Monte Carlo methods – Why it's a bad idea to go to the casino
If you want to really know why you shouldn&#x27;t gamble (for profit... gambling for fun, with discipline, can be satisfying), read this quintessential book:<p>Scarne’s Complete Guide to Gambling<p>What you will probably take away from this book is that the house wins when you win.  And the reason they win is that they don&#x27;t pay actual odds.<p>Take the roulette wheel as a simple example.  There are 37 (or 38 in the case of 0 and 00 wheels) slots.  If you bet on a single number, they pay 36:1.<p>TFA mentioned doubling down when you lose.  That&#x27;s known as the Martingale Strategy.  As banks and real estate lenders discovered in 2007, regardless of your model, there will be some condition where the near-impossible will happen.<p>If you want to use the roulette wheel again as an example, and even if you want to ignore the green 0&#x2F;00 slots, you have half black and half red.  You can simply play one color and double your bet if you lose... until you finally win it all back.<p>The problem there is that while it&#x27;s true that for millions of spins, about half should land black and half should land red... but in short periods it is possible for there to be 10 or 15 or 20 or more spins of the same color.  We can all do exponential growth, so it&#x27;s easy to see how doubling down will empty your wallet eventually.<p>But just to be sure that strategy won&#x27;t work, most casinos will set a table limit.  That limit will be designed to prevent you from doubling your bet too many times (5-7ish times? depends on the place).  Of course, if you discuss in advance with the casino, you may be able to set a personal table limit based on your initial bet.  So you can bet 1 million on the first spin in order to set your table limit to 1 million.  But that&#x27;s truly a gamble.<p>There is one element you can control when gambling: that is when you increase or decrease your bets, and ultimately when you stop playing.<p>Yes, you can count cards in blackjack; but that&#x27;s generally frowned upon (where &quot;frowned&quot; means you will be escorted out and told to never return -- and they are very serious).  Even levels of indirection of counting such as employed by the fascinating experience of the MIT crews of yore (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MIT_Blackjack_Team" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MIT_Blackjack_Team</a>) have become obvious.  So the short of it is, unless you only play a little, bet big, and get lucky for your limited period (and then stop so you don&#x27;t get banned), you will otherwise lose more than you win.<p>Now for my personal opinion :).  Casinos used to be a fun place.  Now they are so optimized and commercial that they are like Walmart.  Yes you can go, but you&#x27;d probably rather not.  For modern thrills, we now have crypto exchanges with 50:1 or more leverage.