investorbet
Understanding probability
The Working Bank is the pot that keeps you in the game. Each stake is what is at risk.
Six people sitting around a table. Each sitting at a chair numbered one to six. They all have £10. They each put £1 in a pot. The die gets rolled. Whichever chair matches the die, wins the pot. Put £1 in, get £6 back including the £1 you put in, so £5 profit.
The chance of winning is 1 in 6, if no one takes a commission. You win 1 in 6, each player could keep playing forever, right? No. Someone will bust out, then another, then another. Why? Losing streaks, or wins do not land as regular as the odds suggest, sometimes not even close.
It could take 20 rolls to get a 2. Then there might be three 2’s in a row, but the player at seat 2 wouldn’t know that, because seat 2 would have run out of money on roll number ten, and would not be able to continue the game.
Without the science, probability is what an outcome will tend towards. That is, the more spins you do, the more the result will lead to the people at the table breaking even. But they need enough money in their pockets to keep playing. They might not win for 10, 20 or even 50 spins. There is no cap. Each roll has an equal chance of being 2 or 6 or 1 or 3 or 5 or 4. We cannot say exactly which spin will do this.
This is why we say bring £5,000 to the table. You need a pot to keep you in the game. We assume trades of £50 or 1% to start off with. That will handle quite a big losing streak, more than one losing streak probably, but it still might not be enough to keep you in the game.
The money in your pocket is safe. The money on the table is not. When the die is rolled, you will know whether you have won 5 more, or lost the one you put in. This is similar to what we are doing.
The datasheets will show the W/L (win/loss) pattern for each year. This gives you an idea of what you need to have in reserve to stay in the game. One of the datasheet tables shows the longest losing streak over a five-year period. That number looks scary, you could bust out, but in some datasheets you do need to make top-up(s) to get to the end of the five-year window.
The rules should be: Do not bring more to the table than you can afford to lose. Understand there will almost always be long losing streaks, keep your stakes to an acceptable level to ride out the losing streaks. Sit down at the table knowing there are no guarantees.
Look at the datasheets, understand this page, and decide how much you can afford to bring to the table, if any.