Skip to main content

The Problem with Probability

I lost $124 gambling.

Statistically speaking, it was not meant to work that way. The first time I came across the game, roulette, was at casino in New Orleans when my friend explained it to me. One simply bet on which color the dice would fall on, red or black. If the bet was in my favour, the winnings would double. If not, I lost everything. I theorised, based on my years of probability education, that it was possible to win the game, as long as the stake was raised by double every time I lost. 

Therefore, if the game had worked out the way I predicated, when I bet $4 for the first throw on red and lost, I had to bet $8 on the next. If I lost that, next bet would be $16. Do the math and eventually when one wins, which was a guarantee at some point because one always had a 50% chance of winning, one would have made $4. 

Just that I lost every single round from $4 all the way to $64. 

Call it sheer rotten luck. I bet on red and it did not turn up the 5 rounds I put my money on it. Losing $4, $8 and $16 was alright, but as the stakes got higher, I could very much feel the heat in my face and my heart beat getting more voluminous. I could literally cut through that tension around me with a knife. While I recognized that the key to the game was patience (one had to be brave enough to carry on doubling the bet if one kept losing), I forgot that at some point, this figure could probably become ridiculously high for me to stake. With the next bet at $128, I had to painfully drag myself away from a game that had pulled me in deeper and deeper into it with every throw of the dice, like no other game before.

A 10 minute precisely calibrated game had torn into pieces 10 years of my probability education. While ruminating on the loss, I wondered how was it that almost every game gave the gamblers at least a 50% chance of winning and consequently gave the casino a chance to simply break even, it was always the casino reporting its billions in profits? Perhaps it was because that if one played long enough, one would eventually break even. However, in line with our greedy human nature, when one won, instead of pulling oneself away from the game, one kept betting to further increase the return, something that was statistically impossible with a greater number of attempts. On the other hand, when one lost, instead of patiently carrying on with the game till one at least broke even, with a lack of cash, one had to just stop playing.

To the casinos, that was perhaps their greatest source of revenue, not probability, but greed and poverty. Probability in itself was a very sound concept, but combined with human condition, there was always only going to be one winner. As I sauntered out of the place with my friends who had both lost as well, I realized that it did not matter if my probability of winning was 0.01, 0.5 or 0.99. All that eventually mattered was if I won.

And to think that all I wanted to win for $4.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Eye for an Eye

"Something that three or four years ago you told me was one of the touchstones of maturity: being nice to people even when they’re not nice to you…" - William Styron It was an plan that came out of nowhere. Perhaps half depressed by the winter and half depressed by the inactivity at work, there was sufficient turmoil in the mind to create these type of plans and then let it fester, until something that started off with a what-if turned into a why-not. It would have been the perfect revenge for the past hurt and humiliation that was yet to completely heal.  The circumstances were similar. On one side, an eager visitor who had traveled far to say "Hello" and on the other side, a host, bewildered and surprised by this visit. In the first case, the host would not receive the visitor, who would turn back humiliated and vowing never again. Now the roles were reversed and I was the host. What if I agreed to receive? What if in reality I did not plan to receive? ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Passage to Vietnam : Part 2 - The Food

Imagine your friend passes you a fully boiled egg, garnished in onion and sauce. You use your chopsticks, lift it up to your mouth and bite of half the egg. It does not tear away as easily as you thought it would. And it tastes queer. Then while chewing away at that half, you look down at the other half on your plate and you see tiny grey feathers and a tiny leg bone staring back at you. My exact feeling at that moment was like I was making love to a woman and she suddenly reveals in the middle that she used to be a man. In short, I wanted to puke. I am not a big fan of Vietnamese cuisine. During my 18 days stay there, my Viet friends were kind enough to bring me around and let me taste about every kind of street food and drink, from snails to sticky rice to Viet baguettes to local alcohol. Other than certain items here and there, I generally thought the food lacked any kind of strong flavour to it. Plus, for some reason, I could not understand why the Viets went to the extent of ea...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sparing the Rod

 She gave me a look of deep displeasure, not very atypical of the look most members of the opposite gender gave me. “You know you can’t do that in Germany?”, she asserted with the same authority my mother used to tell me about not messing around in her kitchen.  “Yes I am aware”, I meekly responded, knowing well that any kind of argument about this would not end well, so it was better to close off the topic quietly and unlike the kitchen, I could not afford to get kicked out of Germany. She was not the first to respond with such hostility to what seemed like the most natural of things in my experience. The last one who told me the same was a teacher I had met at a party. When she sounded shocked that I was ok with it and said it was not right, I (with some alcoholic courage) had retorted, “How would you discipline them then if they do something wrong?” “I would tell them I am very disappointed with them”. I almost laughed. However, that was very much the theory of my new frien...
Post a Comment
Read more