What if... 1% house edge would simply be a charge?
I’m asking about more basic stuff. I walk up to this new craps variant. Do I have dice? Chips? Can I make all the same bets? Is the only difference the payouts? Do I have to make a contract bet before rolling the dice?
Quote: MBI’m sorry. I have no clue what you’re talking about. I asked you to be precise about how it works and you talk about HE.
I’m asking about more basic stuff. I walk up to this new craps variant. Do I have dice? Chips? Can I make all the same bets? Is the only difference the payouts? Do I have to make a contract bet before rolling the dice?
I think you misunderstood the discussion. It's not a craps variant. It's an idea how to think about odds in games of chance and how to calculate Return To Player. I think we are all in a geocentric, pardon - casinocentric model based on a double lie - that play is for free and that odds are fair. There is however similarity to craps which I desribed in a previous post.
A theoretical discussion is nominally interesting. A real example might be much more interesting.
Quote: MBA theoretical discussion is nominally interesting. A real example might be much more interesting.
Real example are craps with everything other than odds bets simplified into a single fee.
It takes someone with real clout and real guts to turn theory into practice.Quote: MBA theoretical discussion is nominally interesting. A real example might be much more interesting.
I'm reminded of the elderly married couple who went to a gay bar in Hollywood because the free appetizers were so good. I think its the same way with gamblers: they will go to a casino if there is only one game that is attractive to them. It doesn't have to be a general policy. One airport set their dollar bill changing machines to return an extra nickel ... they got good publicity but not any long lines of moochers.
Quote: MattUKReal example are craps with everything other than odds bets simplified into a single fee.
Are you changing the payouts of place bets? Hardaways?
Current setup:
I put $50 on red. The ball lands on a black spot (or green). Oh well, off to the next game.
Proposed setup:
I put $50 on red, and I hand $1.35 to the dealer for the privilege of playing this game. The ball lands on a black spot (or green). Now I'm pissed because I just lost $1.35 more. How is this supposed to make me feel any better?
The same is true if the ball lands on a red spot. In the current setup, my $50 turns into $100. Very simple. Under your proposed setup, my $50 turns into $100 but I still have to fork over $1.35. I won't play a game like that because it's dumb to do that, even though I know the house edge is exactly the same either way. It's unnecessarily complicated, and that's not even addressing your ideas of a lower charge during happy hour, or for VIP customers, etc.
The players club promotions can be complicated but at least it's free. If I had to pay to participate, I wouldn't have a player's club card. Simple as that.
Reducing the house edge to zero in exchange for a "pay to play" fee is the same type of argument used by the airlines when they introduced checked bag fees. Instead of the cost of checking a bag being some unknown mysterious amount of your ticket, now it's plain as day -- $25. Same for paying for a meal on board. And paying for a seat assignment (which sucks if you're flying with someone else and the free seat assignments at check in are nonadjacent). It's called being nickeled and dimed to death. No one likes it! So don't do it!
But if you think it's a great business model, feel free to open your own casino and see if it works. Excluding slot machines, gambling is complicated enough for the average player. Charge them a "convenience fee" and you'll be out of business very quickly.
Quote: KevinAAI put $50 on red, and I hand $1.35 to the dealer for the privilege of playing this game. The ball lands on a black spot (or green). Now I'm pissed because I just lost $1.35 more. How is this supposed to make me feel any better?
Thank you for your opinion Kevin. Actually to get the same RTP as on European Roulette the fee is 1 cent for every 74, so let's say you bet 74$ to spin 73$ versus beting 74$ on a standard game. It may be confusing at first, but it's half of what you appear to think because you won't double the "gross" bet but the "net" amount. But you've got the idea. Of course the difference is that you will never get the losing green zero or more accurately that you will never lose more than the expected value. You pay 1/74 with every spin instead of risking losing the whole bet with every spin.
Quote: KevinAAIt's unnecessarily complicated
I think it's the current model that is dishonest and complicated. Here if you want to play you pay a small fee and you have fair odds, no house advantage at all. I think it's genius.
Quote: KevinAAand that's not even addressing your ideas of a lower charge during happy hour, or for VIP customers, etc.
You're wring. The casino manager can increase the "RTP equivalent" as close to 100% as he wants by increasing the amount from which 1c is deducted. That's the best feature of this game. It beats any competition hands down here.
Quote: KevinAAThe players club promotions can be complicated but at least it's free. If I had to pay to participate, I wouldn't have a player's club card. Simple as that.
I think you misses the fact that this game works just like simplified and errorless craps, with all the sucker bets removed. If you want to be consistent you should not even think of playing craps! But jokes aside, you have touched the just here - it's in human nature to prefer convenient lies (that gambling is free of charge) over the inconvenient truth (that you pay for playing in the form of green zero). What you've just said is "I prefer self-deception". But that is exactly what I see as a selling point! What you criticize I see as a great advantage - it's brutal honesty. I really think it's a good enough reason to give it a try. Of course, charging 1c from every 1$ (98% RTP equivalent) makes it already one of the best slots.
Quote: MattUKThank you for your opinion Kevin. Actually to get the same RTP as on European Roulette the fee is 1 cent for every 74, so let's say you bet 74$ to spin 73$ versus beting 74$ on a standard game. It may be confusing at first, but it's half of what you appear to think because you won't double the "gross" bet but the "net" amount. But you've got the idea. Of course the difference is that you will never get the losing green zero or more accurately that you will never lose more than the expected value. You pay 1/74 with every spin instead of risking losing the whole bet with every spin.
I understand all the math behind this. What I'm trying to say is that you're making this way too complicated. Betting $74 or $73 on a spin? How ridiculous. I want to plop down a single $50 bill and put a $50 chip on red and say "spin the wheel!". It's entertaining. It's not a positive EV game, so I'm not going to do a bunch of calculations and decide to bet $74. I have a math degree. If I'm not interested in this, how many non-math-degreed gamblers at the roulette wheel will be interested? Probably zero.
Quote:I think it's the current model that is dishonest and complicated. Here if you want to play you pay a small fee and you have fair odds, no house advantage at all. I think it's genius.
You're wring. The casino manager can increase the "RTP equivalent" as close to 100% as he wants by increasing the amount from which 1c is deducted. That's the best feature of this game. It beats any competition hands down here.
Casino managers play around with VP paytables and no one has any idea (unless you pay attention to the VP paytables, and I have seen a change occur one time at a place in Mesquite NV). Most players aren't aware nor do they care. But if you switch to 100% payback VP and charge to play, then everyone benefits if the casino manager cuts the rate. What is the point of that? I WANT other people to be given the opportunity to play poorly so that I can play those 99%+ VP games optimally. In other words, I personally benefit from allegedly "opaque" information (which it's not if you simply look up paytables and the RTP). Clear and concise "cost of playing" evens the playing field, which is great for bad players, and bad for good players... so no thanks!
Quote:I think you misses the fact that this game works just like simplified and errorless craps, with all the sucker bets removed. If you want to be consistent you should not even think of playing craps! But jokes aside, you have touched the just here - it's in human nature to prefer convenient lies (that gambling is free of charge) over the inconvenient truth (that you pay for playing in the form of green zero). What you've just said is "I prefer self-deception". But that is exactly what I see as a selling point! What you criticize I see as a great advantage - it's brutal honesty. I really think it's a good enough reason to give it a try. Of course, charging 1c from every 1$ (98% RTP equivalent) makes it already one of the best slots.
It's not self-deception, it's simply changing the method in which the casino makes money, from no charge to play with a 1% house edge, to a 1% charge to play with a 0% house edge. It's six of one, half a dozen of the other. I happen to like the way it is right now, and if a casino changed to pay-to-play, I wouldn't play there.
There are times when you can charge to play, though.... if you're operating an Indian casino where you have no competition. In the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma (Durant and McAlester), they charge a 50 cent ante to play blackjack. That's why the blackjack table in McAlester has limited hours and plenty of empty seats. In Durant, which is a huge casino that draws most of its players from the Dallas/Ft Worth Metroplex with its 6 million population, there are people playing blackjack, because they just want to play and they don't mind (or more likely, aren't even aware) that this stupid ante means they're playing an absolutely horrible payback game. May as well just play slot machines.... so many different varieties, can win lots of money in a single spin, no one to tip, etc.
Quote: KevinAAI understand all the math behind this. What I'm trying to say is that you're making this way too complicated. Betting $74 or $73 on a spin? How ridiculous. I want to plop down a single $50 bill and put a $50 chip on red and say "spin the wheel!". It's entertaining. It's not a positive EV game, so I'm not going to do a bunch of calculations and decide to bet $74. I have a math degree.
You have a math degree yet you're completely wrong here. You could bet whatever you want. The charge is 1c from every 74 to get the same RTP as in European Roulette. I just made an example to show you how this works (sadly you didn't get it as you later on wrote "from no charge to play with a 1% house edge, to a 1% charge to play with a 0% house edge" which is incorrect - 1% fee equals to 2% house edge).
Quote: KevinAACasino managers play around with VP paytables and no one has any idea (unless you pay attention to the VP paytables, and I have seen a change occur one time at a place in Mesquite NV). Most players aren't aware nor do they care. But if you switch to 100% payback VP and charge to play, then everyone benefits if the casino manager cuts the rate. What is the point of that? I WANT other people to be given the opportunity to play poorly so that I can play those 99%+ VP games optimally. In other words, I personally benefit from allegedly "opaque" information (which it's not if you simply look up paytables and the RTP). Clear and concise "cost of playing" evens the playing field, which is great for bad players, and bad for good players... so no thanks!
Kevin, first you've said that this idea doesn't allow to boost RTP and now you're upset that it does. Make up your mind! Here you have simply said that you don't like European Roulette (or slots, for that matter) because it doesn't have sucker bets. Fair enough, but now it's about your personal taste, not the game. They will not disappear because you don't play it. It's a multi-billion industry Kevin.
Quote: KevinAAIt's not self-deception, it's simply changing the method in which the casino makes money, from no charge to play with a 1% house edge, to a 1% charge to play with a 0% house edge. It's six of one, half a dozen of the other. I happen to like the way it is right now, and if a casino changed to pay-to-play, I wouldn't play there.
Oh Kevin. YOU are in self-deception and this idea is about puting it to end. You just reaffirmed that you like your self-deception and don't want the truth about cost of playing. That is your real imput and for that I thank you. Strange that people may actively oppose the inconvienient truth, but not very suprising. This is where the problem is - some people doesn't want to know how much they pay for playing. Yet I am sure that a good chunk of gamblers would think otherwise.
Quote: MattUK...snip...
This is where the problem is - some people doesn't want to know how much they pay for playing. Yet I am sure that a good chunk of gamblers would think otherwise.
I really disagree with your basic premise. People will not pay a fee of any kind to enter a casino for the privilege of losing their money, UNLESS there is no other option. Likewise, people will NOT be happy about paying a percentage simply to place a bet.
Look at all the bitching about OK casinos charging .50/hand for the state. Various casinos have ways around this; the place I played, if you had a players card, the house paid the fee for you. The dealer dropped slugs into the money box every couple of hands to track it. If you didn't use a card, you had to pay the fee every hand as you played.
.50 per person per hand. The casino was so desperate to please their patrons that they ate this fee. If it weren't a major negative to overcome in drawing customers, you think they'd pay it themselves? Or lose hands per hour screwing around with it every hand of every game?
I think your 1% would engender similar resentment. And even if the casino started out with "better" games than those around them, I don't see that lasting any length of time in any competitive casino neighborhood . With what they lose in administering it, they slow the game. It will be the first perq given to hi-limit players, not to charge it.
And patrons simply can't be bothered with math. Either they like the action or the potential odds pay, but most play really, really bad sidebets, slots, and games (including me - I like the action on a couple sidebets despite largish HE). The constant fee = worse losses, less than a full win, greed in perception.
Quote: beachbumbabsI really disagree with your basic premise. People will not pay a fee of any kind to enter a casino for the privilege of losing their money, UNLESS there is no other option. Likewise, people will NOT be happy about paying a percentage simply to place a bet. (...)
And patrons simply can't be bothered with math. Either they like the action or the potential odds pay, but most play really, really bad sidebets, slots, and games (including me - I like the action on a couple sidebets despite largish HE). The constant fee = worse losses, less than a full win, greed in perception.
Just for clarification, this idea is feasible only online. It doesn't make sense in brick-and-mortar casinos.
Your post once again identifies what is the biggest obstacle. Not the odds - they may be even FAR BETTER than in European Roulette. Plus, there are extra benefits not even available in the standard version, like ease of offering happy hours with even better odds. It's the self-deception that gamblers don't pay for playing. This game shatters it, reveals the truth with brutal honesty. "Yes fella, you do pay for playing" - it says and it's enough to despise it. Even through everyone do it with every single casino game! I think it's probably worth a thorough psychological experiment.
The other interesting thing is that you are in dissagreement with your colleague Mission146. She thinks that gambling is all about numbers and finding best odds. This game gives it with ease. For example, 1c charged from every 1$ equals to 98% RTP equivalent which is the level of best slots. But for you it's not all about best odds but about thrill and fun. Perhaps you can have a discussion about it!
Last thing - a thought experiment. You have a choice between standard European Roulette (2.70% HE) and "my" roulette with 1c charged from every 1$ (2% HE). My roulette beats it by a massive 0.70% or 26/37 to be precise. Which one would you play beachbumbabs?
Quote: KevinAAYou can make a happy hour at a brick-and-mortar casino quite easily by increasing the comp rate during that time.
Kevin, we talk about my idea, not happy hours in casinos.
Someone hammered on this math assumption earlier but I don't think the original poster understood: removing the 0 from a roulette wheel doesn't really change the variance very much. The thing that makes roulette variance super high is the 1/36 odds to 36x payout, and the way people mitigate that is by betting on multiple numbers at once. You can't really reduce roulette variance to better than double-or-nothing using standard roulette bets, though. (without making multiple bets at a time, of course)
I think the bad psych assumption being made is that gamblers want to play low-variance games. I don't know of any gambling games that offer lower variance than double or nothing -- maybe slot machines with no bonus round and a very high number of lines? I think the popularity of roulette, craps, and slots-with-bonus-rounds indicates that high variance is fun because for those games you can easily fluke into getting rich for a short time, but you can't fluke into getting poor unless you chase your losses by doubling your bets or something.
(Obligatory note: Zekka is a pretty inexperienced gambler and there are no doubt lots of games he doesn't know about. Don't trust him!)
Quote: ZekkaI don't know of any gambling games that offer lower variance than double or nothing -- maybe slot machines with no bonus round and a very high number of lines?
I think I encountered that machine at The D last year; guaranteed that every spin was a winner. I won something like 10c on a 75c spin until I ran 50$ worth of FP down. Literally every spin paid the exact same amount (regardless of what the actual numbers were, which I've forgotten). Please, I'd like SOME more variance than that.
I'm okay with variance, and I'm okay with edge. I'd be okay with an entry fee if I could get it back somehow at a remotely reasonable rate (20$ to get in and you get a 'free' lunch or something). I don't like commission (I don't consider the vig on the buy commission, as that's there for a different reason), which makes me frown at standard PGP and Bac. And, by extension, that means I'd go to some lengths to avoid this, even if it was at marginally better odds.
Quote:
Happy to help, Tom. You are wrong everywhere. The house advantage is always unpredictable. Out of, say, 100 spins you can have 0,1,2,3,4 or even 5 zeros, losing the bet. Under my idea it would always be a fixed % of the wager. Therefore "theoretical house edge" is not "actual house edge", so to speak. With my idea it's one and the same.
This is not different from getting 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or even 5 reds when you bet on black, except that this outcome currently has 19/37 odds but after your change it has 18/36 odds. TomG successfully analyzed this about a post after you floated this. It sounded like, from posts like this, your idea was that eliminating the house cut would reduce the odds of getting this kind of bad outcome and I think you frequently used words like "stable" and "predictable."
You're right that the variance depends on the bet made. Betting on one number gets you one payout of 3600% and 36 payouts of 0%, which gets me stddev of ~583%. ~Betting on half the wheel gets you double-or-nothing, which gets you eighteen payouts of 200% and nineteen payouts of 0%, which gets me stddev of ~99.96% (unless I'm all wet.) I guess in relative terms for gambling games, this isn't high, but compared to everything people bet on outside of casinos, I think it's high. Like I said, I guess you can make multiple bets to reduce it even further.
I'm glad you're being explicit that variance isn't important because I read that as implicitly a huge goal of yours and rereading your posts I probably misunderstood them. I'm still very confused by this post:
Quote:
After 100 spins, 2$ per bet, you don't know what will be the true cost of playing the European Roulette. Most likely 6$, maybe 4$ with 2$ or 8$ still sensible. In my game it will be 1$ exactly. And it's not even about the odds.
I still don't see how this is more true for your game than with roulette. The variance of your game is about the same, so I feel like it should be about equally hard to guess how much money you'll end up with.
I'm not sure the commissions version of the game is easier to understand since I'm still likely to end up with sums of money that are really, really different from what I initially put in. I think "true cost" means difference in expected value from what you put in, but I think that for a short series of observations it's hard to sense that. Any short series of roulette outcomes from betting on black on an unaltered wheel would have a reasonably high probability of having happened on a 50-50 wheel, IMHO, and vice versa -- so the game 'feels' the same and you're still about equally likely to walk away massively up as massively down. (Compare two wheels, one that awards exactly 100% and one that awards exactly 95% every round -- the second wheel's outcomes are highly distinguishable from the first wheel's because variance is so low.)
I think most measures of "predictability" either fall down on psychology, stats or both, so maybe there's a psychology pov on predictability that I'm not getting here? I suppose seeing a wheel that's obviously fair and paying in a house commission gives you an exact quantification of the house edge, even though it probably won't be relevant to you if you don't play for very long. Fun stats project: with a fixed bet size, figure out how long it would take on average for a series of red/black outcomes on a MattUK wheel to have less than 5% probability of having happened on a normal roulette wheel. Of course, winnings are going to tend to go to the same place, but I'm using red/black as a proxy for "massively going up each round" vs "massively going down each round" which is probably a really big part of whether Matt's wheel feels different to play.
EDIT: I stated the *interesting stats problem* in a really dumb way previously (the answer to my old formulation was "never") I've changed it.
(note: zekka is not a real statistician and may have garbled things badly. hopefully he didn't)
--- Revisited later ---
First of all, my formulation of variance is a little particular. If you constrain a bet to a binomial distribution (failure if you lose money, success if you win money) then a 50/50 bet is about as high-variance as you can get -- even though AFAICT a 50/50 bet is lower variance than a 1-out-of-36 bet in roulette because the payout is also reduced. This post works with the binomial distribution version because I think that formulation corresponds to how it will feel to play your game. (especially since the difference between how much you get when you win and how much you get when you lose is always large, at least as large as your bet.) It also makes the math easy.
For two bet types, I ran 10,000 tests of this experiment:
- I'm a gambler and I place bets on your wheel, writing them down.
- I run a Fisher Exact Probability test every time to see if my outcomes could feasibly have come from a normal roulette wheel.
- If the p-value that these outcomes came from a normal roulette wheel is ever < 0.05, I stop.
- stop after 10,000 games no matter what the distribution was:
Here were my results:
red-black bets: on average 318 plays, stddev = 1199 plays
single number bets: on average 788 plays, stddev = 3250 plays
(Note: I could have gotten the math wrong. I really hope a real statistician will run this experiment to confirm the results)
Here's my code:
#include <math.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#define N_TESTS 10000
// red black
// #define NUMERATOR_MATT 18
// #define NUMERATOR_ROULETTE 18
//
// #define DENOMINATOR_MATT 36
// #define DENOMINATOR_ROULETTE 37
//
// single number
#define NUMERATOR_MATT 1
#define NUMERATOR_ROULETTE 1
#define DENOMINATOR_MATT 36
#define DENOMINATOR_ROULETTE 37
#define P_ROULETTE (((double) NUMERATOR_ROULETTE)/DENOMINATOR_ROULETTE)
double mean(int n, double arr[]) {
// TODO
double sum = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
sum += arr;
}
return sum/n;
}
double stddev(int n, double arr[]) {
// TODO
double m = mean(n, arr);
double sumdiff = 0.0;
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
double k = arr - m;
sumdiff += k * k;
}
return sqrt(sumdiff / n);
}
double z(int obs_n, double obs_p, double pop_p) {
double p1 = obs_p;
double p2 = pop_p;
double p = pop_p;
return (p1 - p2)/((p * (1 - p) * sqrt(1/((double)obs_n))));
}
double significant(double z) {
// one sided, 95%
return z > 1.645;
}
int test_once() {
int tries = 0;
int successes = 0;
while (tries < 10000) {
if (tries > 1) {
int n = tries;
double p = successes/((double) tries);
if (significant(z(n, p, P_ROULETTE))) { return tries; }
}
tries++;
if (rand() % DENOMINATOR_MATT < NUMERATOR_MATT) {
successes++;
}
}
}
int main() {
double test_results[N_TESTS];
for (int i = 0; i < N_TESTS; i++) {
test_results = test_once();
}
printf("%d tests; mean steps: %f; stddev steps: %f\n", N_TESTS, mean(N_TESTS, test_results), stddev(N_TESTS, test_results));
}
So I think the odds of walking away with more or less will feel much the same for a long time. I think most gamblers would feel like they were winning and losing about as much as on a normal wheel, except they would resent having to pay commissions.
EDIT: one paragraph SUCKED and included a major typo that says the opposite of the truth, fixed both
Quote: ZekkaThis is not different from getting 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or even 5 reds when you bet on black (...).
I still don't see how this is more true for your game than with roulette.
I don't care about red and black because they are part of the game and they will not change. The only thing that changes is green 0 - it's being replaced by a FIXED FEE BEFORE SPIN. And that is why my idea revels the true cost of gambling. It replaces unlikely (1/37 = 2.7%) loss of entire bet by a small fixed fee (therefore: "guaranteed loss") of 1% (which correspondents to 2% house edge because it's charged before spin). That way the player always knows what he or she has paid for playing. What is truly revolutionary is that the cost of playing is radically separated from the (edgeless) game. I think it's the current system, which blends them together, which is wrong and unjust.
