A look at The Gamblers Fallacy
Now gamblers are a superstitious lot – some of them carry lucky rabbits feet, some wear the same shirt to every game, some might even wear the same pair of underwear at every single game because they believe it brings them luck. And maybe it does, who’s to say? Logic does. Logic tells us that the same shirt or the rabbit’s foot cannot make the dice fall the way we want in craps or the ball fall on red or black in roulette. The same can be said for the ball landing on black 20 times in a row on roulette will not mean that it will fall on red on the 21st and therein lies the gambler’s fallacy – if a number or a colour or even a symbol in the case of slots has continuously come up it is bound to not come up the next.
Most first time gamblers or gamers who are unaware of statistical independence are often suckered into purchasing ‘systems’ that guarantee a win are falling victim to the gambler’s fallacy that there must be a way to predict random events. This is not so. So think about this the next time you decide to stop betting on black because it’s won ‘too many’ times in a row.
