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It's the antithesis of gambling. If you bet $10 on black and win straight away, earning $10, and go home with $20, and stay home for the rest of your life and never walk into a casino again, then yes, you won. But you're not really a gambler. You're actually the opposite of a gambler, one that never enters a casino again. Of course you gambled $10, but the amount is meaningless. If instead you gambled a meaningful amount, say $50k, then indeed it'd be truly gambling something meaningful. But if you'd lose, you'd have to double it to $100k. If you lose that, $200k. It spirals out of control quickly if you're actually betting meaningful amounts. And the amounts must be meaningful. After all, if you bet $10, lose a few and eventually win and go home with $80, the strategy requires you to never gamble again. If you come back because $80 isn't meaningful, you're really just starting over at a meaningful amount, that could make you win enough to never make you come back. But at that point, you're talking about significant risks (e.g. betting $50k and losing 4 coin unfavourable (47% / 53%) tosses in a row, and you've lost a total of $750k and need to risk losing another $800k to walk away with a profit of just $50k, by flipping another unfavourable coin toss) If you were Jeff Bezos, of course you could bet a million and walk away with an eventual win before running out of money. But the amount of money isn't meaningful to Bezos. In the same way a kid with $40 of savings could bet $50 cents and walk away with 50 cents of profit by winning the 5th round. But that doesn't make any meaningful difference if it ends there. If the kid comes back to gamble, the strategy falls apart, as the house always wins in the end if people keep coming back. And that's precisely why the strategy doesn't actually work for anyone. To win any meaningful amount, you'd have to bet a meaningful amount. And to do that, is incredibly risky as there's a good chance you'll run into your limit before you win. And even if you win, that experience will likely pull you back in to try to repeat it, the gambler mindset eventually will lose. How quickly do you run into your own limit, and the limit of the casino? After all, the odds are against you. Technical note: your final game winnings are never more than the first game winnings. That's why the first bet must be meaningful. Say you bet $10 and lose, bet $20 and win, you made $10 profit. Say you lost the $20 too and bet $40, you again still made $10 as you made 80 - (10+20+40). Suppose you lost the $40 too, and the $80, and the $160, and the $320, and the $640, and now bet $1280 and win $2560... subtract 1280+640+320+160+80+40+20+10, and again, you only walked away with $10. In other words, to walk away with something meaningful like $10k, you may end up having to wager 1.2 million after 7 coin toss losses. |
Are there really casinos with no maximum bet? Usually there is a maximum so you run into the problem that at some point you can't double anymore and have to take the loss, even though you would have enough money left.