| There's the field bet, which pays even money if the three-dice total is 3 to 7 or 13 to 18. House edge: 15.7 percent. There's the under-10 bet--the total has to be less than 10, the 10 itself is a loser. House edge: 25 percent. And there's over 11, for totals of 12 and up. House edge: 25 percent. You walk up to a roulette table and see on the board that the ball has landed on number 17 three times in the last 12 spins. What do you do? Do you jump on board, betting on 17 or on combinations that include 17, figuring it's a hot number? Or do you avoid 17 altogether, thinking that it's due to go cold? I've had people send me betting systems based on both scenarios. One fellow sent me a brochure and asked for advice on how to market a system based on avoiding numbers that have hit recently. Another man insisted that the way to win at games of chance, especially roulette, was to ride streaks and trends. If a number has been hot, he said, keep betting it until you're sure the streak is over. There's no mathematical reason to expect a hot number to stay hot, or for it to suddenly turn icy. The wheel doesn't know what numbers have hit. Every spin is a new trial, and past results have no effect. Still, when I hear such things from enough people, I like to do little tests. A few years ago, craps players were telling me the way to make money was to wait for two passes to establish a trend, then to bet the pass line. I responded by charting 1,000 incidents of the shooter making two passes, then recording the next result. The test found no tendency for the dice to stay hot--the results stayed pretty close to the mathematical expectation. For roulette, I've done a shorter test, a wholly unscientific, fun little trial to see if either approach to a hot number could bring a profit. It's too short an experiment to have real statistical validity. Nonetheless, I wanted to see if any trend toward hot numbers recurring or going cold would emerge. Over the course of several months, I kept an eye on the roulette results boards at the casinos on my rounds. Whenever I saw a board that showed the same number had hit three or more times in the last dozen spins, I took note. I also took note of the next 38 spins, to see if the number in question would hit more or less than the 1-in-38 average we expect of any number on an American double-zero wheel. I kept track until I had 100 trials, leaving me with a record of 3,800 spins of the wheels. In 3,800 spins, any given number should turn up an average of 100 times. In any one such trial, a number will turn up a little more often or less often just by random chance. But to be of any use to a systems player, the hot number has to show up either much more often or much less often than expected. These results were not encouraging for systems players. My 100 hot numbers came up a grand total of 102 times in the 3,800 ensuing spins. There was one trial in which the hot number came up four more times in the next 38 spins; two in which it occurred three more times, and 10 in which it occurred twice more. On the negative side, there were 15 trials in which the formerly hot number didn't hit again at all. Where does that information leave the bettor? In roughly the same position he or she would be in with no knowledge of any previous results. Given that the starting numbers occurred slightly more frequently than the average expectation, we can safely say the results didn't support a system based on avoiding these numbers. It had been kind of a nondescript morning at the blackjack table--up a little, down a little. Won all four hands when the dealer busted after I split a pair of 8s, resplit and resplit again. Lost half of it back on a double down on the next hand. As I left the table, I was counting my $2.50 in winnings when a fellow who had been playing at the same table approached. "I have a question, but I didn't want to ask at the table," said the 30-ish man, who introduced himself as Eric. "I read a couple of magazines about gambling, and sometimes I read about blackjack on the Web. When they compare blackjack games, they emphasize something called 'penetration.' |
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