Part One: Dum-Dum on Math and Trends

His name is Dum-Dum, a name he gave himself on my private web site The Craps Club at www.goldentouchcraps.com. He came to the site to discuss his various views on casino gambling and to explain to all and sundry that he was one of the most knowledgeable gamblers in the world, having been personally taught by some Internet dice guru and some author who knows more than even him.

In just about all his gambling theories, Dum-Dum is wrong -- sometimes he's a little wrong and sometimes he's a lot wrong. But one thing Dum-Dum is not and that is unique. His ideas and opinions seem to reflect what many other casino gamblers firmly believe -- that they can figure out some way to beat the house with systems that just can't beat the house.

Since Dum-Dum was quite articulate, I am going to take the 10 points he wrote about in my next few columns and show why what sometimes seems to make sense actually makes no cents or dollars whatsoever when played in the casinos.

Dum-Dum: "Number One. Math is not important to be a good gambler. If I win a bet like the Any Seven [at craps], does it matter what the house edge is? No, because I win the money. I get four to one. I bet one dollar and I win four dollars. The house edge means nothing because I have won the bet."

Scobe: If you were to make one Any Seven bet in your entire lifetime and win it and never came back to a casino to play, you would be right. The math would mean nothing. You'd be a long-term winner at a random game because you won that single bet. Unfortunately, we know you are coming back and so the house edge does mean something because winning that Any Seven bet, the worst bet on the craps table, is also a loser for you and will always be a loser for you if you play a random game. If you bet $5 on the Any Seven you received only $20 because the house took $5. You really should have won $25 but the house became your partner in the bet with its $5 tax. That's how it makes its money on these types of bets -- the house taxes you a percent of your winnings. So you actually lose when you win. And if you play enough that edge will get you without question.

Dum-Dum: "But the people who are slaves to math would tell you that making a Any Seven bet is a bad move because the house edge is 16.67 percent. Where is the logic if I have won the bet? Who cares what the math was? [My guru] preaches that math is not important in the here and now. You have to make the right move right now. You don't have to think of the long run because you aren't playing in the long run and you will never play in the long run. You are only playing in the here and now. Doesn't that make sense? My personal dice teacher also makes bets that have high house edges and he is right. He plays in the here and now. With these two guiding my way, it is obvious that math is given too much emphasis in gambling by mathematicians who think they know gambling."

Scobe: The 7 comes up enough times in a craps game to show that even your "here and now" philosophy is ruinous to a player. If you stay at the craps table for four hours in one day -- Certainly the here and now, right? -- you will witness about 468 rolls of the dice. About 78 of those will be the 7. Now let us say that you bet every roll. You will lose $5 x 390 = $1,950 and win $20 x 78 = $1,560. You are down $390 in just one day. But what if the "math" doesn't work out correctly. How lucky do you have to get to overcome such an atrocious bet? Just divide $20 into $390 and you'll see that you have to win 20 more bets of the Any Seven in one single day to be ahead by a pinch! So the math counts even today despite your beliefs.

Now, a dice controller is in a different situation as he is changing the game on some bets. But even the best advantage players would find it nearly impossible to roll 98 sevens in 468 rolls. And that would be a real waste of time in the here and now when there are much better bets to be made and those better bets are based on -- Dare I say this? -- the math of the game.

Dum-Dum: "Step Number Two: Trend betting is a winning system if used properly. Trends are what make gambling beatable but you have to know how to handle trends. You have to directly analyze what the trend is and whether it is a good trend or a bad trend."

Scobe: Since all gambling deals with decisions, you could make a very strong case that all gambling deals in trends. There are strings of certain numbers showing, certain numbers not showing; inconsistent strings; long streaks, short streaks; choppy streaks. God, you could go crazy identifying patterns of trends. Randomness is incredibly trendy. Check out the number Pi, a completely random number, and you will see trends that will turn your hair gray. The problem with Pi and casino gambling is that nothing is predictable for players who are not advantage players. In a coin toss, three heads were flipped. Will the next one be heads or tails? There is no way to predict this to be more than 50 percent accurate. When you see whatever kind of trend in a casino game there is no way to ascertain whether it will continue or not since there is no causal factor for the trend. (A causal factor will alter what I am saying, obviously.)

If you spend any time at the tables, or any time studying randomness, you know that you will see many weird trends -- that's just how it is. You can choose to bet however you wish to bet because the casino will tax your wins or win more decisions from you. A regular casino gambler cannot get out of that box. It's the coffin of gambler's fantasies. If trends could be predicted, most roulette players would win; most blackjack players would too. Most gamblers actually do look for trends -- and they have the same result as those gamblers who do not look for trends. They lose. The casino profits are proof enough of this.

Dum-Dum: "There are hot tables and cold tables. That is a fact that no one can dispute. But you still get people who say that the table doesn't matter but that it's the shooters who matter. What nonsense. When you are at a cold table, you don't shoot well. You have all experienced that. So what is that? The table is cold. How hard is that to understand? A good precision shooter knows to get off a cold table and he should look for one that isn't cold. He will shoot much better at a hot table as will all the random rollers."

Scobe: There are not hot and cold tables. That is just a figure of speech. There are tables where the shooters have -- in the recent past -- been sevening out quickly. There are tables where several shooters in a row had good rolls -- or bad rolls if you're a don't player. I've been at tables where shooter after shooter sevens out before the 5-Count (that would be a cold table) and then a shooter gets hotter than hell. I couldn't predict which shooter it would be if it's a random roller. It just happened. That's the nature of random rolls. Dum-Dum, a table is just a table.