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Comment by anfractuosity | Hacker News Reader

The trading bot sounded fun. I was always curious about the bots that were apparently used on betting sites like betfair to perform arbitrage.

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I one quadrupled my capital with a betting bot running a martingale strategy. Then I made it run overnight and lost all the funds. Turns out there aren't any betting strategies that can last over the long run.

With a martingale strategy the chances of losing are miniscule but if you play 10,000 rounds at a 0.01% of losing, you're going to lose once. And that's when you lose all your capital.

This is the kind of thing I meant:

http://automatingbetfair.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/betfair-bots...

I don't think the fact that your coin-flip martingale strategy didn't work is evidence that "there aren't any betting strategies that can last over the long run".

No, but over the long run, no betting system can guarantee a positive return. If you run enough simulations, you will inevitably lose. The Wizard of Odds[1] did a great piece on this and it's definitely worth a read.

Also, if you believe to have a betting system that does work, VegasClick[2] runs a $30k wager against your $3k if your system can survive at least 11 of 20 200,000 round games. It's easy money.

[1]: https://wizardofodds.com/gambling/betting-systems/ [2]: http://vegasclick.com/gambling/betting-system-challenge

I think the other posters mean sports betting and other betting markets when they say "betting" not just casino games where, as you rightly say, there's no way of making money.

In sports betting markets it is theoretically possible to make money, but very hard.

Yeah I was thinking of sports betting, however I guess even in casinos you can do card counting or apply the laws of physics to roulette wheels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Doyne_Farmer#Beating_roulet... (although the roulette example could be classed as cheating ;)

Yea, it was; I might come back to it some day. The source is available at https://github.com/nfriedly/Coin-Allocator

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