CasinoObserver - 20 December 2011 05:08 AM
If you have nothing else to report than trying to be negative then I wonder why you are at this forum?
I am fully aware of the house edge. And yes the odds are in principal in favour of the house.
And yes the odds tell us that with every spin the chances of getting red or black are exactly the same. That is all true but it is also true that in the long run there is a natural equilibrium and based on this equilibrium the chances of having (for example) 20 times red after another are 2^20 and that is exactly the same as any other sequence of 20 spins. But this also means that the chance of getting 20 reds is in fact 1 in 1048576 (so 1 in a million). This leaves 1048575 chances of NOT getting 20 reds.
If we take in mind all the people buying lottery tickets with a chance of winning of maybe 1 in a billion (or worse) than why would we not try to create systems for gambling with a loss chance of 2.7%.
What does it mean when we say the odds favor the house? It means that in the long run, the universe of many thousands of spins in which the casinos live, the house is guaranteed to come out ahead. This is easily demonstrated with a simple example. Over time, assuming an unbiased wheel, every number will come up proportionately close to an average of 1/37th (Eurpoean wheel) or 1/38th (American wheel) of the time. Suppose a player bets one unit on each of two columns covering 24 numbers. That player is expected to win one unit 24 times, getting paid 2:1 for the winner while losing the other bet. That player is expected to lose two units the other 13 or 14 times. Total winnings = 24 * 1 = 24; total losses = 13 or 14 * 2 = 26 or 28 for an average loss of 2 or 4 units every 37 or 38 spins even though the player wins more spins than he loses.
It is quite easy, even trivial, to design a betting system that wins more times than it loses. (A simple Martingale on any of the even money outside bets will do.) But that does not make it a winning system! So a system loses only 2.7% of the time. That is about one time in 40. Do 40 winning sessions make up for the one losing one? That is the key question, and the mathematics of the game say that without advantage play they can not.
Indications are that tomuen has developed a system that wins a little a lot of the time, but failures have been reported. Fortunately for the players those failures have come after enough winning sessions so that no players have been busted, but a failure can occur at any time, including the first time. What Brian and I caution against is believing Project X = Holy Grail because it has lost only a few times. We of course want it to be the Holy Grail, but we cannot let that desire blind us to the reality that in the long run it probably is not. (Yes, I concede that tomuen may have discovered a flaw in probability theory; I’m just not betting on it.)
From the posts here I get the feeling people are winning a little most, maybe even almost all, of the time. Cool! That is what losing (or negative) progressions do, and so long as you understand that the rare large losses are expected to overshadow the frequent and small wins then Project X is as good as any other system. My concern is that such frequent wins will generate a false sense of security, particularly when I see posts suggesting running the system on “turbo”. I have seen players lose their last dollar when the “impossible” happened; it wasn’t pretty. I’m hoping none of you play that role.