I have spent the past several days cleaning my office. It is now so clean that I am unable to get any work done in it. Apparently there must be a minimal amount of strewn paper and garbage over the surface of my desk before I can be productive.
This was the only task I had scheduled to complete post grant panel and pre family vacation. So now the Angry Family is off to Las Vegas. This is not our preferred vacation destination, but the Angry Inlaws are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary and Bakers are gathering in Las Vegas from around the globe.
Here is a conundrum, something that I think about every time I ready myself to go to Las Vegas. Suppose I take a sum of money ($i) to the roulette table and place $1 bets on red. The probability that I win on any spin of the wheel is p = 18/38.
Now suppose that my (modest) goal is to win $1. If i is large enough, the probability of winning $1 before losing all $i at the table is [(1-p)/p]^(-1) = 0.90. I like those odds.
So if I take $100 to the roulette table, I will, with probability 0.90, have $101 in front of me at some point before I go broke. My plan is to walk away from the table as soon as I have $101, and take my $1 and put it in my hotel room. Then I take my $100 and go back to the table and play again.
I know, I won't be able to recoup our plane tickets this way, even if I were willing to take 1200 dollar bills up to my hotel room one at a time over the course of four days. But it's fun to think about. I like the nickel slot machines, too.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
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7 comments:
As a quantitative social scientists, here's my take on Vegas:
Most nice casinos will bring you at least one free drink an hour. This is worth $5, but you should tip the waitress $1, so you're getting $4 in income for every hour you spend gambling. As long as you lose less than $4 per hour on the games, you're breaking even.
Nickel video poker, by the way, is much more satisfying than the slots. The odds are about the same, but it's more interactive, and that sense of control feels more satisfying even when you know rationally than it's the same. Plus, your nickel gets you a longer time of play.
A 90% chance of winning $1, and a 10% chance of losing $100 -- and you like those odds? I hope you bought round-trip tickets, rather than depending on your winnings to get you home.
Sean, that's part of the fun - figuring out at what point to quit in a losing sequence, too. If I stop at $94, my probability of walking away with $1 is still over 80%. That's an expected value of 0.8 - 1.2 = -0.4.
The way my attention switches between the amount to be won/lost and the probability of winning/losing fascinates me, in a Kahnemann/Tversky kind of way.
Before you write me off, please know that I have never gambled with more than $5 in my whole life. Well, if you count the football pools, $10, but it's hard for me to count football as gambling.
Hey, you'll regularly find me at the poker tables, squandering more money than that. The fact that I'm playing against the other players and not the house, and therefore could be making money if I consistently played well, consoles me greatly, notwithstanding the fact that this hypothetical situation does not actually come to pass.
Well, it seems the awful emails and the compost ants have finally done it! You really DO need a vacation... keep you $100 and find an Angry Male Stripper (shouldn't be too hard in Vegas). :-P
Actually, roulette has the worst odds of any gaming table. Blackjack has the best. Slot machines are the most gamble-riffic, particularly if you enjoy the glassy-eyed look.
Ooh! I love the nickel slots -- mostly because the they're cheap entertainment and the first time I went to Vegas I started with $3.00 changed into nickels and cashed out at the end of the week (was working a trade show) with $26.35. Not bad!
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