Good points, and I will get to implementing those features, but I don't think they're necessary before I allow >1% risk.
Sure. At 1% those features are totally unnecessary.
It's possible for the house to have long losing runs, especially when most players make tiny bets. The few who make the big bets pretty much affect the house's profitability. In a long enough period I would expect the house to profit. Wouldn't you?
I would not, at >2% investment. Small bets are not what I was having in mind.
If you only consider *largest* bets, you, as a house, will be losing money in the long run
if you allow bets over 2%.
This may seem paradoxical - the odds are in your favour; your expected return grows exponentially, yet your actual capital decreases
with certainty.
The effect is obvious if you consider a simple game: 75% chance to double your stake, and you stake
all capital every time (corresponding to 100% investment, the largest bet every time, 50% house edge). After N plays, your expected capital is skyrocketing: (3/2)^N (assuming you start with 1), yet
with overwhelming probability (1- (3/4)^N) you are ruined- your capital is 0.
And this is not an artefact of 100% investment. Consider 50% investment, largest bets: when you lose your
capital is divided by 2, but you win it's multiplied by 1.5. Make some imaginary plays (at a small, ~1% house edge) and you see how fast it decreases. But it does increase at 50% house edge.
The optimal investment percentage on largest bets, at house edge 1%, is 1%. You are not losing (as a house) when investing at under 2%. The optimal overall (all size bets) of course depends on the distribution of the bets. Speaking of which, it'd be interesting to look at the empirical distribution of bet size so far.
I can explain how I got 2% and 1%, but I better say where I got them from: from
this paper.Yes, this is a mathematical paper, but it's very readable (and you can ignore the information-theoretic interpretations if they don't make sense to you).
Edit: as has been pointed out by others before, this does not make the feature of higher investments percents useless. You can use it but you have to manage your investment manually, alimenting and withdrawing in order to maintain a safe percent overall. Hence my request for those features.