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 Article 7
 
 
 A Possible Advantage of a Mathematical Gaming System

In a few articles in the “Fortune Smiling” site, I say that a purely mathematical system that will give you an advantage when gambling does not exist, despite what anyone may say. This has been proven again and again, and trust me, it is true.

   If you don’t believe me, ask someone who wants to sell you such a system if he will give you a guarantee: if it doesn’t work, will he return your money? This is usually not the case!
 
   Yet in theory, at least, there is one way in which a mathematical system could indeed prove advantageous. Not because it alone gives you better odds of winning over time (it will not), but rather, because when combined with an “outside” factor, it might be easier to predict when your lucky/unlucky times are present. 

   Let us assume that astrology can indeed successfully predict, at least 51% of the time, when you will be lucky/unlucky. Let us further assume that a speculator plays the Forex market every day, purchasing or selling dollars, for instance. Now of course, someone who plays the Forex market learns as much as he/she can on the subject, studies past trends, reads up on the latest financial news, the most recent economic policies of the major world governments,  etc. All this information will probably already give the trader a more-than-50% advantage; astrology would then perhaps raise his chances even more. 

   Yet for the sake of simplicity, let’s say that one particular trader knows nothing of the market; he/she simply trades every day, and depends on luck alone to come out ahead. 

   In such a case, he will probably, by the end of the year, have won about as much as he has lost (assuming he didn’t lose all his funds somewhere along the way, and was forced to stop speculating altogether). For such a person, to lose one day is no spectacular event: it happens about half the time. The same for earning: there will be many days when he will make a profit, so it’s really no big deal. What will be a big deal is if, on a certain day, there is a great change in the currency price, and he wins or loses a lot of money. 

   To be honest, I don’t think astrology would help much on the “normal” days. If an investor earns, for instance, $5 on a certain day, this can hardly be considered a huge gain, so it is unlikely that astrology would have been able to predict it; the same would go for moderate losses. 

   However, I feel it is much more probable that astrology will be able to predict the likelihood of having an exceptional day: one on which the speculator earns, or loses, a great amount. For this reason, certain days, as indicated in the “Fortune Smiling” Finance Graph, should be avoided altogether, and others should be favored for such investing. 

   Now we come to gambling, and mathematical “systems”.  For the sake of simplicity, we will take the example of roulette, using the (in)famous “Martingale” system in this example (though any other system would do as well). 

   I purposely choose, as always, to use an example from roulette, and not the Forex market, for instance, since the rules of roulette are quite clear, and there are practically no “unexpected” factors (such as a sudden financial crisis in a certain country, that could affect currency prices). 

   In case you are not familiar with it (using casino roulette as an example), in the standard Martingale system, you place a bet (for instance, on red); if you win, you play again for the same amount. If you lose, however, you double your next bet. Lose again? Then double again… and keep playing till you win, at which time you will have recovered all you have lost, due to the fact that you doubled each time you lost. A very dangerous system, to be sure, since if you lose many times in a row, you will be totally ruined! 

(Example: your first bet is $2; you lose, then bet $4; lose, bet $8; lose, bet $16; then $32, $64.. you get the picture. If you lost 10 times in a row, you would have to bet $2,048 on the next spin.) 

   No wonder any expert (including Gonzalo García Pelayo, by the way) will tell you not to use such a system, for sooner or later, it will totally break you. 

   Nonetheless, I think that perhaps such a system, when used with astrology, could have certain advantages, as long as we place very clear limits on how much we aim to win, and how much we can afford to lose on any one day. Let me explain. 

   With the Martingale, as with any other system, you should previously decide when you will stop playing. There should be a point - both as to the amount you lose, as to your winnings - when you will stop playing for that day. For instance, you decide that you can afford to lose $100. If you are winning, you will stop at $100. Why? Well, as every gambler knows, if you keep playing, sooner or later, your luck will fade, and you’ll start to lose. Thus, it is wise to quit while you are ahead. 

   Now, if $100 is your limit for both winning and losing, no day will be exceptional: out of 100 days, you will win about 48 times, and lose about 52. Since the number of winning days is just about as large as the losing days, you really won’t be able to speak of “great luck” – or “terrible bad luck” – on any of these days. For this reason, I don’t think astrology will be able to show you very clearly the losing and winning days: after all, you’ve decided you can afford to lose $100, so it’s not devastating when this does happen, and it will happen so often throughout the year that you won’t go into a severe depression every time it does. On the other hand, being content with winning $100 on any given day, this will also not be such a big deal, since it will happen about 48% of the time. 

   But…  suppose now that we “tailor” the Martingale system in such a way that a losing day is truly something exceptional, and is therefore really bad: the stronger the event (emotionally stronger, in this case), the more likely it is that astrology will be able to ”perceive” it beforehand, and predict when such really bad events are most like to occur. 

   In our example, we’ll do the following: 

   We decide that, as before, we can afford to lose $100, but, that we will be content to win $6: if we win $6, we will call it a day. Now things are a bit different. If we are satisfied with winning $6, but are willing to accept a loss of $100, then there will be many more days on which we win, than those on which we lose.  Let’s take a look at this, assuming that each bet made is for $6.

Day 1; you play a spin of the wheel, betting $6. You win. You quit, as you’ve achieved your goal for that day. Put this day into the “win” column.

Day 2: You play for $6. Losing, you double, putting down $12. Lose again. Put down $24... win. Altogether, you had bet $42 (6+12+24). Of that, you had lost $18; on the third bet, you get back the $24 you put down, and win $24. Thus, you’ve now won $6. Goal for the day achieved. You quit.

Day 3: You lose the first 3 times (doubling after each loss, so you’ve now lost $42) Yet the 4th spin, you win, recover your losses, and are now $6 ahead. You quit…

   Now, of course, sooner or later, you will have a day when you lose 4 times in a row. On such an occasion, you will have bet 6 + 12 + 24 + 48 dollars; your losses are $90, and you must quit, since doubling again would risk going over you $100 limit. 

   What are the odds that you will lose 4 times in a row? 1 in 14.72, approximately (if the odds of winning one game were 1 in 2 (50%), the odds of winning or losing 4 in a row would be 1 over 2x2x2x2, or 1 in 16; however, because of the slight house advantage, which only gives you a 48.6% chance of winning at single-zero roulette, the odds of losing 4 in a row are slighter greater: 1 in 14.72, instead of 1 in 16; the odds against winning 4 times in a row would then be 1 in 17.422. But then, in our model you will never win 4 times in a row, since you will quit once you’ve won $6.) 

   In other words, 10 days out of about 147 (I’m multiplying the above figures by 10, so that the decimal of the 14.72 figure may be taken into account), will be really bad days, on which you lose four times in a row. Total dollar losses for all of these days will be $900 ($90 on each losing day); total wins on all of the 137 winning days will be $6 X 137 = $822.  Thus, you will have ended up losing $78 total. 

   Obviously, these figures will not be exact; you may lose more, or less. Yet in the long run, this is the way things will come out, according to probability, and the more days you play, the more your losses will approximate 51.4%, while your wins come to about 48.6%, remember? 

   Yet now we bring in an “added factor”, that though not part of the “game + rules adds up to probability” system, can perhaps have an influence on your results: astrology. If astrology can predict when it is most likely that we will win or lose, then playing with such a system as described above can have a definite advantage, for the reason that now, it is not the case that both losing and winning days are common. In the model above, the winning days are indeed very common (though you only win $6 each time); however, the losing days are not so common, and because of the large sum of the loss - $90 – those days will be emotionally much more depressing. 

   Therefore, astrology will have a better chance of predicting when those days will come, as opposed to a system that gives you only slightly more losing days than winning days, for such a system would mean that neither winning nor losing days are anything really special at all.

 I hope I’ve made my point clear: the less often one sort of event will take place, and the greater the emotional impact the occurrence of such an event will have on us, the more likely it is that astrology will be able to predict when such an event is most likely to occur.

   This is not to say that astrology will be able to predict exactly when those “bad days” will crop up. To play it safe, therefore, we would do the following: for each month, we would calculate a list of, say, ten days that look as though they could be bad. Then, we would avoid playing on all ten of those days. Since we know that on average over time, we will have one bad day every 14.7 days (or a little more than 2 bad days a month) by selecting ten possible bad days, and not playing on those days, we increase the chances of the two bad days being “ruled out”.  Not that they will never occur, but over time, if we continue to play like this, it will, astrologically speaking, give us a better chance of ending up in that elite group of players, who despite the mathematical odds, are the fortunate ones who have indeed won more than 50% of the games they played – the “lucky few”.

   To get back to Forex: those who speculate with foreign currency will have no need of using a system as described above, since the “exceptionally good and bad days” will come anyway: depending on a number of factors related to the variations in the prices of currencies, there will be days when, for instance, the dollar rises or falls much more than average, and on such days, anyone who has bought dollars will either win or lose much more than on a “normal” day.  Therefore, astrology will tell you when it is most likely that you will have such an uncommonly “bad” or “good” day; to avoid losses, you’d simply refrain from investing at the bad times, and limit yourself to those days that look more promising. 

   Whether you play the Forex market, the stock market, or gamble, it’s worth giving astrology a try, isn’t it? Especially since you can get your first three-month “Fortune Smiling” Predictive Finance Graph for a fraction of the regular price: $19.95 (a  $69.95 value), and with our money-back guarantee!
Go here to order your Finance Graph Report now.

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