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Re:A professor who beat roulette by 41b696ef1113 on Sunday February 27, 2022 @05:41PM (#30493509)
A roulette payout can be 35x the wager, so $100->$5000 only requires two consecutive lucky bets.
Re:A professor who beat roulette by faeriechangling on Sunday February 27, 2022 @08:16PM (#30494929)
If he's betting high enough to win 50x his stake over two bets with a winning edge, he's a moron.

A mathematician with a clue and a winning house edge would bet fairly conservatively and bet more as their bankroll expanded and bet less as their bankroll retracted to reduce their risk of ruin. Somebody making 50x their bet in an hour at roulette may sound impressive to many people, but it's obviously idiotic to any gambler worth their salt. It's so unlikely that it suggests incompetence at risk management more than it does genius gambling.

Re:A professor who beat roulette by MockObject on Monday February 28, 2022 @04:31PM (#30505401)
The comment you're responding to said $100 -> $5000. He's a moron to risk $100? There must be some context you didn't make explicit.
Re:A professor who beat roulette by faeriechangling on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @03:29AM (#30511225)
Staking $100 or $1 or $10,000 or 100BTC or 100 widgets isn't the important point. It's that the previous poster is suggesting that he could have made 35x his bet on a single spin, while missing that he would have had to risk over 95% odds to lose his entire bankroll to do that. He would have to bet everything on one spin. If you lose your bankroll, you can't bet anymore, and your edge over the house is worthless.

Now if you take a more conservative strategy, lets say you can lose 1% or win 35% of your initial bankroll, sure it may take longer but if you have an edge in your favor it should take a very unlucky streak of bad luck to go bankrupt and when you win your winnings will compound on top of eachother and the casino still will go bankrupt within a month if they don't ban you from playing roulette. So a more conservative strategy nets you more cash on average.

This is kind of a tangent, honestly I'm not even sure how unlikely it is for a gambler with a reasonably executed winning strategy to double up a few times over a long night if they're running hot. They would be doing this over hundreds of rounds of betting, so a small edge compounds rather quickly.

Re:A professor who beat roulette by klodolph on Sunday February 27, 2022 @07:22PM (#30494476)
That assumes that the gambler is playing unskillfully, or assumes that they don’t care about going bankrupt.