Do any of you Scientists, mathematicians, engineers, etc. gamble?

Question

As a statistician I refuse to gamble. I understand the futility of it. The law of large numbers guarantees you will go bankrupt against the house in all games except poker (or its derivatives).

I attempt to explain this to everyone. It is a popular subject here in Ct as we have two very large Casinos in state. These casinos prey upon the less mathematically inclined. My explanations get shrugged off as virtually everyone seems to think there are ways to beat craps, blackjack (besides counting), and roullette. They seem to get confused by "raising the odds" and "beating the odds".

So my question is, do any of you mathematically inclined people, who understand the laws of probability, and how gambling works, actually gamble?

I mean casino games with set probabilities. Sports betting involves skill like poker and can, with enough information, be lucrative.

I should have excluded gambling as "entertainment" as that is understandable.

I do admit to purchasing a lottery ticket from time to time. The "buying a dream" concept is reasonable. I do think mathematically about it though. I believe powerball is roughly 1 in 120 million. I figure the lump sum payout after taxes is about 1/3 the jackpot, therefore it is wise to buy a ticket when the jackpot hits 360 million. Then your expected payout turns into a fair game. I do however buy a few when it gets over 150million or so.

Brett, you are a wise man. You exploited an arbitrage position. NO risk, guaranteed gain.

Answer 1

no but i have a interesting story for that
I was at a collage casino night where they give everyone fake money and let them play casino games all night and with their winnings they can bid on prizes. Well they increased the payoffs for the games to make it more fun and give the students a better chance of winning. However they increased the payoff at the roulette table to a 1:40 payoff for picking one number correctly. well I took all my money and set equal amounts on each number for a guaranteed 25% gain every time they spun the wheel

Answer 2

I'm not a professional scientist, mathematician, or engineer. I've studied all three, but work as a technical writer.

I play the lottery now and then and have been known to play the slots at Vegas.

I only play games that are controlled strictly by chance and have even odds. For example, roulette is a game of chance, but the odds favor the house. In the lotto, any combination has an equal chance of losing. I don't play games of skill because those games are bad for people not willing to study the game. Poker, for example, is a game of skill and knowledge as well as chance, and I have neither. Blackjack can be beaten so easily by some methods of counting cards that you are not permitted to use these methods.

I play the slots--when I do--for fun. I am buying the chance to sit and watch the lights and colors. To my mind, it's not much different from a pinball machine, which is actually how I spend more of my time if I go to a casino. When I do play the slots, I generally start with a $20 roll of quarters and play until they are gone or until I get bored. When I quit from boredom, I am generally ahead by about $15.

As for the lottery, I am buying a piece of a dream. Right now the Mega Millions lottery (available in California and a few other states) is $96 million. After taxes and cash payout penalty, the winner would get about $24 million. There is nothing I could do in this lifetime that would net me $24 million, short of inventing a time machine and going back to 1984 and investing heavily in Microsoft stock. Frankly, I'm more likely to win the lottery.

My $1 ticket is the price of being able to daydream about winning $24 million. If I played every draw, and I don't, I'd be out $104 per year. That would buy me about eight admissions to the movies, and I think I get a better return on my entertainment investment with the lottery.

It's rather like voting. I don't think my individual vote is going to change any election. My state votes Democrat on presidents and senators by a wide margin. My congressional district votes Republican by a wide margin. But if I didn't vote, I wouldn't have the right to complain about politics for the next 2 or 4 years.

Answer 3

My maths is pretty reasonable and like yourself I can easily see that the odds are stacked in favour of the casinos - for this reason I very rarely gamble and when I do it's just a few pounds (I'm in the UK) and is done for fun in the knowledge that I'll probably not see my money again.

Having said that, I've bought about 10 lottery tickets over the years at a cost of £1 each and have twice won £10 and once won £74. On each occasion I've kept the winnings unlike others who immediately buy a whole lot more tickets and end up with nothing.

A lot of people like to think thay have some unique system that tips the scales in their favour but at the end of the day no matter what betting system a person uses it all boils down to probabilities. Unless someone actually rigs the roulette wheel or tampers with the playing cards the odds are always going to favour the casino.

The only other gambling I do is the odd sweepstake on major horseracing events but that's just between friends and colleagues. It usually ends up with the winner buying all the drinks so each 'loser' gets their money back in a roundabout way.

Answer 4

I've tried but can't. I keep thinking I'm giving this guy $100 to play cards. I did manage to play some nickel an penny slots in Vegas. I went with a bunch of people and I was the only person that came out ahead. I must confess to buying a total of 5 lottery tickets in my 30+ years.

Answer 5

I'm going to University next year, and I just switched my major from Biomedical Engineering to Molecular and Cell Biology so that I can pursue a career as a doctor. Oh, and I've got mathematics pretty well covered - fear my AP Calculus course. Leonardo Da Vinci was gay (or at least bisexual), if you want a brilliant scientific mind that's well known. I dunno, man. Last I checked, my sexuality had to do with the people I wanted to have relationships with, not my ability to find relationships in numbers and the physical world.

Answer 6

I'm not a mathemetician by profession. But I refuse to gamble. Gambling, as you've already pointed out, defies logic.

Answer 7

I gamble a bit in the stock market (better odds.)

An interesting lotto playing system (free) is here:

http://www.use4.com/lotto.html

To get a clearer picture of what it's doing, you have to look here:

http://www.use4.com/Prove-it.html

Basically, the system looks for mixing errors in lottery games where the balls enter the machine in numerical order.

Seems it could, under the right circumstances, produce an improvement in the odds.

Answer 8

II don't gamble for many reasons, some of them mathematical. What do you think of gambling on horse racing?

Answer 9

Yes. It is entertainment. It's just a game. I set aside a certain amount that I'm willing to spend, and I treat it just like a ballgame or a movie, as entertainment.

Answer 10

A retired electrical engineer, my next lottery ticket or trip to a casino will be my first. And unless I become a bit daft first, neither is about to happen any time soon.