Topic: Stop gambling your coins unless you're playing for entertainment! - page 3. (Read 4028 times)

I think if you're placing two complimentary bets which cancel each other out, leaving you a guaranteed profit, that's arbitrage.  If you find a site that's offering a 10-1 payout for an event which you are pretty sure will happen around 50% of the time, that's not arbitrage; that's just taking advantage of someone estimating the true odds incorrectly.

I believe that this example is called "arbitrage" and is occasionally used in sports betting (or other gambling where the payoff odds on the same event can differ between multiple bookmakers).

I can think of 4 examples, all of which have worked for me:

* play on a poker site when you're good enough relative to the other players that you win enough to beat the rake.
* play on a site that offers enough bonuses and incentives to make it +EV to play there
* play on a site that allows you to count cards at blackjack.
* play on a site which allows you to place bets against other players, rather than against the house.  spot good value bets and profit from them.  sometimes it's possible to use multiple sites to create a no-lose situation.  For example I once bet on "Michael" to win some TV reality show on one site, and bet that he wouldn't win on another site.  The odds available on the two sites were out of whack with each other, meaning that whatever happened I made a profit.  When I phoned the betting company that I had won the bet against asking how  I could withdraw my winnings, they seemed to suggest that nobody had ever asked that before, and that I didn't need to - I could simply bet my winnings on another event instead!  This was before the days of Bitcoin.

All of the above can offer a +EV gambling experience.  Using "a good martingale strategy" never changes your expectation.  If the odds are in the house's favour then changing your bet size doesn't change that.  You'll still lose everything if you play long enough.  With a +EV game, that's not necessarily true; it's still possible to lose everything due to a run of bad luck, but your expectation is to grow your bankroll, not shrink it.

I believe he is referring to poker.  If he is being honest, then it would seem that he is a skilled player who has enough of an edge to overcome the rake.

If you have a good martingale strategy and a bit of good luck, you can play for tens of thousands of rounds, before you lose it all. If you walk away with your winnings before then, you have won.

Where the hell do you find a gambling service that has a positive EV?

To many people telling people what to do with "their" bitcoin, just tune them out as noise is my advice.

But holding Bitcoins as a store of wealth is a gamble already.

But gambling is the single solitary way I have made my coins.  I started from zero and have piled up dozens and dozens of BTC, all from gambling.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say not to place bets that have a negative expected value as a known outcome? If one can find bets where the expected value is generally positive should one not take those coins?

I do.

This post is awesome. I love when maths justify my gambling habit.

Not so funny story:

I was hanging in #bitcoin-otc one day and a guy showed up who had BTC8.5, but due to currency fluctuation, he was about BTC0.5 short that he needed to complete an important purchase on a site that only takes bitcoins. He had no trading history and no one would sell him the last 1/2 bitcoin through paypal even though he was offering an obscene premium - like 50% or something.

Anyways, another guy and I advised him to play the 75% shot on Satoshi Dice and Martingale it up if he lost. He lost the first one, then we coached him to increase his wager to make up the difference. I wound up getting kicked off #bitcoin-otc because of a nitty op who thought it was morally repugnant to encourage gambling as a money management strategy. The guy wound up winning all he needed on his second or third try.

The op tried defending himself with variations on the "house always wins" canard, but when I asked why HE didn't jump at the opportunity to trade some BTC at a 50% premium he suddenly ran out of answers.

I'm pretty sure there's no winning strategy for BlackJack at bitZino.  It's a game of skill, but no matter how good you are at it, the house edge is still positive.

Someone just worked out how gambling works !!!
If you start with $100 and spend all night betting your balance of course you will end up losing.

Some people really seem to have trouble grasping this very simple concept, let us use a lottery for an example.

Fools Method:

100 tickets @ 1 bitcoin each.
House takes 1 bitcoin for operation costs.
Fool buys 100 Bitcoin tickets and is annoyed when he wins 99 bitcoin.

Gambling for entertainment Method:

100 tickets @ 1 bitcoin each.
House takes 1 bitcoin for operation costs.
100 people buy 1 ticket each, 1 lucky player wins and is thrilled he won 99 bitcoins.

Here is another reason to gamble.

You have 2.7BTC left over from before your GPUs burnt your house down and need 3.25BTC for your order from a certain website to ease your pain. You could go through the hassle of buying 0.55BTC or you could bet exactly 2.7 to win 3.25 on Myriad and have an 82% chance at avoiding the hassle and fee.

People with discontinuous utility/btc curves can profit (it terms of their utility) by making negative EV wagers at the right times even disregarding entertainment value.

The validity of your statement depends entirely on where and what you play, and if it's a game of skill (say, poker), how skilled you are at it.  For example, there are raffles over at BitDraw that no one is entering.  If a single person enters, they are guaranteed to win, and will win more than twice what they paid for the raffle ticket (prize amount goes up as people buy tickets).

I've also personally made money playing BlackJack over at BitZino, but that's because I know how to play BlackJack properly (:

The more you play, the more you're likely to lose them all. Don't play BTC gambling games to try and make you rick or "turn 0.24 btc into 0.25 btc for a nice number, they're not worth it. Only gamble if you want to lose your coins.