PLAYING IT SMART by ALAN KRIGMAN

Do only turkeys base their betting strategies on streaks?

Some casino aficionados think "streaks" are key to gambling success. Pressing during the hot runs, backing off on the cold. The problem, of course, is that a string of positive or negative results up to a particular round is no indication of what will happen next. Casinos aren't like that. Neither is the real world.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb, in "The Black Swan," suggests you picture yourself as a turkey. From the moment you hatch, a farmer ensures you have lots of good food to eat, your coup is clean, and the barnyard bullies don't hassle you. Life is good. You're on a tear. You expect it to last forever. On the day before the fourth Thursday in November, you're in for a big surprise. You couldn't extrapolate from the past after all. The positive reinforcement you were getting day after day had no predictive value.

Gamblers have at least one potential advantage over turkeys. Even if gobblers had mathematical facility, they would have no way to anticipate significant events that can transpire, let alone assign probabilities to them. In the casino, you can do both.

Make believe you're wandering by a roulette table. You notice the tote board shows that the outcomes of all recent spins are 25 through 36. They're in the high dozen. You certainly should be aware that wheels are kept in good balance, spots are grouped together on the betting layout but scattered around the wheel, and dealers don't have the hand-eye coordination or other skills required to "place" the ball where they want. But you figure some kind of streak must be in effect. And since a dozen pays 2-to-1, you could make good money parlaying on this proposition.

So, why not give it a shot?

Turkeys start every day without thinking about the probability it'll be like the one before. But if you're playing double-zero roulette, you can and should know that a spin may very well finish out of the high dozen. The chance of doing so is 26 out of 38, somewhat over 68 percent. Moreover, you can and should know this is the likelihood, regardless of what's happened previously.

You also ought to understand that streaks in casino games are a class of random phenomena, unpredictable in advance but with well-defined prospects. And, further, that those prospects fall sharply as duration increases. The chance of a high dozen on any spin is just shy of 32 percent. That of two in a row is about 10 percent. Three in succession declines to the neighborhood of 3 percent. A run of four clocks in at roughly 1 percent. A series of 10 is down to approximately a thousandth of a percent -- a scant one out of over 100,000.

Pretend, instead, the tote board showed 13 through 36 -- the mid and high dozens. To ride this streak, you put up $2 to earn $1. The chance of success on any spin is 24 out of 38 or about 63 percent. Streak probabilities still drop with length, but slower than for single dozen bets. They're around 40 percent for two, 25 percent for three, 16 percent for four, and 1 percent for 10.

The decreasing chances of long streaks don't necessarily mean that betting strategies based on them are for turkeys. As usual, it's a matter of personal preference. Say you start with $10 and parlay your winnings, which many solid citizens and more than a few bosses think is "playing with the house's money." A run of 10 high dozens, assuming the casino would waive the upper limit, would net you over $590,000. A run of 10 mid and high dozens, finessing the detail that you'd have to bet fractions of a cent after the third winning spin, would net you more than $575.

If the streak fizzled anywhere along the way, the dent in your starting stake would still be only $10. Could you could take this on the chin? Or would you realize that once you'd collected on an intermediate wager, the money wasn't the house's, but yours, and kick yourself for being ahead then giving it back. This insight from the immortal inkster, Sumner A Ingmark, may help you decide:

Losing bets that you've been pressing,
Needn't always be distressing,
But your plan may need redressing,
If you find the plunge obsessing.

(c) 2007, ICON/Information Concepts Inc

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