Quote:
Originally Posted by NewOldGuy
I think the thing that confuses them is that, the chance to lose 9 times in a row could really be described as a "hindsight" probability. As you state, the next bet is 50/50 even if you lost the last 8. Always. The chance to lose 9 in a row is sort of an emergent property of very long series, an average that is expected to eventually emerge. On average. Usually.
People who believe in this kind of system seem to make one fatal logical error more than any other. They trust that "You have to eventually win" if you play enough times, and sometimes the related idea that you will become "due" if you've lost enough times in a row.
But both of those points are bunk, just false altogether. And you certainly don't have to catch an eventual win within the narrow series that your bankroll enables. They tend not to see this until the exponentially growing bet sizes get through their entire roll after 5 or 6 bets.
The fact is, you're always going to have people who think they can outsmart a brick wall. You could have a guy on the corner who sells common $5 bills for $5.25 each, and you'd have people like this making up pseudo-math and coming up with all kinds of cockamamie schemes to pull one over on the guy. (That's effectively what casinos are doing, after all, and what Martingalers are trying to do to beat them.)
Last edited by Jimulacrum; 01-23-2014 at 07:00 PM.