Osler's Razor

I lived in Detroit when casinos were hailed as the savior of the city's economy.  Detroit would become a tourist destination, and money would be pumped into that desperate place.  It didn't work very well.  Hordes of tourists don't flock to Detroit.  Instead, people from Michigan (including Detroit) go there and lose their money.  Casinos were a sucker bet.

Here's the thing:  Gambling is pretty much for people who can't do math.  You can't both play and win, because the edge is with the house.  If you win, you have to stop, but people don't do that.  They stay and gamble some more and lose what they have won.  That's how it works when one side has an edge, however small-- in the end, the side with an edge will win unless the other side stops playing at precisely the right time. 

We humans don't do that very well; we are adverse to walking away when the winning is easy (or at least it feels that way).  We aren't always so great at calculating our odds, either.  Lots of people, including me, gave a relatively unknown company some personal information in order to play the "Billion Dollar Bracket" challenge.  In short, it offered one billion dollars to anyone who composed a perfect bracket prior to the 2014 NCAA tournament.  No one won.  The video above explains why.

The only way to win at a casino is to own it-- and you don't even have to be a master strategist to do that.