On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 2:30 PM, Sai Sai <gofastnismo@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Id say 99% of the people dont gamble for a living on this board and dont
> have never ending bankrolls. This makes short term play a big deal. Most
> people want to play not ride a progressive for days on end trying to get
> the mathematical payback.
This repeats an oft-held fallacy that math doesn't matter for short term
results. The answer is that of course it does.
Suppose player A and player B go to the casino once a week and play 1,000
hands each. Player A always plays FPDW and player B always plays 6/5
Bonus Poker. 1,000 hands is obviously short term, so on any given week,
neither player will achieve their mathematically expected result. Some
weeks player A will do better than player B and vice versa.
But if they keep doing this every week, which one do you think will have
more money at the end of one year? At the end of two years?
The fallacy of "it's only 1,000 hands, so the math doesn't matter" is that
you could say that every time, and then you find yourself as player B.
(The mathematical way of expressing this is: the overall expected value of
a series of events is simply the sum of the individual expected values of
each individual event. It doesn't matter when the events occur, or how
close together, or how many of them happen on any particular day.)
> If you cant understand this than your not as smart as you think you are
> Bob. The math doesn't always work and there have been pros that have
> busted.
The math *does* work. Pros go busted when they ignore *other* math, which
says how big of a bankroll you should have to have a certain level of
confidence of surviving a horribly unlucky streak.
