Читать книгу Casino Gambling For Dummies - Swain Scheps - Страница 76

Unfortunately, too many newbie gamblers rely on luck to guide their experiences. Casinos can be an easy place to burn through money, so your best chance for hanging on to that hard-earned cash is through a little dose of knowledge. But, you wonder, when it comes to striking it rich in the casino, isn’t there such a thing as luck? Technically, the answer is yes — but don’t count on your rabbit’s foot to keep you on the path to riches over the long haul. The term luck can describe many situations, especially in gambling. Someone may have a lucky run at the baccarat table, or maybe your Aunt Rosemary plays a lucky slot machine that never loses.

In order to have a realistic perspective of your chances in the casino, you need to view luck in rational and mathematical terms: Luck is a temporary fluctuation or deviation from the norm. In the short run, you may perceive that you got real lucky when the dealer busted eight hands in a row at blackjack. But in reality, such an event is just normal fluctuation — also known as a random walk — such as when the stock market drifts in one direction or another.

For example, in three-card poker, for every $100 you wager, you can expect to lose a little over two bucks. But remember, that’s an average loss over an infinite number of games. Over the short run, anything can happen. You may get lucky and finish the day ahead — or you may get unlucky and lose far more than $2.

In a purely mathematical sense, neither of these results has anything to do with luck. They are simply the normal consequences of fluctuation. For example, try flipping a coin. Half the time, it should be tails, and half the time, it will be heads. Flip it 1,000 times, and you’ll get close to 500 each. Now zoom in on any consecutive sequence of 20 coin flips out of that 1,000, and you’ll find sets of 20 that veer way off the path from 50 percent.