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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 willbe 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, andnot
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”
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