Post
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Board Service Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: Just-Dice.com : Play or Invest : 1% House Edge : Banter++
by
GOB
on 28/09/2013, 05:32:49 UTC
As a JD Investor, lowering the max profit decreases variance. For instance betting your life savings with 51% is stupid. Betting your life savings in 100,000,000 bets, with a 1% edge, will put you ahead by a large amount, with little variance, in total gain.

You keep returning to this variance thing. What you call variance other people call luck. There is no such thing as variance, just the house edge and a nice bell shape called normal distribution.

Betting your life savings over 100,000,000 bets and betting it all on a single bet carries the exact same risk and reward. You risk less by wagering less on each bet, but if you sum up all those little "risks" across all those millions of bets you end up with the same as just making one single, large bet.

In your terms, placing many small bets means you have to be lucky and win 50,000,000 times. Placing a single bet means you only have to be lucky once.

-Michael




This is dangerously wrong. Please do not follow your own advice.

What you are getting at is exactly what the Kelly Criterion is about. Even if you have a positive expectation bet (like bankrolling just dice), the Kelly Criterion proves (or suggests, or whatever) that you should not bet all your money, because you risk ruin. The Kelly Criterion sets out a formula that maximizes your earnings in light of minimizing your chance of ruin. In the case of just dice, for 1% edge, the Kelly Criterion says you (the house, the investors) should only wager 1% per bet. Incidentally, for negative expectation bets (like wagering on just dice or any casino bet) the Kelly Criterion says you should wager negative money, aka don't bet, or be the house!