The short run in a long run universe

19 September 2012

By Frank Scoblete

You hear players at the tables and you read "experts" on the Web and in books and magazines all the time:

"I just saw five fives in a row! I'm jumping on that five right now!"

"The 12 just showed three times; it's hot. I'm jumping on that 12 right now."

"My Lord, the 11 just hit six times in a row. I'm getting on it right now!"

Sounds logical doesn't it? As logical as the earth is flat and that it is also the center of the universe -- all wrong ideas in light of true knowledge.

The short term fluctuations in numbers appearing in a random game of craps have no impact on the future appearances of these numbers. Let me take this to absurdity then -- "I just saw the two hit four hundred times in a row! I'm getting on it right now."

That's the equivalent of saying, "I've been to four hundred places on earth and everything I have seen tells me the world is flat!"

In a RANDOM game, the appearance of all those twos is meaningless, totally meaningless for your future prospects should you start betting that number. The numbers at craps, given time, will reflect what probability is for those numbers. That is a fact. You can't look back over the last 10, 20, 80, 200 rolls and think you can now make predictions on the next 10, 20, 80 and 200 rolls.

After four hundred hits of the two, the likelihood of the two coming up 401 times is one in 36. Those last 400 rolls mean nothing.

So why does it feel, appear, and logically tug at our intellects to impose the concept of a “short term order” that can predict the next batch of short term orders? Because we are creatures that inherently, intuitively look for order, patterns and meanings in everything we do.

If you are religious and you did something wrong and then fell down a flight of stairs, an old-world view would sound like this: "God just punished you for doing something bad!" That flawed way of thinking dropped out of our thinking (to a degree) after the Book of Job showed that bad things can happen to good people. Thus, there is not necessarily any meaning to short-run bad luck.

Check out the major league baseball batters who wash their hands in dirt, interminably spit, grab their crotches, make the sign of the cross, look to the heavens when they hit a home run, eat the same breakfast every day before they have a game. Do any of these things have any real meaning? No, they don't. But the players think they do because somewhere in the past, after washing his hands in dirt for the first time, the kid hit a home run. Or he spit a gob of phlegm out of his young mouth and hit a home run.

Mentally this might mean something to the player, but I can grab my crotch all I like but I am not going to hit home runs in the major leagues. Crotch grabbing really has nothing to do with the actual results, even though the player's mental makeup gives credence to crotchiness.

The key to understanding how to bet at a random game of craps is to realize that all past decisions are meaningless. You are better off not knowing what these decisions were than seeing them and projecting them into the future.

Do not let your short-range pattern-finding natures blind you to the light of knowledge. In a random game, the short-term of the past is no indicator of the long-run future. If you believe it is, the world is flat and is positioned at the center of the universe.