Are You Fooled by Randomness?

[Don Pedro Dinero]

Now let's find out: if you are successful in sports betting or other types of gambling (as you think), then are you not fooled by chance, as Nassim Taleb writes? Is your success a survivor's fallacy?

No, because today I am a net loser, so this example does not apply to me. But we can see clear examples on the forum of people who have a winning streak and think it is because they are good at a particular type of gambling, that they have found some variant of martingale that helps them to beat the casino or things like that.

[KiaKia]

I thought it was just me, because sometimes I believe that casinos only lend you money when you win and the gullible person that you are you will be overjoyed for winning, probably screaming that you've won.

The question I have is once you won that life changing money are you satisfied? Will you finally take your eye off gambling? Will you move on and never look back again? Because my dear, this is the only way to win in gambling.

Don't come back, doing so makes you a winner, if not you will pay what you owe because that's just it, I find it hard to believe that once you win its yours forever if you still keep gambling, that's why I said that it's like they lend you the money and you will pay it back in the future.

Gambling isn't a thing if you aren't having fun.

[pawanjain]

I thought it was just me, because sometimes I believe that casinos only lend you money when you win and the gullible person that you are you will be overjoyed for winning, probably screaming that you've won.

The question I have is once you won that life changing money are you satisfied? Will you finally take your eye off gambling? Will you move on and never look back again? Because my dear, this is the only way to win in gambling.

Don't come back, doing so makes you a winner, if not you will pay what you owe because that's just it, I find it hard to believe that once you win its yours forever if you still keep gambling, that's why I said that it's like they lend you the money and you will pay it back in the future.

Gambling isn't a thing if you aren't having fun.

That's another perspective of winning money in gambling and it sure makes sense. If the gambler keeps playing then he is destined to lose money in the long run.
The house edge will make sure of that and at the end it all goes back to casino and the owner is the one making money.
Either the person has to be really really lucky, as OP said, could be that he's the chosen survivor or may be he's smart and decides to quit gambling with the winning money.

[o48o]

At one time, Nassim Taleb wrote a famous book, Fooled by Randomness, which became widely known. What is this book about? First of all, it is about randomness. It is about the fact that the role of randomness and chance in our lives is underestimated and that most success stories are actually survivorship bias. Most of the examples in this book are not related to gambling, but they can be easily adapted. For example, the famous illustration about a million monkeys. Let's rework it for sports betting, for example.

Let's imagine a million monkeys betting on sports. None of them analyze sports games, they just bet like crazy. In a year, half of the monkeys will be broke, but the other half will be doing well. In another year, half of the monkeys will win again, and the other half will suffer losses. In 10 years, there will be a thousand monkeys who have not lost money all this time, and in another 10 years, at the top of this pyramid, there will be a monkey who has always been lucky. Of course, journalists will start to find out what the winning monkey did right. Maybe he got up earlier? Ate more bananas? Surely, a simple monkey cannot always achieve success just like that! And sooner or later, journalists will definitely find an answer…

Now let's find out: if you are successful in sports betting or other types of gambling (as you think), then are you not fooled by chance, as Nassim Taleb writes? Is your success a survivor's fallacy?

We are build to be fooled easily. We prefer to believe that there are patterns to be found that pure chaos and randomness, because our brains have developed a sort of intuitive pattern recognition.

That skill has kept us alive as a species, and gives us pleasure when used, so we tend to try to utilize it, even when the pattern isn't there.
Especially in probability calculations it's hard to accept that when sample size is high enough, changes for some improbable results being involved grows.
Instead of accepting them as a margin of "error", we want to highlight them and make them more meaningful.

I see same thing with trading as i see in gambling, and that's people wanting other answers then being lucky, even though being lucky becomes obvious if you think of it as million gamblers playing a lottery instead.

[crwth]

I do think that it's a great book, although I haven't read it yet. However, it seems to provide a good explanation of the role of life and the concepts you mentioned, such as overestimation and survivorship bias. I'm just trying to understand how those million monkeys would be some lucky people in this world, but it's better to have that skill to be successful, so the chances are higher.

There is that kind of illusion, but it should still be backed by the correct data and be replicable. There are a lot of factors.

[Smartprofit]

Hmm, even though the survivor's fallacy prevails, a question remains: why it had to be THAT monkey (or that gambler) and not any of the other ones? Is it really about randomness, or is there something else our eyes and comprehension can't catch in order to decipher this mistery?

And by not being the lucky gambler who has been always winning, it doesn't mean the end of the world, because you can still be the lucky one regards another aspects of life. Maybe not in gambling, but in familiar relationships, love, career, health, travelling opportunities and so on...

There are many ways to be the lucky one, and at some point, "randomness" will surprise you positively on one or some of them.

This is an interesting question, but there is a simple answer to it: there are no reasons or patterns why this particular monkey should win and not another. It is just a whim of chance, if you follow this concept. But the "monkey" itself, by this analogy, like a successful person in any field associated with risk, will believe that their success is due not to random factors, but to some specific secrets of success. True, their followers will be confused by the fact that the success of teachers is difficult to repeat, but usually this is attributed to insufficient effort and insufficiently precise adherence to the original strategy. It is difficult to say how fair this concept is. But its followers are everywhere. I know one influencer who claims that success in trading is always just an accident and survivorship bias. In other words, it is impossible to make money in trading, any earnings there are just an accident. In gambling, this is even truer.

Even if it is true and making a big profit in trading (gambling) is just a random event, I still think it makes sense to trade (play).

Even if winning is just a random event, it should be noted that if you do not play at all, the probability of winning is zero. And this is true for all human activities.

To succeed, you must constantly try to get rich (try after try). And one day you will get lucky!

There is even a joke about a gambler who complained to God that he had never won the lottery. He complained, complained, complained, and then God came to him in a dream and said: “I would have helped you a long time ago. But give me a chance to do it ... Buy a lottery ticket!”

[Agbamoni]

it's more like a collective effort of preparation, chances and then finally luck, because preparation increases your chances of winning, while luck fetches you that win.

You can be prepared at times and unprepared sometimes too and still have luck. No matter the approach will follow, the gambler's general review is that luck is involved in any game we win. If you have only chances and no luck you wont win, that is how it works in gambling.

Even with the best prepared strategy, without luck, the outcome can still go against you. That’s why you see many say gambling is more about chances, and luck than the most prepared strategy.

[stompix]

Let's imagine a million monkeys betting on sports. None of them analyze sports games, they just bet like crazy. In a year, half of the monkeys will be broke, but the other half will be doing well. In another year, half of the monkeys will win again, and the other half will suffer losses. In 10 years, there will be a thousand monkeys who have not lost money all this time, and in another 10 years, at the top of this pyramid, there will be a monkey who has always been lucky.

Well, this goes against randomness itself, and no, it won't work like that.
First, you mentioned betting on sports. Since sports are not dice games with 2x multipliers, the monkeys will be randomly on 5x, 1.3x, and so on. The thing with sports is that for every monkey that bets on PSG, the odds for Inter increase, so the monkey will get a better return than the initial, while the second monkey that bet on PSG gets a worse one. So the chances of half of the monkeys doing well and half of them doing bad are incredibly thin.

Again, this is not red/black, or hi/low. This can easily end up with 100 monkeys alone making money and the rest not making a dime. If we took a huge sample in the billion bets, the actual randomness result would be closer to half of the monkeys making a 10% win and half of the monkeys making a 10% loss. Half of the monkeys losing all their money is not only statistically impossible but it defies the way betting in sports works.

[Tungbulu]

✂️✂️✂️

You can be prepared at times and unprepared sometimes too and still have luck. No matter the approach will follow, the gambler's general review is that luck is involved in any game we win. If you have only chances and no luck you wont win, that is how it works in gambling.

Even with the best prepared strategy, without luck, the outcome can still go against you. That’s why you see many say gambling is more about chances, and luck than the most prepared strategy.

Then it appears we are of same opinion about the roll of luck, but it's quite unfortunate that a lot of gamblers (even among us in this community) downplay the importance and role of luck in gambling. A few times, I've seen some people argue that with or without luck, as long as someone knows exactly what he is doing, he'll be able to determine the outcome of his bet, and I just try to imagine how naive this person and his perspective really is.

Whenever I see people engage in such an argument, I only ask them just one question, and every time I ask this question, they're always incapable of giving a reasonable answer. The question is that "if gambling is really about skills, experience and gambler's expertise, then why is it that the same gambler who once used his skills to secure a successful win in a round, would still end up losing subsequent rounds even after applying that same skill". Because if it was really about the skill, then those pro gamblers who's got the skill and experience shouldn't loose at all when they gamble.

[mak013]

~
Now let's find out: if you are successful in sports betting or other types of gambling (as you think), then are you not fooled by chance, as Nassim Taleb writes? Is your success a survivor's fallacy?

In such way we can every win calculate as random win.
It is interesting moment. On one hand we have lucky winners who just make random bets and don`t care about research and strategy because they believe in luck. On the other hand we have serious bettors, who analyze every source they can find, has their own strategy and risk management. They both wins because they made right bet. But one of them just made a bet, and another - made all that he could to win. And result is the same. May be it would be better to be that lucky monkey?

PS. I prefer to make all my best to win. And ideas that i won due to luck - hurts me.

[free-bit.co.in]

In fact, Taleb's argument seems really valid to me. It's true that we really only want to hear success stories, we don't like to hear stories of failures or even no one likes to publish their failure story to others. This is a classic example of survivorship bias where the role of luck & countless untold failure stories are deliberately hidden.

In the case of wagering, most gamblers foam at the mouth when they win a large amount. They just want to prove themselves as heroes at gambling. They always flatter themselves with their gambling skills. But here, the main reason they win is because they were lucky, nothing else. Meanwhile, the many who lost are often overlooked. How? When a particular few lucky guys win, the vast majority face losses, & how many losing stories do we know?

I always dislike the tendency to follow the hype of successful stories. These selective success stories mislead us. It's essential to recognize the role of chance in outcomes.

[wheeljunkie]

In such way we can every win calculate as random win.
It is interesting moment. On one hand we have lucky winners who just make random bets and don`t care about research and strategy because they believe in luck. On the other hand we have serious bettors, who analyze every source they can find, has their own strategy and risk management. They both wins because they made right bet. But one of them just made a bet, and another - made all that he could to win. And result is the same. May be it would be better to be that lucky monkey?

That is not the point of the book, and it certainly does not apply to gambling like that. The point is that you can't choose to be the lucky monkey, randomness will pick winners and losers. What you can do is educate yourself, and play correctly, to improve the chances that you become that lucky monkey.

In fact, Taleb's argument seems really valid to me. It's true that we really only want to hear success stories, we don't like to hear stories of failures or even no one likes to publish their failure story to others. This is a classic example of survivorship bias where the role of luck & countless untold failure stories are deliberately hidden.

In the case of wagering, most gamblers foam at the mouth when they win a large amount. They just want to prove themselves as heroes at gambling. They always flatter themselves with their gambling skills. But here, the main reason they win is because they were lucky, nothing else. Meanwhile, the many who lost are often overlooked. How? When a particular few lucky guys win, the vast majority face losses, & how many losing stories do we know?

I always dislike the tendency to follow the hype of successful stories. These selective success stories mislead us. It's essential to recognize the role of chance in outcomes.

Pretty much everything you see online is a selective trick. Whether it is people who are on vacation all the time and pose to be rich, to people who have made big money in any type of gambling game. Once you understand this fact of life, you can stop reading any stories at all. They are just junk and do not help you at all. Very few stories will be about people who ruined themselves, their families and even ended up killing themselves from out of control gambling.

[Findingnemo]

Randomness or in other words we can call it luck.

Yes, I lost bets so I am not that lucky one, so no one is gonna ask me what I did while betting or prior to that. And there's no guarantee that we will win as same as other person did if we replicate everything that's what the randomness is all about and it's not just applicable to gambling alone but for life itself.

There are things that we can't control so let's just do the right thing to do and everything else isn't in our hands.

[Botnake]

Success and luck shouldn’t be paired together especially when we’re talking about long-term success. Sure, we can win when we’re lucky, but treating luck as a strategy? That’s a mistake. Luck is not a strategy.

What we really need is a solid strategy that helps us win consistently, not every single day, but most of the time.

If we understand the game and our chances, we won’t be fooled by randomness. In sports, outcomes are always unpredictable, that’s just the nature of it. But our job is to make smart predictions. And if we get more predictions right than wrong, it will lead to profit over time.

[mak013]

In such way we can every win calculate as random win.
It is interesting moment. On one hand we have lucky winners who just make random bets and don`t care about research and strategy because they believe in luck. On the other hand we have serious bettors, who analyze every source they can find, has their own strategy and risk management. They both wins because they made right bet. But one of them just made a bet, and another - made all that he could to win. And result is the same. May be it would be better to be that lucky monkey?

That is not the point of the book, and it certainly does not apply to gambling like that. The point is that you can't choose to be the lucky monkey, randomness will pick winners and losers. What you can do is educate yourself, and play correctly, to improve the chances that you become that lucky monkey.

Yes, you can`t choose your role, but you can think that you are that lucky monkey. For someone it can be serious disappoint - he made huge job and win one bet after another, but other people think that he is just lucky man.
The same time he wouldn`t be happy to see "lucky monkey" near with the same results.
It is mostly about emotions, that can disturb to keep calm during the game and can make the gambler to take wrong decisions.

[wheeljunkie]

Yes, you can`t choose your role, but you can think that you are that lucky monkey. For someone it can be serious disappoint - he made huge job and win one bet after another, but other people think that he is just lucky man.
The same time he wouldn`t be happy to see "lucky monkey" near with the same results.
It is mostly about emotions, that can disturb to keep calm during the game and can make the gambler to take wrong decisions.

You should not think like that, because nobody is always lucky in life. You can be the lucky monkey in certain things and at certain times, but at other times you will be the unlucky one. That is precisely what the thing about randomness wants to say. Do not let random selection cloud your judgement and make you think that you are something which you are not.

[Theupdude]

Honestly it hits hard I’ve read some of Taleb’s ideas and he makes a good point we love to look for reasons behind success but often ignore how much luck plays into it. Especially in things like betting where randomness is a huge factor I think many people overestimate their skill when they’re just on a lucky streak and they only realize it, when the luck runs out it doesn’t mean skill doesn’t matter at all but being aware of randomness can keep us humble and help us make better decisions in the long run

[mak013]

Yes, you can`t choose your role, but you can think that you are that lucky monkey. For someone it can be serious disappoint - he made huge job and win one bet after another, but other people think that he is just lucky man.
The same time he wouldn`t be happy to see "lucky monkey" near with the same results.
It is mostly about emotions, that can disturb to keep calm during the game and can make the gambler to take wrong decisions.

You should not think like that, because nobody is always lucky in life. You can be the lucky monkey in certain things and at certain times, but at other times you will be the unlucky one. That is precisely what the thing about randomness wants to say. Do not let random selection cloud your judgement and make you think that you are something which you are not.

I don`t think so. I mostly don`t care about others` opinion. But sometimes i feel angry when i made a high quality job and someone says "Ough, he is really lucky".
PS. My win rate was between 55-70% so i`m sure that i`m not such lucky monkey. But i don`t like when my job downgrades to luck.

[iv4n]

Now let's find out: if you are successful in sports betting or other types of gambling (as you think), then are you not fooled by chance, as Nassim Taleb writes? Is your success a survivor's fallacy?

https://mindfulness.com/mindful-living/are-these-bad-times-or-good-times-the-story-of-the-zen-farmer

I haven't been able to find the original story as I heard it about 20 years ago... There are similarities, but instead of the answer “Bad luck. Good luck. Who knows?” it was "We will see."

Gambling, like life itself, is full of ups & downs. It is hard to accept some defeats, just as it is hard to remain humble while winning... life teaches us that the best way is to accept calmly the things that come our way. I believe there are natural talents who learn that from a young age... but the rest of us learn from experience, after many mistakes... after countless ups & downs.

[peter0425]

Now let's find out: if you are successful in sports betting or other types of gambling (as you think), then are you not fooled by chance, as Nassim Taleb writes? Is your success a survivor's fallacy?

No, because today I am a net loser, so this example does not apply to me. But we can see clear examples on the forum of people who have a winning streak and think it is because they are good at a particular type of gambling, that they have found some variant of martingale that helps them to beat the casino or things like that.

I do not think there is any variant of martingale that can help them beat the casino. The house edge remains and the martingale strategy will not allow you to earn much. It can cover up your losses but then you will only win a few amount.

Moreover, considering loss streaks what happens if you keep losing? You might end up in debt lol.