Related papers: Some people have all the luck
We use three kinds of computations: simulation, numeric, and symbolic, to guide risk-averse gamblers in general, and offer particular advice on how to resolve the famous St. Petersburg paradox.
Accurately predicting the outcome of sporting events has been a goal for many groups who seek to maximize profit. What makes this challenging is that the outcome of an event can be influenced by many factors that dynamically change across…
Unusually large prize pools in lotteries like Mega Millions and Powerball attract additional bettors, which increases the likelihood that multiple winners will have to share the pool. Thus, the expected value of a lottery ticket decreases…
We introduce a betting game, where the gambler aims to guess the last success epoch from past observed data. The player may bet on the event that no further successes occur, or choose a `trap' which is any span of future times. In the…
At the end, the house always wins! This simple truth holds for all public games of chance. Nevertheless, since lotteries have existed, people have tried everything to give luck a helping hand. This article compares objective scientific…
Predicting the outcome of sports events is a hard task. We quantify this difficulty with a coefficient that measures the distance between the observed final results of sports leagues and idealized perfectly balanced competitions in terms of…
We show that, in a resource allocation problem, the ex ante aggregate utility of players with cumulative-prospect-theoretic preferences can be increased over deterministic allocations by implementing lotteries. We formulate an optimization…
We describe the probability theory behind a casino game, blackjack, and the procedure to compute the optimal strategy for a deck of arbitrary cards and player's expected win given that he follows the optimal strategy. The exact blackjack…
We study the problem of whether a betting-strategy can be decomposed into an equivalent set of simpler betting-strategies, such as betting-strategies that bet on a restricted set of stages or bet on a restricted of favorable outcomes. We…
We develop a systematic approach to quantum probability as a theory of rational betting in quantum gambles. In these games of chance the agent is betting in advance on the outcomes of several (finitely many) incompatible measurements. One…
In many countries poker is one of the most popular card games. Although each variant of poker has its own rules, all involve the use of money to make the challenge meaningful. Nowadays, in the collective consciousness, some variants of…
We study the asymptotic behavior of the ratio of total return (or total profit) to total amount bet in a casino game. While the limit is well understood when the sequence of wagers is independent and identically distributed, here we…
We give a criterion under which the expected return on a ticket for certain large lotteries is positive. In this circumstance, we use elementary portfolio analysis to show that an optimal investment strategy includes a very small allocation…
The Possible-Winner problem asks, given an election where the voters' preferences over the set of candidates is partially specified, whether a distinguished candidate can become a winner. In this work, we consider the computational…
In online betting, the bookmaker can update the payoffs it offers on a particular event many times before the event takes place, and the updated payoffs may depend on the bets accumulated thus far. We study the problem of bookmaking with…
We consider a Bradley-Terry model in random environment where each player faces each other once. More precisely the strengths of the players are assumed to be random and we study the influence of their distributions on the asymptotic number…
We discuss winning possibilities of players in various variants of cops and robber game played on large random graphs, a testbed for various kinds of network queries, search problems in particular. We explore the use of logic frameworks to…
The Monty Hall puzzle has been solved and dissected in many ways, but always using probabilistic arguments, so it is considered a probability puzzle. In this paper the puzzle is set up as an orthodox statistical problem involving an unknown…
The locker puzzle is a game played by multiple players against a referee. It has been previously shown that the best strategy that exists cannot succeed with probability greater than 1-ln2 \approx 0.31, no matter how many players are…
Recent work has considered natural variations of the multi-armed bandit problem, where the reward distribution of each arm is a special function of the time passed since its last pulling. In this direction, a simple (yet widely applicable)…