The Shimmering Casino Lights Don’t Shine Because of Winners!

The Shimmering Casino Lights Don’t Shine Because of WINNERS!

I just spent several days in Puerto Rico playing at El Conquistador, the Hyatt Dorado, the Hilton and the Sands.  One evening, my friend’s wife Sherri wanted to join us at the tables.  Earlier over dinner, we had discussed an associate’s method of playing a very dangerous progressive bet on Yo (11) using a count method combined with progressively larger wagers.  After copious amounts of Puerto Rican rum combined with fruit juices as diverse as mango, papaya, guava, and breadfruit, Sherri was bound and determined that she was going to try her hand at it.

Here’s a copy of that method directly out of my Playbook along with my original comments:

15-count YO Progression

Start counting rolls without an 11 showing, when it gets to 15 rolls, bet one unit (.25 or $1) on the YO (11)  On each roll without a win, follow the table below:

Does it work?

Yes, but it’s not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.  A friend of mine swears by this method and says it generates about $35/hour on a $1 table.  I grimace every time that I see him play and he has to put out those large Prop bets, roll after roll after roll. The dealers, box-men and I just look at each other and shake our heads. He’s says that he’s never lost, but there have been many times when the progression got over 80 rolls before YO showed.  He normally plays at a $1 minimum prop bet table.  The 25 cent games no longer provide enough “entertainment” for him.  Needless to say, he drinks a bottle of Pepto-Bismal every day, and he’s got ulcers the size of the state of Maryland.

“So is this system just voodoo-magic hoping against hope or does it really work” she asked.

 Well, a little of both, I replied.

 Long-shots are bets with exhilaratingly high payoffs and excruciatingly low probabilities.

Although “experts” often belittle them, these wagers have undeniable appeal.  For some people it provides a thrill not commonly found with Pass Line betting.  For others, it a matter of suspending reality and diving head-first into the gambling waters.  Unfortunately, sometimes a head-first dive into the shallow waters of casino reality can cripple even a medium or large-sized bankroll very quickly.

The primary argument against it is that the house has too great an edge. Returns, while seemingly large, are actually small when compared to the odds against winning, and even worse if you look at tapping out your bankroll without a win.

The biggest risk is in not realizing how risky these type of bets actually are, and in treating long-shots as a “bread-and-butter” play, instead of as an occasional small side-bet.

Here in Puerto Rico, I was even more concerned that I would have to ride out the rest of our Caribbean trip with this women even if she lost.   Knowing Sherri’s personality, the waters would be very rough for all of us no matter how calm the actual sea was.

I thought about it:

• Betting systems can be optimized for any specified gambling goals.
• High likelihood of a positive outcome is no guarantee that it will work every time
• The insidious law of unintended consequences, like having good intentions as you are carted off to the oblivion of casino-hell.
• Increasing the chance of hitting a specified goal also increases the risk of ruin.
• Excessive loss if everything went wrong was a definite possibility.
• There would be no “fall-back” position, or opportunity to partially re-coup losses.
• Hideous looks from fellow players, sneers from dealers, and lop-sided smirks from box-men and Pit Bosses also factored in. 

This method qualified for, and was guilty of all of those things!

 How right was my friends “tainted” logic that an 11 would eventually HAVE to roll? I did some quick calculations while the rest of our dinner party had their third snifter of brandy, at the same time I reflected into my cup of the island’s rare native coffee.

 For a 99 percent chance that this method would work all the time, you would have to stand at the craps table for 17,000 uninterrupted rolls of the dice.  This woman was getting older by the second.  The combination of booze, nautical sun, and a pampered lifestyle indicated that she didn’t have the patience, life-expectancy or bankroll to wait that long.

 So I figured it out for a more reasonable 90% probability that she should win. 

Here’s the numbers:

The single-roll probability of the YO showing up is 5.56%.
To ensure a 50% chance that the YO will appear is 13 rolls.
To ensure a 90% chance that the YO will appear is 41 rolls.
To ensure a 99% chance that the YO will appear and conform to the Law of Large Numbers is 17,000 rolls.

I knew that my friend had factored in at least 85 rolls and that meant a bankroll of at least $1,618.  He usually buys in for $2,000 and he had previously swore under threat of having to listen to my grandmother’s Boxcar Willie Greatest Hits CD that he had never gotten past 85 rolls without the YO appearing and saving his ass.  I told Sherri that information, and suitably armed with money from her tele-communications guru-husband, and sufficiently anesthetized with enough booze to float his 124′ motor-yacht, our group ventured off to the craps table like gladiators into battle.  I followed, and secretly prayed that the casino-lions-of chance had just finished a meal at least as large as the one that we had just devoured.

Now we had to see this method at play in a semi-foreign territory, the “Coliseum of Chance”. Okay here are the results:

 Over two days of play Sherri spent about 8 hours at the table only using this method.  The longest number of rolls without YO showing was 71, and the shortest was 1 roll.  She made a grand total of $311 profit.  I didn’t figure the total amount of money that she put at risk to make that profit, but I estimate that it was near $3,000.  For you investor-types out there, that’s a 10% return-on-investment.  I understand that both the Dow and Nasdaq will not be able to do that for you this week.

Okay the “15-Count YO Progression Method” worked this time.  Did Sherri dodge a bullet or is there a certain brutal elegance to this method.  The following day I called my friend back in Boston to tell him that we had used his method successfully without blood-shed or loss of friendship.  He said “Hmm, maybe I’m not so crazy after all.  Maybe it’s you Mad Professor that’s crazy for not believing in me.”   However, he added that his ulcers still look like Sigourney Weaver just blasted and obliterated an extraterrestrial alien egg-hatchery, but that he plans to continue with his method.  Funny thing, Sherri has been saying the same thing over and over, like a mantra, as we make our way to Dominican Republic.

This woman now thinks that she has seen and read the Holy Grail of gaming.  I’m still trying to tell her that she is wrong, but I have a feeling that sooner or later the dice will give Sherri the same message, only they’ll be a lot more convincing.

Oh yes, one more thing. References to extraterrestrial aliens are all allegorical. The research did not require that a single flesh-eating cyber-morph be brought into a casino and forced to perform unnatural acts, nor were they subjected to unwarranted risks in the name of scientific furtherment, or made to endure the company of stubborn “fail-proof-system” people.

Good Luck & Good Skill at the Tables…and in Life.

The Mad Professor