Gaming Do's and Don'ts

Gambling is an activity fraught with psychological traps. Anyone who bets has experienced the empowering sensation of winning as well as experiencing the stomach-shrinking feeling of losing.

Sometimes the irrational part of our brain takes over and tries to invoke the 'winning' sensation at all costs... Illogical thoughts like, 'it must be time my luck changed' or, 'surely it can't be red again' are our prompts that this is happening.

The smart gambler keeps this irrational instinct in check and understands that chance does not owe them a favour because of past sins. This section has a list of commonsense do's and don'ts that should be adhered to when involved in any form of gambling.

Do's...

DO take breaks from the gambling activity you're involved in. There's a reason why casinos don't have windows or clocks! The less you think about the time you're spending at the tables and the longer you spend there, the more you'll lose overall, unless you're a professional gambler with the hard won knowledge to gain a statistical edge.

By taking a break you not only cut your turnover and therefore losses, you also refresh your brain (which may be relevant in games which require a degree of skill, like Blackjack). Finally, it gives you a chance to get your emotions back under control if you have been having a big winning or losing streak. Playing in the grip of strong emotions is a very dangerous pastime.

DO play within a fixed budget. Decide before you start what you can afford to lose and do not try to recoup your losses once your limit has been reached. That's how family homes are lost. If you have trouble stopping at your loss limit, then only bring the limit amount in cash and Leave your credit cards at home. However, a person with such disciplinary difficulties should really not gamble at all.

Having established a budget, find a table limit appropriate for the amount of entertainment time you expect. If you want to make a night of it but can only afford to lose $100, then don't play at the $20 minimum Blackjack table. Find the lowest minimum bet table offered and wait for a seat to become available.

DO keep track of your betting results. If you're trying a new form of gambling, you are well advised to keep written records of your returns from each session. Over a statistically valid period this will show you whether your 'system' works or not. Do not rely on your memory for such information. There is unfortunately nothing so easy to deceive as our own egos.

DO accept a loss. It is not a reflection on you as a person. It does not establish future 'credit' with the gods of chance. Statistically you are more likely to lose further money than you are to win it back... Let it go, and have a laugh about it.

Dont's...

DON'T drink a lot of alcohol when gambling in a decision making environment. Many gambling pastimes require skill, and excessive alcohol will inevitably cause you to make mistakes and also perhaps become blase about losing money.

DON'T play decision based games unless you know the correct strategies. If you are going to play games like casino Blackjack, take the time to learn its basic strategy.

Games with zero skill (i.e. every bet has the same expected percentage return to the punter) are generally a worse proposition than playing decision based games well... but much better than playing those same games badly!

DON'T keep on doubling! In this popular and seductive system, commonly used when there are roughly even money chances in games such as Roulette, you keep raising your stake with each consecutive losing bet to somewhat more than double the previous bet, so that when you eventually win you cover all the losing bets and make a small profit.

The fallacy with this system is rather obvious, a resource barrier will be hit at some point... The system ultimately works only if you had an infinite bank and the casino had an infinite limit. In all other cases (i.e. in real life) you will win a small amount frequently and lose a lot of money occasionally. Your percentage return remains the same.

So let us stress again, no matter what the system, changing bet amounts according to some special mathematical formula cannot increase or decrease your returns. All it can do is change the variance of the outcome, the 'volatility' if you like, so that you may be more likely to win than otherwise, but lose more money when the system fails, and vice versa.

It goes without saying that being more likely to win doesn't mean that you'll win more overall. This is shown mathematically by a comparison of winning versus losing returns over a large number of bets. When a system has you winning 10% of your bank 90% of the time (which sounds attractive) then you will lose your entire bank 10% of the time (which isn't so good!)

Note that there are staking strategies in some games requiring skill such as Blackjack that do affect your percentage returns, but these are dictated by 'inside information' gained from techniques such as card counting. The game is not genuinely random as in the spin of a Roulette wheel or toss of a Two-Up coin. A card counter at Blackjack knows whether the spread of cards left in the deck are statistically favourable to the player or the house, so their staking method is based on knowledge, not some magical mathematical formula.

DON'T blame that player on the end! This one is peculiar to Blackjack, but also occurs in other games where turns are taken and someone's actions appear to have an effect on your result.

In Blackjack, the last person on the table, sometimes referred to as the 'anchor man', makes choices about whether to stand or take cards that have an immediate impact on which cards the dealer gets. If the dealer ends up with a winning hand, some players are given to thinking, 'That player caused me to lose. If they'd made the decision you're supposed to make there, then the dealer would've busted and I would have won'... This makes no sense but is disturbingly prevalent philosophy. Except for rare cases where the player has special information about the deck through card counting, the likelihood of the remaining cards in the deck being beneficial to the dealer is completely independent of what the last player does. Sometimes it will be good, other times bad.

To clarify this point, the 'anchor man' will play some hands badly and cause the dealer to win, some hands badly and cause the dealer to lose, some hands well and cause the dealer to win, and some hands well and cause the dealer to lose. Ultimately both the dealer's and players' fortunes are affected equally by the anchorman's decisions, whether they be perfect basic strategy or suicidally stupid. It's just easier to remember decisions that cost us money!

As a general principle, retrospective analyses of chance events are a waste of perfectly good angst that could be spent on worrying about whether pigs actually fly...