WHAT ARE THE PROS AND CONS OF ADVANTAGE PLAY?

[esoito]

Now that we have a suitable definition in the Glossary, I've changed this thread to a dicussion about...

The Pros and Cons of Advantage Play.

Fire away...

[kelly]

How about the wording from wikipedia:

practice of using legal ways to gain a mathematical advantage while gambling



Advantage gambling, or advantage play, refers to a practice of using legal ways to gain a mathematical advantage while gambling.  The term usually refers to house-banked games, but can also refer to games played against other players, such as poker.  Someone who practices advantage gambling is often referred to as an advantage player, or AP.

[Gizmotron]

practice of using legal ways to gain a mathematical advantage while gambling

Beating randomness is a mathematical advantage. It must be. The only thing missing is a mathematician that knows how to do it and then explain it with mathematical proof.  ... there goes that Fields Medal, the International Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics.

Analyzing randomness and using it is Advantage-play.

esoito: P.S. you don't have the terms Randomness or Reading Randomness.

[Have added them.   ADMIN ]

[kelly]

You don`t have to be math genious to calculate why card counting has an advantage.  If the deck is rich with high cards, you have a high probability for a black jack.  So has the house, but you get payed 3:2 the house only 1:1 (they just keep your bet).

Im sure reading randoness is just as easy to calculate if it exists.  Im sure you can do it,dont hold back.

[Gizmotron]

You don`t have to be math genious to calculate why card counting has an advantage.  If the deck is rich with high cards, you have a high probability for a black jack.  So has the house, but you get payed 3:2 the house only 1:1 (they just keep your bet).

I'm sure reading randoness is just as easy to calculate if it exists.  I'm sure you can do it,don't hold back.

Attacking me won't bring you a mathematician. As long as this stays this way it's to my advantage. By the way if the deck is rich with (10) valued cards then the dealer has a good chance of busting at 12 to 16 where they must take a card. Try to get the mathematics of this thing before you tackle reading randomness.

[kelly]

Exactly.  Thats another part of the advantage.  The player can choose to stand on all the "stiffs" where the dealer is required to draw a card.   

[esoito]

How about the wording from wikipedia:

practice of using legal ways to gain a mathematical advantage while gambling



Advantage gambling, or advantage play, refers to a practice of using legal ways to gain a mathematical advantage while gambling.  The term usually refers to house-banked games, but can also refer to games played against other players, such as poker.  Someone who practices advantage gambling is often referred to as an advantage player, or Advantage-play.

Thanks, Kelly. 

Never occurred to me to look in Wikipedia!

I've now added their definition to the Glossary.

[esoito]

Basically, based on posts thus far, the answer to the thread title appears to be NONE.

[Bayes]

My 2 cents -

I haven't actually read the glossary, but I'm assuming that we are defining AP to mean one or more of bias/VB/DS, in which case:

CONS

• Difficult to play online - you need to see the wheel fairly close up and from different viewpoints.
• You have to travel to maybe many casinos to find the right conditions.
• A reasonable level of skill required, together with knowledge of statistics.
• The management can easily take steps to stop you winning (such as calling NMB earlier in the case of VB) or changing the ball, speed of release etc
• It's likely that AP will become increasingly more difficult and opportunities more limited with the advances in wheel technology and the efforts made by casinos to combat Advantage players.

PROS

• Given the right conditions, you will win. The laws of physics guarantee it. 

[MrJ]

The author is Al Krigman and is an excellent read. Agree, not agree? >>>

More esoteric systems involve detecting irregularities in the apparatus which make some results more likely than normal, then betting accordingly. If such bias existed, and were great enough, players could indeed gain an edge. Here's how this might work.

In an unbiased double-zero game, the probability of each number is 1/38 or 2.63 percent. Paying 35-to-1, the house has a 5.26 percent edge. Say the bottom of one slot was spongy or the frets around it were high, raising its probability of winning to 3 percent. Bets on this number would have an 8 percent edge.

What if a wheel were tilted in some way favoring half the grooves? Ordinarily, bets on each of 19 numbers have 50-50 chance of losing $19 or winning $17 - giving the house its usual 5.26 percent edge. Instead, assume the bias creates 53 percent chance the ball will land on a known half of the wheel. Now betting on each number in that half gives the player 0.42 percent edge.

BIASED WHEEL SYSTEMS HOLD IN THEORY BUT FAIL IN PRACTICE. Roulette wheel construction and maintenance make large biases unlikely, and problems such as broken bearings would be noticed immediately and result in a game being shut down. Small biases require numerous observations and complex calculations before solid citizens can be confident that the effect is not random; even then, they may shift the edge toward the player too little to be significant during a session of reasonable duration.

The example of the bias on a single number involved a 0.37 percent increase in probability. To be 95 percent confident in detecting this small an anomaly, data would have to be analyzed from roughly 71,000 spins. A 99 percent confidence level would require about 122,500 spins. Neither is even remotely feasible.

The second example involved a hefty 3 percent change in probability. To be 95 percent confident of detecting this large a bias, a player would have to analyze data from only 1,100 spins. To be 99 percent confident of the bias before going for broke on the favored half of the wheel, data would have to be analyzed from 1,850 spins. These many observations might be possible, for instance with a team of trained observers monitoring results and relaying the data to their computer experts for analysis. But this doesn't account for the time wasted checking unbiased wheels. Further, this much bias is unlikely to occur or persist - and still only gives players under half a percent advantage.

[WannaWin]

WHAT ARE THE PROS AND CONS OF ADVANTAGE PLAY?

Spend days and days, evenings and nights, searching and searching and searching for the conditions that every day are more scarce and when they are there it is needed to make up the time and money invested and exploit the advantage while it lasts and it resent casinos and it is plugged.

Then when it is plugged and better equipment is in place: Spend days and days again looking and looking ...

[MrJ]

BINGO BINGO BINGO >>>>> Correct !!


Ken

[kelly]

And while doing all that, having your trips paid for and on top of that making your bankroll grow and grow.   Yeah i know, what a life.  Its still hard not to walk out of there with a smile on your face though.

[Bayes]

I would never write off advantage play as being ok in theory but failing in practice, maybe the reverse is true? - it's ok in practice but fails in theory! it certainly doesn't make sense to determine a possible bias in the way that Al Krigman suggests, even back in the days when casinos were more lax. From what I've learned, the way to do it is to first identify a possible bias visually, and only then back up your hypothesis with spin data.

It certainly isn't obvious how and what to look for though, and maybe the typical system player is like the guy who, having lost his keys in a dark alley is found later looking under a street lamp. When asked why he's looking for them there, he replies: "because this is where the light is".

[kelly]

Kriegman is not  a biasplayer.   Not many bias players will track a bias by only tracking the numbers.   The tracking should only confirm what one has already noticed in the wheel.  The things you look for is not something everybode sees, i have played VB for years but only a few years back learned to see mechanical biases.   Even after looking straight down in the wheel for years i didn`t see those things before someone told me HOW to.   Its not a surprise if Kriegman can`t see it, no one can without some knowhow.   Despite that, the net is crawling with bias experts who knows how to mathematicly track a roulette wheel for a bias.   Yeah yeah, good luck with that.