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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

Looking at how bad these results are, the career gamblers in the casino seem to have an edge. They have various strategies that actually do work to greater or lesser degree - e.g. Playing poker which is a game of skill against other people with a house rake instead of a house mathematical edge.

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Poker isn't gambling, but a game of skill. Are there many people making a living actually gambling on something like craps or roulette.

Making a living on poker? Absolutely.

Making a living on craps or roulette? Not mathematically impossible, but highly improbable. How do they get their edge?

Not likely. But there are some strategies that amount to exploiting casino promotions and perks. There used to be some tricks around slot machines - like those near the door had a payout ratio above 1.0. There are probably still tricks along those lines, but if they become well known the casino's change them. You'd be much better of sticking to games of skill.

Fair enough. I've heard of craps players teaming up to play huge on both sides of the pass/don't pass, which would still have a negative EV. But they racked up comps pretty quickly which supposedly gave them a slight overall return when factoring that in. This might be good for a while to accumulate free rooms and whatnot, but not sure how one would actually make a living doing this.

Yeah, seems like a bad bet, but still better than day trading judging by the study results.

Roulette you just play the statistics: not really an edge. You run the Martingale system (double your bet after every loss), and my quick monte carlo simulation says I'd turn $1 into $2,250 after 5,000 iterations. But I'd need a bankroll of $8,200 to cover the 13 consecutive losses my model spit out. And if your bankroll is that big, there are easier ways to get the same return.

(Oh, and most tables have maximums, so you can't keep doubling your bet to infinity.)

Not craps or roulette (without cheating), but certainly with blackjack. By finding favorable conditions and counting cards, it's possible to extract a slight advantage over the house (say 1% edge). Of course this is a grueling enterprise with an extremely high variance and thus requiring a large amount of capital.

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