4 Gambling Basics
1. Only bring to the casino floor money you are prepared to lose.
2. Keep chips you have won separate from the chips you started with. This way you can track when you are gambling with profits and when you are gambling with your own money. This can serve as a good gauge of when it is time to cash in and get out.
3. If you are gambling to have a good time, enjoy yourself. If you are gambling to make money, do not allow yourself to be tricked into easy casino traps such as gambling while drunk, tired, or upset. The casino is filled with distractions to prevent gamblers from focusing on gambling strategy and the amount of money they are losing. Focus on making money, then everything else the casino has to offer will seem all the more splendid after you have won.
4. The three most important decisions you make on the casino floor are: what games to play, how much to bet, and when to leave.
4 Probability Basics
1. The probability of any event occurring is just the number of outcomes in which that event occurs divided by the total number of events that could possibly occur. For example, the probability of drawing a club from a standard 52-card deck is 13/52 or 1/4 as you can draw 13 cards that are clubs out of the 52 total cards you could possibly draw.
2. If a game is truly random, the outcome of the next trial is not influenced by previous trials. For example, if a fair roulette wheel has landed on red for the past 10 spins, the probability of it landing on red on the next spin is still equal to the probability of it landing on black.
3. The probability of two independent occurrences is the product of their individual probabilities. For example, the probability of flipping two heads with a fair coin in two flips is 25%. The probability of your first flip being heads is 50% and the probability of your second flip being heads is 50%, so 50% times 50% is 25%.
4. The expected value of a game is the sum of the probability of each outcome times the payout of that outcome. For example, if you get paid $2 every times a fair coin is flipped and it lands on heads and you lose $1 every time it lands on tails, the expected value of each trial of this game, one flip of the coin, is $0.50 as 0.5(2) + 0.5(-1) = 0.5. This game has a positive expected value, so this is a player-friendly game. Every time you play this game, you can expect to make, on average, $0.50.
For more information on properties of probability, check out these free lectures at MIT Open Courseware, UC Berkeley Online, and Khan Academy.