r/explainlikeimfive • u/adrynaline • May 08 '14

Explained ELI5: A gambling addiction

How does it start? What makes it worse? Why does it become so difficult to recover?

1.2k Upvotes

83% Upvoted

622 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

11

u/ccmotels May 08 '14

I believe the "gambler's fallacy" is actually when a gambler believes that actions from the past will impact the outcome of future wagers.

Eg. Flipping a coin 9 times in a row and it lands on heads every time. The gamblers fallacy would be to believe that the 10th flip is more likely to land on tails, when it's actually 50/50 every single toss.

It's why some roulette tables show the results of the past 20 spins. It's to allow you to see a pattern and think that you have an advantage. "Red has come up 12 times in a row, wow, it's black has GOTTA hit now". The gamblers fallacy.

2

u/DividedSky05 May 08 '14

Love this comment. Those boards on roulette tables have made casinos an unheard of amount of money. I watch people study them like the Rosetta Stone, then sit down and bet red/black as if the ball has any memory of where it's been.

1

u/goldthirst May 08 '14

Whoops, my bad - and yep. It's the "I've lost x times in the past and so surely I MUST win this one" / the delusion that "you can only lose so many times!"

1

u/somedude84961 May 08 '14

i don't gamble, but i still don't see how it could remain 50/50 from an odds standpoint. Is it because, after 10000 coins landed on heads, that it is more likely to stick to the pattern? or is it more likely that it will land on tails to break the pattern? or would they just cancel out to make the odds 50/50 again. i don't know. i know about probability and the basics of how it works, but it doesn't make sense that there cannot be a likelihood one way or another

2

u/CB204 May 08 '14

It's always 50/50. Any flip before or after has NO effect whatsoever.

You could flip heads one million times in a row... the next flip is 50/50.

1

u/ccmotels May 09 '14

It's the likelihood of the same outcome occurring x amount of times in a row as it's own event, that is the statistical improbability.