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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.
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