Flunking the Gambler's Fallacy
You're experiencing a losing streak at the casino. Even though you've already cut into your reserve bankroll and your more rational side is telling you to pack up and go home, you still tell yourself to continue. Because you've already lost so many times in succession, you tell yourself, you're bound to win the jackpot in the next round, or the next round, or the round after that. It's quite a common scenario and, if you've ever gone through it, you've experienced the gambler's fallacy.
The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy, is basically the idea that previous events or occurrences will make certain future situations more probable. For casino games of luck like slots and roulette, statisticians will tell you that this is laughably untrue. There are casino games such as poker and blackjack which have a definite number of possibilities that decreases as the game progresses, so the gambler's fallacy doesn't hold for them.
The commonest and simplest example for the gambler's fallacy is given by a certain betting strategy for a very simple and very old dice game. The strategy said that the player must bet on a single number and, when he loses the previous roll, must bet double in the next roll. The rationale for the strategy is that another number had come up in the previous roll, and therefore the player's number is more probable to come up in the next one. The double bet is for the player to recoup his losses in the previous round.
Similar to the first situation above, the example relies on the player's many losses in the past to believe that he has more chances of hitting the jackpot in the next round. However, as you'll see later, this is not the case, and you could end up with a gambling spree that spiraled out of control, all because you believed in the gambler's fallacy.
If you want to see how exactly the gambler's fallacy is untrue (although we wouldn't mind if it were otherwise), take the example case of the dice game. At the start of the game, it's obvious that any number on the die has 1/6 or roughly 16.7% chance of coming up. However, once a number has come up on the die, it doesn't get removed from the game or wiped off from the die. For the second and all succeeding rounds, you'll still be using the same die with the same number of sides. Therefore, it doesn't matter whether you're rolling your first or your four hundredth; the chance of any number coming up on a single die is still 1 in 6.
The gambler's fallacy is directly in contrast to the games of skill, where there are only so many combinations and the number of combinations dwindles as the game goes along. Know what kind of game you play when you're gambling and try to notice if you're being fooled by the gambler's fallacy. If you are, STOP. Remember that every losing turn doesn't necessarily lead to a winning turn. If anything, it'll probably just lead you to losing more money if you believe the gambler's fallacy.
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