Winning at roulette

I’m going to tell you a sure way to win at roulette…for free. All you have to do is double your bet every time you lose until you win. You properly heard this before. The only problem is that it is not working over a long time. It might fool you because you will win small amounts for some time but sooner or later you’ll lose it all back and then some. The only sure way to win long term is to be the casino.
So let’s take a closer look at this strategy. First of all it’s called Martingale and has been played properly as long as roulette itself. It has just a few very simple rules:
• Start with one betting unit (e.g. 10$)
• If you win => pocket the win and start over again
• If you lose => double your bet (going from 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32….)
That’s it ! This will win you one betting unit most of the time. And give you a false sense of security. Until you hit that one big losing streak which will erase all wins.


The above table shows all possible combinations after five rounds (without the fatal green zero(s)). Without the green zeros the chance to hit red or black is fifty percent each. Now analyze the possible outcomes if you bet on red every time following the rules above:


As you can see in the above tables you will bust once out of 32 times. When you do you will lose a total of 31 units. The other 31 times you will win one unit each. This results in an expected value (EV) of:
(31/32 * 1) + (1/32 * -31) = 0
So you are not making a profit…but you are also not losing like I said before. This is because, as already mentioned above, we neglected the zero(s) which is making the roulette unprofitable. But showing no profit if the rules are not as bad as in the casino should already demonstrate that the method is not working as advertised.
If we include the green zeros into the above tables the chance to win is getting smaller (lower than fifty percent). Hitting the correct color has a chance of 18/37 = ~48.6% (single zero) or 18/38 = ~47.4 (double zero). This results in a negative EV for this betting system which is called Martingale.

How to beat poker - the basics

I am not talking about basics like pot odds and winning percentages. There are some principles which are even more basic and fundamental to all forms of poker.

Table/Seatselection
Choose your opponents wisely. If you wanna win money make sure you are the best or at least one of the better players at the table. Playing against better opponents might improve your own game if you are willing to learn from them. But you should be aware that you don't get these lessons for free. Others like to match themself with the best players around. That is just stupid..Leave your ego away from the table. It will just cost you a lot of money. You should also try to be on the left of bad players. This gives you the chance to isolate these players preflop and play one on one against them.

Bankroll Management
Even if you are a winning player poker is still a game of chance. You can and will lose versus weaker players sometimes. And sometimes this might stretch over a long period of hands. Even solid winners of swings of 100 big bets every now and than. So make sure that you can handle these times. You should have at least 500 BB for the stakes you are playing. If you play professionally it should be even more. So you don't have to move down in the stakes you are playing. If you have less than 300 BB for your current limit you should move down to avoid going broke.

Don't tilt/Play your A game
This seems simple, right ? But i guess it is what turns themost players into losers. They know how to play. When to fold or raise but they don't do it at times. I am not only talking about the obvious signs of tilting like going full phil hellmuth and scream at everyone and everything. The more dangerous form of tilt is not when you are in full berserker mode. After a couple of suckouts or setups/coolers you start making bad calldowns or become a maniac. DON'T !
Don't let your feelings influence your game. If you notice that your style of play changes stop playing.

Good luck at the tables everyone!

Klondike Solitaire - is it beatable ?

I am one of those people who can play klondike (sometimes also just called solitaire) for hours and hours. And I was always looking for the best strategy to play. When searching on the internet I noticed that there is next to no websites on strategy and zero information on the expected value (EV) of this game.
One of the few pages with some insight on this topic is OddThinking but this is a slightly different game than the one I am interested in. I prefer the vegas style game where you can only move through the deck exactly once and any card that has been moved up has to stay up.
As stated before I could not find an analysis of this game online which is strange because this game can even be played in some online casinos for real money. So I build myself a simulator to play it automatically. Here are my first results:
My best strategy so far is able to move up about 9.3 cards in average. Which would result in a house edge of 7%. I am confident that it still can be improved.
A Monte Carlo run of 1000 plays per deck (meaning a certain deck or single game is played 1000 times with totally random moves) is able to score a average of 14.5 cards. Of course this value can never be reached by any "real" strategy it will only give a upper threshold.
A "real" strategy has to make a decision on the next move by the information which is currently available (we call this a information set). Since Klondike is a game of imperfect information (because some cards are still hidden) there might be different games which have the same information set. All visible cards are exactly the same but the hidden cards are distributed differently. Our strategy always has to make the same move which of course will result in different results on each unique game. Monte Carlo will choose different moves each time and will ignore the information set. That is the reason why a strategy will never beat the Monte Carlo approach (if the game has imperfect information).

More to follow.....

Miniconomy - economic browser game

Well the blog is also about pc games. So here is the latest browser game i am testing

An economic browser game. It doesn't have the nicest graghics around but it seems fairly complex. Every movement costs gas and everytime you search your land for resources the condition if it gets worse.
You can choose to dig for resources or create a more advanced product. You may even found your own bank or try to get elected as mayor. Even a life in crime is possible. It is totally up to you....Now see you in miniconomy....You can find my shop in Centropolis.