Yeah, but if the player goes back there is nothing to prevent him winning more. Games don't have memory so he has the same chances as he started with. There is nothing to say that is DESTINED to lose, unless there is a switch to protect the casino from losing too much. Have you seen the case here where a player won $400 000 with repeated wins on Live Roulette? It just goes to show that every now and then you can keep on playing and manage to avoid the loss. The question is would he have been able to pull this off at virtual RNG roulette?
Not every player puts their winnings back to casino. If you have won enough you can buy a house with your winnings and never put it back to tables.
if you never put it back to tables, then you ARE a winner. i said that the house gets the advantage of taking people's bets all day and can break the pocketbooks of many players. immediately after that, i said the player's advantage in that situation is he can take his money and run whenever. the key is that the majority of players will chase and chase. every time you go back to the well, you risk falling in and losing it all. also i think it is very rare a person will cashout and leave the casino with a small loss, they will use the rest of that gambling money to try to get back ahead.
and as for the roulette champ, i am sure he upped his bet from what he started out playing, or there's no way he could have won that much. and in raising his bets, he put himself at risk to lose it all, or at least a much larger portion of the maximum balance he had. and if he had, how could that happen without the game cheating? how could someone lose 400 000? they had to have flipped a switch on him. or, he was stupid with his money and kept playing. the more play, the more exposure to negative-expectation games, like someone from the casino side mentioned.
and a lot of this debate is from a short- versus long-term perspective as well. we can use points from either side to support different viewpoints we present as arguments.
because clearly in infinity the no-edge game will do just that, pay out as much as it takes in. but that's why i made the point that the punters are like mortals, where the casino is always there. limited roll can be spent up and that's the end, where no matter how much the house is down, they can even out the short-term losses by continuing to play and thus bringing the real score closer to the mean (of zero for the no-edge games).
the reason the player is destined to lose is the long run. in the short term, variance comes in wild amplitudes. in the long run, you will have some sessions that are great outliers from the mean. that is, things like a 500 unit losing session. but unfortunately, most players play with far fewer units in the stack, so a going broke session happens far more often than an exceptionally good run. having this hard stop point at your bottom end limits the player's ability to get back to break-even like the math says should happen. ad you just have to get uber-lucky once in your life to hit that 500 unit upswing during the part of the series before your stack is blown, you feel like all was for naught, and you have to reload to start a new session chasing that life-altering win.
casinos even offer some games at less-than-zero edge, because they can afford to. players seeing dollar-signs in their heads, maybe not playing optimally within each hand, playing at a volatile bet size compared to variance... serving casino games is easy money, and toss a few crumbs in the form of a zero lounge to the plebes keeping them under your thumb.