Completely inexperienced nongambler here who’s reading this thread with great interest.
A question about the Martingale thingy. If I’m reading this correctly, and assuming you really had an unlimited bankroll and were able to double your bets until you actually won, wouldn’t the “trick” to such a system be to stop playing the first time you won? Is the reason this almost never works is because people keep betting after that fist win? You might not win huge amounts but wouldn’t you at least turn a small profit?
(Disclaimer: I’ve never gambled and don’t intend to because I know myself too well – I’m pretty sure I’d never allow myself to cut my losses and leave if I were losing. My father had a semi-mild gambling problem when he was young and I think I would take after him in that respect.)
I can attest to this. I downloaded Poker Tracker to see if I could find some flaws in my game. I didn’t want to play for a living but I figured if I could make a few bucks it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
So I do reasonably well 4-tabling at 2NL but just had a hard time getting any traction at 5NL. Trying to figure out why it was it finally occurs to me. At a $5 buy-in NL table there were SIX PLAYERS with a VPIP <17. :eek:
I have played poker online since 2003 and have been a significant winner, though I have never played poker to support myself. It is quite possible to support oneself with discipline and constant thinking about the game. Most players who play poker online for money will be losers. This is simply the dynamic of the rake, at two plus two there is a constant discussion about what percentage of players win long term. The latest estimate I saw put that figure at about 17%.
For the great majority of that winning minority poker is a nowhere pursuit. After you have played thousands, or in my case millions, of hands the game is just boring. Playing it alone all day long grinding out a few extra dollars is not satisfying and it doesn’t give you marketable skills outside of poker. I don’t think there it is any accident that there are significant numbers of depressed kids in their early twenties posting on poker message boards. I see no reason why school and poker can’t coexist. I really don’t care how much money someone is making, the beauty of online poker is that it is there and waiting at any hour of the day and any time of the year.
Good luck to the OP’s son, but I hope he realizes that the question of whether he can make ends meet isn’t the only question, or maybe even the important one.
Where did you see that 17% estimate? The estimates I’ve seen are all less than 10%, usually half that, but I guess maybe with decent rakeback deals you can get these days…
So say you put $5 on the table and lose.
Then you put $10 on the table and lose.
$20 lose
$40 lose
$80 lose
$160 lose
$320 lose
$640 WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER!
How much did you win? $640. How much did you lose in the previous 7 attempts? $635. How much did you net? $5.
Five dollars. You put up $640 to win five dollars. And yes, you can walk away at this point a winner but you’re really winning all that much, so your trip to the casino to implement this “proven” system will not really be worth the gas money you spent getting there.
Besides which, once every 256 times you try this out, you’ll lose even the $640. And once every 512 times, you’ll lose $1,280. And once every 1,024 times you’ll lose $2,560. All to chase that $5 profit. How long do you wish to continue? How much money do you have in front of you?
If you had an infinite bankroll and if the casino allowed an infinite amount of money on the table, yes the Martingale system would work all the time.
And if both of those conditions were to apply…you’d have an infinite amount of money. Why in the heck are you gambling at a casino?
Enderw24 already mentioned the most important issue: you can only win as much as your initial bet, even with unlimited bets and unlimited funds *and you don’t need to gamble if you’ve already got unlimited funds *.
I’ve done some online gaming (not gambling for real actual money) that included a “casino” that did coin-flip betting: 50% chance of a “win” (at ~95% of the stakes) and 50% of a lose. And the casino takes 5% off.
Be aware of the gambler’s fallacy: even if you lost 20 games in a row (if you started with a $10 dollar game, you’d now need $10,485,760 to make a profit of $10 - minus the house takes, which are already almost a dozen orders of magnitudes over your “profit”) your chances of actually winning the $10 are still only 50%. And you probably did not actually start with a million bucks in your wallet.
It’s amazing how many people lost literally hundreds of millions of virtual dollars - not that those bucks were worth any real money, but just the idea of putting that much time and “dedication” to such a stupid concept was pissing me off.
The other problem with this, besides what others pointed out, is that you can’t stop playing. Because you’re still alive and you’ll eventually have to make another decision later in life about something.
Bottom line is, if you play the Martingale (actually, if you play Roulette at all), you’re destined to lose eventually. So you think “well, what if I get out while the getting is good?”
Ok, so fine, you get out of the casino with your $5. You go get in your car and head home on the highway. Then you figure “I don’t need to check my blind spot,” because, hey, there’s little chance that there will be a car there, right? I mean, if that rare event happens, sure, you’ll lose your car, life, or limb, but so what? It’s unlikely.
So you change lanes without looking. And you get away with it! There was no car there. You pull into a parking spot and walk to the corner. You see the light change and you get the white “Walk” man so you head out into the crosswalk. You don’t check for cars running the red light, because although the results of failure would be tragic for you, it’s hardly ever going to happen. What are the chances? 1 in 20,000? That’ll never happen to me. So you get across the street safely.
You log in to your E*Trade account and make a risky bet on a stock. It’ll probably go up, you think, but there’s a sliiiight chance you’ll get wiped out. Turns out, the stock does go up and you make a slight amount of money.
Then you’re cutting the grass and a stick gets stuck in the chute so you reach down with your hand while the mower’s running. You’ve done it a million times safely, right? What are the chances you’ll lose your finger THIS time? Hardly anything. So you reach down, and…CHOP!
You’re in the emergency room learning how to write your signature left-handed and what do you think?
“Curse my bad luck!”
The point of this story is that just because the Martingale probably will yield you a $5 profit, it’s still a bad bet. And if you’re going to run around making bad bets, the odds will eventually catch up to you. What does Roulette have to do with mowing the lawn? It seems like nothing. And yet, you’re missing a finger.
Ha! Thanks, Ender24, Chessic Sense, and the gloriously named Superfluous Parentheses, for reminding me
a) why I’m a writer/artist, not an accountant/banker/mathematician, and
b) why I don’t gamble for money.
I didn’t do the math on the betting thing. When the question occured to me, I was sorta assuming that that single win would = double all your previous bets.
I … have no idea why I thought this.
Thanks for not pointing and laughing at the nimrod (except probably to yourselves!).