better odds than the house... Hell no. Thats why you sit there and let the "drones":) flush their quarters away and step in when the time is right.
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The gambler's fallacy:
"The gambler's fallacy is the mistaken notion that the odds for something with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending upon recent occurrences."
 
Mike, if you flip a fair coin 100 times in a row and it comes up heads every time, what is the chance the next flip will be heads?

Answer: 50%, exactly the same if the last 100 was all tails, was HTHTTHTTTTTHH..., or any sequence.

Same with the machine. If a chump loses on that machine 1000 pulls in a row, and then you walk up and pull the arm (I know, nobody uses the arms anymore), your chance of success is still exactly the same as that last chump.

There is no such thing as stepping in when the time is right.
 
andyandy said:
is there skill in black jack - i mean more than just knowing to stick on 16 or above.....(or some similar strategy - i admit i'm no expert :) ) ?
the only skill i can think of is through card counting....but i imagine the casinos would be onto that pretty quick....
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Card counting is not illegal. It is just that if you can turn the game so that you have an advantage the casino will not want to play with you, and as a private business they don't have to. They don't need to say you do anything wrong, you can not force them to play with you.

Note that useing outside assistence for cardcounting like a computer is illegal.
 
In answer to the opening post, I don't think you are per se an idiot if you gamble. I gamble 1-2 times a year and at least for the present do not believe I am an idiot (opinions vary).

However, I do believe a lot of idiots gamble. I play the $5.00 blackjack tables at Vegas during TAM (came out $170 ahead) and used the same stragety many others here do; take only what you can afford to lose and keep the rest in your pocket. And when you get ahead, get up from the table. (that's my weakness, I'll start with $60, get about $20 ahead and say "OK, I'll play with their money and get to $100 and...) But the folks I would see running through a couple of hundred dollars in 1/2 hour and then pulling out a couple more Benjamins knowing that their luck would change...I never ever could understand them.

Gambling can be fun if you have the expendable cash and know your limits. Sadly many people don't have and don't know....and that's why 5,000 room luxury hotels get built in Las Vegas...

andyandy, if you ever make it across the pond to Vegas, I'll take you to the blackjack tables and show you how I play it (better yet, get with Brown, the PaiGow Poker grandmaster).
 
Bronze Dog said:
They have the odds programmed into the slot machines so that they will (pseudo)randomly arrange themselves. Unless you can reverse engineer the seed number or whatever used as the basis, you don't know when you'll win.

1/100 odds doesn't mean that it'll go off every 100th time.
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Yes I know that. You can flip a coin 5 times and have it land on heads each time. All I was saying is that you can figure out and average or estimation of the odds so that you don't have to play as long to win on a slot machine. Over a longer period of time you could figure out and approximation of how many times it takes to win. So if over a day you watch a slot, say the range of pulls to win is 145 to 80. You can assume that the average amount of pulls to win is 112.5. So if you see someone play 100 pulls and not win yet; its reasonable to assume that you have a better shot at winning on that slot than the slot next to it. Thats all im saying.
 
MilwaukeeMike said:
I know slot machines don't have a memory. But they run on odds just like everything else in a casino. If you sit long enough you can figure a estimation of what the odds are on a given slot machine, and then figure out an "estimated" number of times its going to take to win. You can't honestly say that its just three wheels spinning with a bunch of pretty pictures on it that just randomly arrange themselves each time. They have odds programmed into the slot machines. Do you think a casino would give the gambler the chance to have better odds than the house... Hell no. Thats why you sit there and let the "drones":) flush their quarters away and step in when the time is right.
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yea, the "three flips came up heads so it is now more likely to come up tails" aproach to probability.


It is wrong of course. The slot machine has changed its odds no more than the coin has. Actualy the random number generaters are running all the time so it might have hit in there and gave not outward sign as well.
 
SwissSkeptic said:
The gambler's fallacy:
"The gambler's fallacy is the mistaken notion that the odds for something with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending upon recent occurrences."
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OK, you still are not reading what I am saying. Im not talking about a single pull. And Im not talking about an over the counter game mentioned at that "skeptic" website. Im not talking about selecting anything. Its very simple. A slot machine and a period of time. They have odds. Im not talking about roulette. Yah I know that in roulette people think red was picked so it cant be picked again. I mean that's so much more simple than the odds of a slot. Over a period of time a slot machine will average a certain number of wins.

"In a modern slot machine, the odds of hitting a particular symbol or combination of symbols depends on how the virtual reel is set up. As we saw in the last section, each stop on the actual reel may correspond to more than one stop on the virtual reel. Simply put, the odds of hitting a particular image on the actual reel depend on how many virtual stops correspond to the actual stop.

In a typical weighted slot machine, the top jackpot stop (the one with the highest-paying jackpot image) for each reel corresponds to only one virtual stop. This means that the chance of hitting the jackpot image on one reel is 1 in 64. If all of the reels are set up the same way, the chances of hitting the jackpot image on all three reels is 1 in 643, or 262,144. For machines with a bigger jackpot, the virtual reel may have many more stops. This decreases the odds of winning that jackpot considerably.

The losing blank stops above and below the jackpot image may correspond to more virtual stops than other images. Consequently, a player is most likely to hit the blank stops right next to the winning stop. This creates the impression that they "just missed" the jackpot, which encourages them to keep gambling, even though the proximity of the actual stops is inconsequential.

A machine's program is carefully designed and tested to achieve a certain payback percentage. The payback percentage is the percentage of the money that is put in that is eventually paid out to the player. With a payback percentage of 90, for example, the casino would take about 10 percent of all money put into the slot machine and give away the other 90 percent. With any payback percentage under a 100 (and they're all under 100), the casino wins over time."

http://money.howstuffworks.com/slot-machine.htm/printable
 
Hawkeye said:
On the other hand, something that I think is a completely bad idea is playing the lottery.
Lottery: the idiot tax indeed.
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True only if you are looking at it in terms of expected $ return. Possibly different if looked at in terms of expected utility (utility defined as it is for economic theory): Impact on my life of spending a buck once or twice a year = 0 (utility, not dollars). Impact of winning $30,000,000 = huge, gigantic, immense, life-changing (again, utility). So the expected utility may be positive (for me) even though the expected dollars is negative.
 
I can see how gambling can be taken as entertainment but I think it's easy for people to inadvertently slip from that into a mode where they think they'll somehow defy the odds. People often call this stupid or idiotic but I prefer the word self-delusional, although I realize that is kinda what people mean when they say stupid or idiotic. It seems to describe them better though. Many of these people aren't dumb per se, rather they're deluding themselves.

As far as the "lottery is a tax on those who are bad at math" thing, I don't like that line for philosophical reasons, mainly because people pay taxes involuntarily whereas they line up to play the lottery. If there really was a tax on people that were bad at math then many would protest. But few protest the lottery and those that do aren't the ones handing their money over.

The lottery is just the state monopolizing a form of entertainment (that slips into delusion for some) in order to get money. What bothers me about the lottery isn't that it's a tax but rather that it's a monopoly. IMO we should either not allow gambling or, if we do, we shouldn't give the state a monopoly on certain forms of it.

As far as TV saying that Larry Flynt uses strategy in card games and consequently usually walks away with $1 M of the casinos money, the only way that is true is if on those occassions when he doesn't win, he loses many million. Larry Flynt nor any of the other high rollers are winning in the long run. I wouldn't doubt that the TV show said it or implied it though since TV often titilates rather than informs.
 
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