Tweet For any gambler with a cursory understanding of math, expectation is everything. When you calculate pot odds in poker, what you’re calculating is expectation. Let’s say all the cards are out in a hand of Holdem, you’re heads up with a single player, and there’s 90 dollars in the pot. You assess that you…
Category Archives: Math and Stats Concepts
A Simple Probability Error Almost Everyone Makes (Including this Gambling Author)
Tweet The following is from Joseph Mazur’s new book, What’s Luck Got to Do with It?: …there is an authentically verified story that sometime in the 1950s a [roulette] wheel in Monte Carlo came up even twenty-eight times in straight succession. The odds of that happening are close to 268,435,456 to 1. Based on the…
Do You Make This Sports Betting Mistake?
Tweet Let’s say an NFL team starts the season 3-1. You have to bet on their overall record this season (16 games) without knowing any more information than this. Where do you put your money? It’s easy to say 12-4. Extrapolating three wins and a loss over a 16-game season gives us 12 wins, four…
Why Some People Insist that the Roulette Wheel Is ‘Due’
Tweet We humans aren’t wired to understand randomness. For example, when two events happen in sequence, we have a tendency to believe that the first one caused the second. This is extremely helpful when it protects us from touching a hot burner a second time, or from poking around a bees’ nest. It’s not as…
