Casino weekend

Sometimes a leap of faith can take you farther than a spreadsheet of logic. - Adithya M.R.

An occupational hazard of my occupation is the fact that you become a devotee of the phenomenon some people call chance, college boys call probability and cynics call fluke. It's funny how the law of averages lends itself to such apparent engineering, when you allow it to spread across people, nations and companies. There is no better place to observe this cosmic law in action than in a temple of Mother Chance - the casino.

Probability theory assigns an expected value to the outcome of any game in a casino. For example, let's say we were to toss a coin and if heads fell out, you would pay me a rupee, and if tails fell out, I would pay you the same amount. Since both outcomes are equally probable, my expected profit, like your expected profit, is zero. In a casino, they bias the odds towards themselves in some way so its never 50-50, but say 49-49, so that 2% of the time everyone loses. Now if there was some way to bend this expected profit towards the positive side, you're in green.

As it turns out, getting an expected value of more than zero is like making water from thin air - requires rocket science or maybe not even then. But what is possible, is to plan your moves such that 99 out of 100 times you'd make 1 dollar, but on that one bad chance, you would lose 99 dollars. The expected value is still 0, but if you just looked at "winning" or "losing" regardless of "how much", the odds would be stacked in your favor.

I invested about 6-7 hours flicking various things from the internet, with minimal contribution of my own, and found a bunch of rules that did this. Basically I had to bet on both odd and even outcomes on a roulette wheel, and keep putting a fraction of my money onto the "0" square, and it should start puking gold coins. If I won on a bet, I'd retain the same bet again, but I would double my bet should I lose (this is a common strategy in the world of gambling - so there's no genius to it). If I kept winning, I'd keep betting 1 pound every time, but if I lost, I'd bet 1 pound, then 2 pounds, then 4 pounds, and so on, until I had no money left.The "zero" outcome is managed by using a fractional bet, say 10p every time on the zero square. Most of the time this bet would lose, but when the white ball did fall on zero, I'd make enough money to cover up. Feeling super proud of myself, I walked into a casino later that day, with 20 quid tucked up into the pocket of my blue jeans and wearing a brown corduroy blazer with elbow patches partly to hide my burgeoning belly and partly to hide the fact that I was an RCB fan (they had just dropped out of the CLT20 tournament).

Given that I was in London, I thought I'd figure out all the machines and tables in a flash, ( my last, and first ever casino experience was Macau where half the stuff was in Chinese and I had a hard time figuring out what button to press). Unfortunately, luck didn't favor me there - I went around asking innocent questions to old, experienced people with wrinkled foreheads holding a glass of wine in one hand and frowning on their night's losses. What is this button? How to put money into this machine? How to lay my bet? I was looked at with the utmost scorn, telling me the meaning of the phrase "new kid on the block".

Anyway, I sat on my roulette table and discovered pretty soon, that my odd/even masterstroke plan would need to put in at least 5 pounds on each box to start with. And then if I lost, 10 pounds. And then, 20. I was going to be "gambled out" before my genius plan started working. What the hell, I thought. I put a fiver on each box. As luck would have it, the ball fell on zero. My bankroll was thinner by 5 pounds. (Adding to the trouble was that I always have this tendency to convert to rupees - 5 pounds was Rs 350!) Angered, I aggressively jabbed my finger for a naked bet on the odd button, hoping that I'd at least break even. Mother Chance was angry with me.

I looked around, there were a few slot machines that I could blow up my remaining 10 pounds on, rather than waste it on this dumb roulette machine. Feeding in the cash, I started spinning. An hour later, my position was still on 9.8 pounds, I was betting 20-30 pence every time, and winning or losing small change - nothing great. I wasn't getting anywhere. My spinning worked like this - there were 5 columns with 4 boxes each that ended up with a different picture on each spin and 40 lines that I'd bet on every time. If any of those 40 lines connected certain identical pictures (every spin makes sure there are some identical pictures - only they may not be connected), then I'd win some change. Roughly I'd win 40 out of 1000 times.

I looked around. The old Chinese smoker I had disturbed earlier had also moved to the slot machine, perhaps to take a break from his hard core roulette. Next to him was an empty machine, much smaller. It even had about 5 pence credit in it already - perhaps because the previous player was too frustrated losing his money to go collect 5 pence from the cash desk. I had chosen my machine because it needed only 20 pence per spin - it would let me make at least 50 spins before I finally got gambled out. This small machine needed you to play at least 75 pence every time. I wondered why. Then I saw it.

The small machine had only 4 columns with 3 squares each, and I could bet on 15 lines each time, which meant that my odds were roughly around 15 out of 81, a little over one sixth. Compare that with the 4% win chance in my machine - it was over 4 times better! And all it needed was you to bet 75p, which was less than 4 times the 20p bet I was being forced to make now. I was breaking even on my current machine - I should just about make more money on this small new machine. Was Mother Chance playing another trick on me? Could it really be that simple? I switched machines.

The boat ride back home was amazing - not least because of the thick wad of a hundred and sixty pounds stuffed into my pocket.