Whereas the expected bankroll growth is more to do with the factor by which the bankroll grows with each bet.
[snip]
Yup, great explanation btw. I think your summary is a lot clearer than the original.
So now that we have a way of calculating the expected bankroll growth, we can introduce another term "the kelly".
If you plot the expected bankroll growth (EBG) against how much you are risking -- you will see the chart is sort of parabolic. And the point in which EBG is maximized is known as the kelly.
Now a casino isn't really able to make every bet "a kelly" because that would require telling players how to bet, but what it can do is limit bets that get too risky. I'm not really sure there's a good robust way to do this, at it totally depends on the context.
For instance it's my unconfirmed belief that physical casinos employ very strict limits on the general tables because they know if someone wins "big" they will just walk, instead of turning over the money. (i.e. last casino I was in, had a $50 limit on a number in roulette, unless you were a high roller in which case they were happy taking over x10 that).
Bustabit also has some pretty unique constraints, as the limits can everyone. So it really needs to balance the idea of having a "hard cap" risk amount it accepts per game, while also being able to accept as much from a single player as possible. The system it uses of having a 1x kelly per-player and a hard-cap of a 2x kelly (or currently 1.5x) per-game seems pretty reasonable.
The other interesting thing about 2x kelly, is that for a
binary bet (win all, or lose all) there is 0-EBG (but positive +EV). But actually bustabit (from the houses perspective)
isn't a binary bet, it can lose some and win some. So assuming I calculated everything right (which very well might not be the case, as I can't come up with an analytical solution) it's actually quite common for a 2x kelly to be positive expected bankroll growth! (and the worst case is a 2x kelly is 0 EBG)