Online casino gambling – the gambler’s fallacy

Unlike online poker, online casino gambling represents a confrontation between the player and the entity which operates the casino, over all the featured game tables. As an online casino player, you’ll be going up against the house every time and not against your peers. That means one thing for you: the house edge. The house edge is the small advantage the casino will enjoy over players on each and every wager. The house edge itself may be small, but it usually only serves as a tool to induce a system known for experts as the house drop, which is a much more efficient money maker for the house.

The bottom line is, that because of the house edge, and the house drop that it generates, players will be faced with a negative long term expected value at the casino’s tables.

One way to keep this negative EV at a minimum is by steering clear of the gambler’s fallacy. The gambler’s fallacy is one of the main engines that keep the house drop going.
I’ll use an example to make it clear what gambler’s fallacy is about. Suppose someone tells you he’s willing to bet you X dollars that a flipped coin will result in heads 10 times in a row. If you give that guy 1000-1 odds, you’d still stand to win money in the long-run, which means it’d be correct for you to give him that sort of odds.

Suppose he flipped the coin 9 times and got his heads every time. The final time, he’d be getting 1000-1 odds on the flip of a coin, which would not be right at all, as a matter of fact, you’d be making a huge mistake offering that sort of odds for a 50-50 event. Gambler’s fallacy is about the mistake of considering that since the coin came up heads 9 consecutive times, it is somehow “due” to yield tails on the next flip. In the case of coin flips, each and every single event carries exactly 50-50 odds, and that will never change, regardless of current streaks.
Casino players like to window-shop for trends. They watch the roulette wheel for instance, and if they see that the last 9 spins all yielded red, they figure that it’s about high-time a black came up. That is just not the case. All spins are 100% independent of the previous ones, that is unless the casino’s random number generator is defective.

One of the worst shows of gambler’s fallacy is the Martingale system. The Martingale system tells players to bet twice the amount of their previous bets every time they lose a wager, in order to recover their losses and to pocket some winnings on top of them. The Martingale system fails to take it into account that long losing streaks are more than possible and that players’ bankrolls will be eaten up extremely fast by the exponentially escalating wagers.

This is exactly the reason why the Martingale system is almost guaranteed to backfire.
If you want to be successful as a casino gambler, you need to find actual ways to reduce the house edge. The same way online poker rooms offer rake rebate and poker prop deals, online casinos reward their loyal and active players with various bonuses and comp points. Take full advantage of these perks and make sure you play as close to optimal strategy on each of the games as you can. In live casino blackjack it is theoretically possible for the player to turn the tables on the house, but I’m not sure whether the same system (card counting) works online too.

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