As you can imagine, my inbox doesn’t only receive questions about business and investing, and more and more people, desperate for money, are searching for hundreds of ways to get it. That makes them easy victims of miracle methods for making money, especially when the method seems to have statistical and mathematical logic behind it.
I can vouch that, statistically, this trick doing the rounds on the internet would work in a traditional casino, to the point that if you used it, casino security would throw you out, since using mental mathematical algorithms at the tables is strictly forbidden. In online casinos, on the other hand, it is allowed. Let’s see why it is allowed, what the trick is and where the catch lies.
Some of you will have received this trick or method by email, and others will have seen it in some kind of advert: by placing small bets for one or two hours a day, you would be practically guaranteed around €4,000 or €5,000 a month. What’s more, the “genius” explaining the trick advises you to cap your winnings at €500 a day (imagine that…).
The method
Statistically, if we toss a coin 100 times, the probability of heads is 50%, the same as tails. Sometimes heads will come up three times in a row, or tails five times in a row. The point is that if we bet on heads, sooner or later heads will come up, as long as the coin isn’t rigged.
On a casino roulette wheel we have red/black or odd/even. Let’s take red/black as the example:
“The supposed trick is to bet €1 on red. If red comes up, we get back the euro we bet plus the euro we won. Next we bet €1 on black. If red comes up this time, next time we double the bet, again on black. That is, we bet €2. If red comes up again, we double the bet again (we bet €4, again on black). Black comes up, so we have won €8. That is the supposed trick. Basically, you bet on a colour. If you win, you switch your bet to the other colour. If you lose, you stay on the same colour and double the bet until that colour comes up.”
It has its logic: it is statistically possible and mathematically correct.
Who is giving away this miracle method?
The advert will feature someone who discovered the trick and doesn’t charge you for using it. What’s more, he gives you a list of online casinos where he has tried it and never had any problems, because using it isn’t prohibited. Obviously, the casinos recommended by this guy, gentleman, decoy or huckster are the very same casinos that are giving you the method so that you open an account and try the trick with them. The online casinos themselves are inviting you to swindle them, to cheat them, to con them. Why would they hand you the trick themselves?
Where is the catch?
The catch lies in the mathematics itself, and probably also in the fact that virtual roulette wheels may not follow the same statistical algorithms. On a virtual wheel the same colour can come up as many as 14 times in a row (in fact, the same colour could come up 100 times in a row), and the trick then multiplies your losses like this:
1 + 1×2=2 + 2×2=4 + 4×2=8 + 8×2=16 + 16×2=32 + 32×2=64 + 64×2=128 + 128×2=256 + 256×2=512 + 512×2=1024 + 1024×2=2048 + 2048×2=4096 + 4096×2=8192…
As you can see, if you take the trick seriously and follow it to the letter, and the same colour comes up 14 times in a row, your last bet will be €8,192. But that’s not all: your accumulated losses by then would be €16,360. People who sign up to try the trick usually start with €50, €100 or €500 at most, so the same result only has to come up five times in a row for your account to be wiped out.
If you thought of topping up your account with those thousands of euros to win back your losses, there would very probably be a glitch in the casino’s computer system, and you would have no legal recourse, because, as their terms and conditions say, they accept no liability for this kind of error even though they know it could happen. In any case, I’m 99.9% sure you would quit before doubling a fifth time.
In short: the trick consists of hooking a sucker who thinks he is going to outsmart the online casino, and then the casino empties his account. The casino will probably give him a bit of breathing room and convince him the trick works while he plays with €1, knowing that people soon want to risk more when the wind is in their favour.
At some point, someone may decide to try with €10 or even €100, since they have done well with small bets, and that is how they end up ruined very quickly.
Thousands of people around the world fall for it every day, which is why we keep warning that easy money doesn’t exist: there are no shortcuts and no tricks. Besides, believe me, anyone who had a method for making €5,000 a month with one hour’s work a day would never share it; they would keep it as an inheritance for their children.
Further reading
Featured image: Ralf Roletschek, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
