Sports Betting Articles
PERCENTAGE AND HOW IT WORKS AGAINST THE PLAYER
By: jef
The professional operator of any organized gambling games scheme can¬not offer bettors even-up propositions. He cannot payoff at the true or correct odds. As he says: "There is no percentage in that." He must in some way gain an advantage or edge over the player; he must have a better chance to win every single bet. A crooked gambler obtains this by cheating. The honest gambling operator obtains it either by levying a direct charge or by extracting a favorable P.C. (percentage) on each wager. He does this last very easily: he simply pays off winners at less than the correct odds.
Most of the 90 million gamblers in America know that every gambling operator has the advantage of a favorable percentage over the player. But as most of them can''t calculate it, they never know how powerful it actually is, and because it works so smoothly and quietly, they forget most of the time that it is even there.
Here is a simple example that shows how the P.C. operates and why it shouldn''t be forgotten. Suppose you walk up to a carnival wheel with $15 in your pocket. This wheel, let us say, has 15 betting spaces on its layout numbered from 1 to 15, and the operator pays winners at odds of 10 to 1. You place a $1 bet on number 6. Since the probability is 1/15, you can expect in the long run to lose 14 bets for each one that you win.
Let''s also suppose that the wheel acts exactly this way in the first 15 spins. You lose the first 14 bets and you are out $14. You have only one buck left. Now you bet that. Number 6 pops up and you win. If the operator paid off at correct odds of 14 to 1, he would return the $1 you bet plus $14 which you won; you would break even with the $15 you had at the start. I
But no carnival or any other gambling games operator ever does this. In our example, since he pays off at 10 to 1 your win gets you $10. This, with the $1 bet which is returned to you, adds up to $11. You have $4 less than at the start. This $4 out of $15 is the operator''s favorable per¬centage, his charge for operating the game. It is what makes gambling operators rich and most players poor. 0
Now let''s forget probability theory for a moment and look at it in another way. Suppose you bet your $15 all at once by placing $1 on each of the 15 betting spaces. You must win one of these bets on the next spin because you have all 15 numbers covered. In this situation, spinning the wheel is unnecessary. The operator might just as well scoop up your $15, retain $4 for himself and hand you $11. You say that only a nitwit would gamble in this fashion? I agree. But, in the long run, this is no different, percentagew''ise, from betting a single number 15 times in succession.
Today, even most of the novice and inexperienced gamblers are aware that this house P.C. exists in all organized forms of gambling, but most of them believe it to be much less than it is. In spite of the fact that the methods for figuring it are usually neither complicated nor difficult, very few gamblers know precisely what it is. You may be surprised to learn that most operators don''t know either.
The general rule for figuring the percentage is simply this: the operator''s favorable percentage (or the player''s disadvantage) is the amount the player is short divided by the total amount he would have collected if paid off at the true odds. In the carnival wheel example above the player is $4 short and he would have collected a total of $15 if paid off at the true odds. Divide 4 by 15 and you get a percentage of 26%% in favor of the operator.
If you make 100 such $1 bets, the probability is that you will end up with a loss of $26.66%. But don''t make the common mistake of sup¬posing that if you start with $100 and place $1 bets on number 6 all evening that you will lose only this amount. The $26.66% is not your total loss for the evening; it is your average rate of loss. Old Man Percentage is in there grinding away on every bet made. You are losing at the average rate of $4 on every 15 bets of $1 each.
You can start with $100 and place more than 100 bets because you can also bet the money you win. The more bets you place the more you lose in the long run, and at the end of 375 spins of the wheel your average rate of loss will have reduced your $100 bankroll to zero. The operator will have earned it all.
Let''s carry this further. Suppose you start with $100 and find at the end of the evening that you have made a total of 750 bets of $1 each and have finished with the same amount of $100 with which you started. You haven''t come out ahead, but you are pleased because the evening''s gambling entertainment has cost you nothing-so you think. Actually, that 262/3% you were bucking cost for you $200 in winnings, because if your winning bets had been paid off at correct odds you would have walked away from the carnival wheel with $300 instead of $100.
Now let us suppose that the wheel operator''s favorable edge was only 3%%. On $750 worth of action you would have walked away with $272.50 instead of breaking even. If the operator''s P.C. was only 12/3% you would have walked away with $287.50. This should make it obvi¬ous that your chances of winning are better when you buck a smaller house percentage than when you buck a bigger one.
I said earlier that the methods for figuring the P.C. are usually not complicated or difficult. Note that word usually. It all depends on the game; sometimes it can be really tough. One example: for over thirty years dozens of top mathematicians have tried in vain to calculate the bank''s favorable P.C. at the game of Black Jack as it is played in the Nevada casinos. Their writings on the subject indicate clearly why they have failed: they simply don''t know enough about the way the game is really played-the problems they work out are never those which are of any practical use to the Black Jack player. They usually suffer from the same handicap when they try to analyze other gambling games.
The author takes pride in stating here that after months of difficult analysis he has succeeded in being the first person to calculate the bank''s favorable percentage at Black Jack.
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