Mathematics of Horse Race Gambling

Discussion in 'Physics & Math' started by Vic the Trader, Mar 24, 2010.

  1. Tach Banned Banned

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    It is a scientific book, it must be tough for you not to be able to understand an iota of science. Trolling is so much easier...
     
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  3. Lakon Valued Senior Member

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    Is it ? And you're a 'scientific' person who states that ..

    their algorithm wasn't worth anything

    so ..

    "I tailored my bets to be exactly the opposite of theirs"

    Based on nothing other than stuperstition and crackpottery.

    OK - I can see how you speak from experience on this one too, having had a big black line through your name recently.
     
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  5. Tach Banned Banned

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    I see that you continue to have comprehension issues, doesn't look that you'll trad the text and understand it. Tough.

    It is very simple, I don't know why you have so much difficulty, if someone makes a series of bets say , on red, and loses, then the people betting on black must have....won! Try to see if you can extrapolate from this example to the case of betting even, do you think you can do it all by yourself?

    What is "stuperstition"? Something that you suffer from because you can't either read or follow simple logic?
     
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  7. Lakon Valued Senior Member

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    Superstition is an irrational belief in my book. What is it in yours ?

    You had an irrational belief that tailoring your bet opposite to theirs would help you win.

    Else, why did you do this ?

    And you've asserted the result - ie, you won 800 Eu over an hour because of this.
     
  8. Lakon Valued Senior Member

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    1,117
    Brerathtaking stupidity !

    Yes, Tach, they must have won ..

    Now tell us how we can .. emm .. tailor (roflmao) ... this to win over the next hour.
     
  9. Tach Banned Banned

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    I must agree with you, in addition to your inability to spell .


    You are making progress. You figured this all by yourself.


    You need to do some work, don't expect me to tell you everything.
     
  10. Lakon Valued Senior Member

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    No .. I can't seem to do it. This will need the work of a great, emmm, 'mathematician', such as yourself.

    I'm glad you reduced it to the example, above .. less wiggle room for you.

    Tach;
    if someone makes a series of bets say , on red, and loses, then the people betting on black must have....won!

    Lakon;
    Yes, Tach, they must have won ..
    Now tell us how we can .. emm .. tailor (roflmao) ... this to win over the next hour.


    So, I tinkered here, I tailored there .. couldn't do it.

    Tell me how you did it.
     
  11. Tach Banned Banned

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    You can't do ANY scientific work, this is why you relegate yourself to trolling.

    I know. Tough.
     
  12. Lakon Valued Senior Member

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    There's only one person that's had a big black mark across his name for improper behaviour 'round here - and that's you, not me.

    Yes, I couldn't - because I would have to base it on superstition (irrational belief) like you did. I wouldn't do this - but you did. But I wouldn't do this in a hard physics / maths forum.

    So you are a crackpot.

    Here is the standing issues that you have failed to answer;

    Tach - their algorithm wasn't worth anything

    Tach - "I tailored my bets to be exactly the opposite of theirs"

    Question - what was this 'tailoring' based on if not superstition and crackpottery ?

    Tach - if someone makes a series of bets say , on red, and loses, then the people betting on black must have....won!

    Yes, Tach, they must have won. Now tell me how I can tailor this to win, over the next hour or so, as you did.

    This is a hard physics / maths forum. Stop avoiding the issue.
     
  13. Tach Banned Banned

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    Nope it is based on theory of probabilities.


    Correction: you couldn't. You still can't.

    Based on your posts in this forum.....LOL!


    Probabilities, something that you know nothing about.


    Sure, stop wasting your time trolling, take a class in probabilities.

    It should be. Unfortunately, it is suffocated by trolling cranks.
     
  14. Lakon Valued Senior Member

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    1,117
    Tach;

    Probability .. right. I see you've mentioned it several times in the above post. So,

    Tach; if someone makes a series of bets say , on red, and loses, then the people betting on black must have....won!

    Ignoring the zero/s (as you did in the example - I'm happy with that) if we had a series, say of 6 blacks in a row, it is more probable (likely) that the next result will be red ?
     
  15. Tach Banned Banned

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    5,265
    You are looking at the problem the wrong way.I'll give you a hint: the program in discussion was guessing the color and the parity with a probability of 0.81. This meant that it was misspredicting the color in a sequence with a probability of about 0.9. So, what strategy should you apply in order to win?
     
  16. Lakon Valued Senior Member

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    1,117

    YOU are looking at the problem the wrong way. You seem to be suffering some form of Gambler Fallacy.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_fallacy

    Gambler's fallacy
    The Gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy (because its most famous example happened in a Monte Carlo Casino in 1913),[1][2] and also referred to as the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that if deviations from expected behaviour are observed in repeated independent trials of some random process, future deviations in the opposite direction are then more likely.

    Explaining why the probability is 1/2 for a fair coin
    We can see from the above that, if one flips a fair coin 21 times, then the probability of 21 heads is 1 in 2,097,152. However, the probability of flipping a head after having already flipped 20 heads in a row is simply 1⁄2


    You seem to think that past performance reaches out into the future by some unknown agency to determine future events. This is rank crackpottery. A roulette spin (or the toss of a coin) has exactly the same probability in each spin (or flip), totally independent of the past results, as stated above.

    You've got to be kidding. It is difficult to believe you seriously believe this.
    Mispredicting the colour with probability of .9 is THE SAME as predicting (the other) colour with probability of .9
    You think that the operators of that machine were so stupid as not to see this if it existed ? You think that the casino proprietors would not have been very quickly conscious of this if it existed ? It took you to come along and discover this ?

    Actually, you may well be suffering some form of Reverse Gamblers Fallacy (from the above wiki) ..

    Reverse fallacy
    The reversal is also a fallacy (not to be confused with the inverse gambler's fallacy) in which a gambler may instead decide, after a consistent tendency towards tails, that tails are more likely out of some mystical preconception that fate has thus far allowed for consistent results of tails. Believing the odds to favor tails, the gambler sees no reason to change to heads. Again, the fallacy is the belief that the "universe" somehow carries a memory of past results which tend to favor or disfavor future outcomes.


    There is no strategy that can be adopted in a game that has the same odds, each spin and always. This is precisely why casinos always win and you, in the long run, will always lose. Their ONLY advantage is the zero (European Roulette) which affords them a long term statistical edge of around 2.6% of each and every single bet.

    It is quite shameful for you to keep insisting that some algorithm, or some action or .. tailoring .. of yours in relation to it, in any way improved those odds.

    You seem to be self abused of some Gamblers Falacy - reverse, inverse, whatever ..

    This I'm sure is quite embarrasing to other mathematicians here, in a physics / maths page that does not allow crackpottery.
     
  17. Tach Banned Banned

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    5,265
    Nope, nothing to do with that, keep trying, you might get it. Most likely, not.

    Nope, nothing to do with this either, I gave you a simple hint, to a simple exercise, you are answering by trawling all the non-applicable quotes from wiki. You are trying to do math the way Farsight is "doing physics".

    Once again, nothing to do with the "operators of the machine" (casino).


    I agree with you on this one, you should stop posting your "stuff".
     
    Last edited: Sep 2, 2013
  18. Jennifer Murphy Registered Senior Member

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    How many players do you know? If you don't know a significant percentage of the banned players, it's just an anecdote.

    I personally know one guy who was banned from several casinos, mostly in Reno, but some in Vegas. I watched him play a few times. He was on excellent terms with everyone at the casino. He was a superb card counter. I watched him play 7 hands at a time. I never witnessed obnoxious behavior and cannot imagine it from this guy. He also wrote a column in a gambling magazine for awhile. This was 20 years ago.
     
  19. Jennifer Murphy Registered Senior Member

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    This thread has degenerated into a puerile pissing contest between adolescents competing for Master of Irrelevancy, so there may not be any rational people still following.

    However, about 20 years ago the son of a friend of mine came up with what I thought was an ingenious way to beat the odds at the track. The kid, then in college, was a hot-shot software engineer and a real whiz with math. He was also fascinated by gambling. He was an expert card counter and pretty good at poker. You could get him to bet on pretty much anything.

    He noticed that for major races, multiple tracks will post independent odds so people around the country can make local bets on races in other states. As already pointed out by someone here, the odds are set by the bettors. They are calculated dynamically to ensure that all of the wagered money is paid out less the track take. He figured that for major races with horses from around the country, locals would bet more heavily on local horses, which could skew the odds in a different way at different tracks.

    He worked out a formula for comparing the odds at the different tracks to determine if the differences were enough to take advantage of. He discovered that fairly often, the odds do vary enough from track to track to allow a particular combination of bets at different tracks to guarantee a profit no matter which horse wins. He wrote a computer program to do the math. The program would calculate which track had the best odds for each horse. It would then calculate how much to bet on each horse so that no matter which horse won, the winnings from that bet would be enough to offset the losses of all of the other bets and make a profit. One bet would be placed in each horse. The program kept track of how much cash each bettor had on hand at the start and after each race, so it would scale the bets accordingly.

    The method had a few challenges:
    1. It requires someone at each track to place the bets.
    2. The odds have to be updated as close to the the actual start of the race as possible.
    3. It requires a bit of coordination.
    4. It requires each bettor to have a fairly large amount of cash in hand. This could get worse after each race. One bettor would pick up some winnings, all the others would lose their bets.
    5. The bettors at each track have to be reliable and trustworthy.

    He actually tested the method 4-5 times. He found a place with several phones so he could be on the line with each bettor. Today it could all be done with a special smartphone app talking to a laptop. He fired up the program on his computer, which showed him a screen with fields for each horse at each track. The bettors would call in to report the odds and the program would calculate which bets to place on which horses at which tracks. He would give that information to the bettors over the phone. As I recall, the program worked perfectly when the people didn't fail. A couple of times, one of the bettors wasn't able to get the bet placed in time. I think one time, one of the bettors just didn't go to the track at all, so gthey weren't able to do it.

    He lost interest after he showed that it worked. As a college student, he didn't have enough money to make it worth it. Leer, when he had more money, he had better things to do.

    I think one of the things that caused him to lose interest was finding people he could trust. It would be easy for one of the bettors to say he placed a bet, but just pocket the money. If the horse lost, no one would ever know. If the horse won, he could say he didn't get to the window in time, which happened a few times.
     
  20. Buddha12 Valued Senior Member

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    Expiration:
    All winning tickets sold in the State of Illinois expire on December 31st of the year after they were issued. Therefore, all tickets sold in 2012 expire on December 31, 2013 and all tickets sold in 2011 will expire on December 31, 2012. All winning tickets sold in 2010 and before have expired.

    Many states also have this law so your friend should have collected his winnings if he really won for he had monthds to do so.
     
  21. Undefined Banned Banned

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    1,695
    I think Jennifer meant he didn't get to the betting window to place his bet on time in the first place, given the short notice from the 'scheme co-ordinator' message about which horse to bet on. So that 'untrustworthy' participant need only present the 'betting stake' (minus any winnings/profit' he made, of course!....because he WAS able to get to the betting window on time, but told a fib in order to keep the winnings for himself. Is that what you meant, Jennifer?).

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  22. Lakon Valued Senior Member

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    Tach - this thread is mainly about horse racing. To stay on topic and to not interfere with others I have opened a new thread, 'roulette'

    You can (or rather can't) explain your crackpottery there.
     
  23. Tach Banned Banned

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    5,265
    In translation, you got proven wrong in this thread so you feel compelled to troll on the same subject in a second thread . You extended your trolling from one thread to two threads.
     

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