| I have spent the last few years poring over every junk piece of gambling literature. I consider myself an expert on the subject. I am a connoisseur of dreadful mail-order systems. If someone in Denver is composing some ghastly streak betting system, I can smell it several thousand miles away here in England. I have a finely honed bullshit detector. The first and easiest principle to determine whether a system is valueless or not I will christen May's First Law Of Hucksterism. This law states that a gambling system sold through mail order is by definition worthless. This blanket statement is pretty accurate. Mail order system-sellers are almost universally charlatans who prey on human credulity and superstition. The majority of mail-order systems depend on luck, some betting progression, "card-clumping" or some other form of pseudo-theory. Luck, for all practical purposes, does not exist. Luck is a medieval concept. Try to win at gambling by the use of a charmed amulet or lucky coin and you will slowly but surely get wiped out. You would be better off going into politics planning your career on the predictions of the entrails of a chicken. Betting progressions, it is universally agreed, do not provide you with a long-term advantage over the house in a game of independent trials. They do change the distribution of wins and losses. Which makes them excellent for system sellers who can say something "you will win 75% of all sessions" in total honesty. I can do better than that. Try doubling your bet every time you lose. Then you will win all of your sessions. Except for one, which will be the one in which you lose everything. Pseudo-theorists are the most lethal form of huckster. They cloud their pitch for a worthless system in confusing verbose language designed to wow the customer with their intellect. This is like toothpaste advertisements going on about fluoride. Know what difference fluoride makes to toothpaste? Me neither. In the same way you will find hucksters talk about Hypogenic non-linear congruential clumping strategy. When challenged as to what that actually means, they will go "Ah...$200 please". There are more exotic varieties of system huckster. There is the plagiarist, the individual who simply steals someone else's quality work, photocopies it, and sells it for 10 times the original price. (Someone did this recently to Frank Scoblete's work on slots and my writings on baccarat.)Of all forms of gambling, the lottery, in percentage terms, is the worst. The expectation is generally around 50%. That's worse than blackjack when the dealer deals seconds. The reason people put up with these terrible odds is that the higher the potential payoff, the less people care about the odds. Despite these odds, a whole industry claiming to improve your chances has sprung up around the lottery. Mostly these involve superstitious nonsense, but some involve pseudo-scientific methods, such as wheeling or pattern recognition. Obviously, none of these methods can be used to overturn that huge house edge. Nevertheless, it is a surprising fact that the lottery can sometimes be a good bet. The reason for this is simple: in weeks in which no one correctly picks the winning numbers, the jackpot is reinvested, which is called a "rollover". This keeps happening till somebody does eventually win the jackpot. Sometimes the return from a rollover jackpot becomes high enough that buying every single conceivable possible combination of lottery tickets may give you a profit. |
Tiger 1 home gamble1 gamble2 gamble3 gamble4 gamble5 gamble6 gamble7 Tiger 2 Tiger 3 Casino and other Advertisers |
||