Hi Everyone,
Anticipation of our trip to Vegas got me thinking of years ago when Doug and I were fooling around with a "system" to try and beat the roulette wheel (silly us). We were working with an IBM PC jr. and must have had a lot of free time on our hands.
Our original premise was that, while statistically possible, in real life, there was almost no chance that 100 spins of the wheel in a row would come up Black. We proceeded to try and determine the maximum spins of one color that would come up and try to devise a betting system for it. We thought that the idea would be to wait for a pre-determined number of the same color, red or black, to come up in a row, and then start betting.
The betting progression went like this:
Wait for 7 or more of one color in a row, then bet $2. Losing that bet, the next bet would be $4. Any loss going forward, we would then triple the bet. So it would go 2-4-12-36-108-324-972-2916 (or 2000 if table max).
Total bankroll needed to do this would be $4374. Starting at the 7th color in a row, betting this progression would mean that the same color would have to be spun 14 times in a row to lose. Not too likely.
Each time a bet was won, you would make a profit equal to 1/2 your current bet. What we found by running 100,000 random simulations of the wheel (including greens), was that you would win, win ,win; until, all of a sudden, you would see 15 or 16 of the same color in a row, evaporating your profits. We were amazed. The computer actually generated one set of 17 in a row! All in all, I think there were less that 6 sets out of 100,000 that were losers. You should have seen the computer paper hanging on the wall!
The moral of the story is that we are still convinced it could work, only it would have to be in Monte Carlo, with no table limit and an unlimited bankroll (and only 1 green). I still say you can't roll 100 Blacks in a row, though any statistician knows that every spin is independent and there is a 50-50 chance (worse with the greens).
Oh, well. Back to the drawing board!
Anyone know how to count cards?
D1
ps. This all got me thinking that AOL might be a good AIM stock now that it's down almost 50% from the high. See any similarities? |
