jetset said:
Do I understand this response correctly? Are EH in effect saying that these horrific results garnered by several players was the equivalent of a bad streak, but that over a large enough sample the doubling feature would come out at 50/50?
How large a sample? That doesn't sound like a very good bet for gamblers expecting 50/50 odds to me.
Their argument is based on confusion and deceit.
Basically the argument works like this:
You walk into a casino and play roulette. 125 spins in a row the wheel comes up red (this is roughly equivalent odds to the doubling we saw). You speak to the pit boss and say you know they are cheating and leave in disgust.
The next day the gaming control board comes back to test the wheel. The casino has by this time switched the wheel for a fair one. 1,000,000 spins are conducted and the results are roughly even with red/black (as the wheel has been replaced for a fair one), say 500,000 red and 500,000 black. Taking the 125 red spins together with the 1,000,000 fair spins, the result is 500,125 red, and 500,000 black. This is not unusual nor suspicious.
The problem being that they already switched the wheel. If they had continued with the old one the results would be the same.
But if you take a sample from a rigged game and add to it a relatively much larger sample from a fair game, the rigged sample no longer has much effect.
This nonsense about things evening out in the long run is just that.
Yes it's true that if you get four reds in a row, there is nothing unusual - the odds are only 1/16 - something that will happen fairly often. In this case you need a much larger sample to say that it is likely that the wheel is unfair. But the reason that four reds in a row is not enough evidence is not because the sample is too small, it is because 1/16 just isn't unusual at all. It is *extremely* important to realise that the thing that matters is the probabiltiy that the event could happen, not the sample size. The sample size only matters insofar as a trend demonstrated over a bigger sample will have a lower probability of being fair. The nonsense about sample sizes is a logical fallacy:
1. A trend demonstrated over a bigger sample size decreases the likelihood that the game is fair
2. Therefore in order for a game to be fair you must have a big sample
This is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. The thing that matters is the chance that the event occurred randomly. It is already been shown that this is approximately a
2,016,352,813,782,491,278,292,828,543,127,849,349-1 (this is not the exact number but it is of the correct magnitude: I have printed the full number rather than using scientific notification to give an idea of just how unlikely it is)
shot
The sample size is not important, it is the chance that something occurs by chance.
English Harbour must not be allowed to cover this up by taking samples from a game they have fixed after being caught cheating.
Selecting the same grain of sand from every grain of sand on every beach in the world three times in a row just doesn't happen. Neither does 125 consecutive reds on roulette.
Nor do the video poker results we've seen here.
My guess is that someone at English Harbour who does not understand mathematics has allowed someone to blind them with this faux scientific explanation and thinks that everyone else will be convinced.
They are wrong.
Very foolish. English Harbour has unfortunately consigned its group of casinos to the record as the casino that fixed their games and then covered up.
I believe this fatal damage to reputation will prove much more expensive to them in the long term than the money they made from their unfair doubling game (although of course nobody knows how much that is - it could be substatnial).
