Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
I can't believe this is still being debated here after more than ten years.

You can't beat mathematics in long term gambling. If you are -EV, you will lose money in the long run no matter what, barring a mega-jackpot situation.

The confusion comes from the fact that you may also lose long term if you're +EV, due to poor bankroll management, or by playing with such variance or small edges that you would need an insane number of sessions to guarantee long term success.

Anyone who has played -EV games long term and claims to be a winner is lying, unless they had a single monster hit which was large enough to make up for their other losses.
The reason this keeps coming up is because the point keeps getting misrepresented.

No one has said they "beat the math" in long-term gambling.Yet if someone comes on and says they've won over any amount of time by playing -EV games, we immediately have the conspiracy theorists jump up and down claiming "they're lying!"

In my case I net profitted in four years playing my strategy. That's hardly "long-term", in fact, it's but a relatively small slice in time. And if anybody doesn't think it's possible to win as much as I did in that amount of time at the limits I played, it is they who do not understand the math.

I took a chance when I chose to play it. I never experienced a complete loss ($57,200 in one session) and it was always possible for it to happen multiple times a year. But it didn't. I have no doubt that had I not come upon the DU bug play and continued to play my strategy instead, I would have experienced more than one of those losses. But would I have lost overall...given the continuing opportunities for huge hits along the way? No one knows--not even the math. Because the math doesn't really know if 10 years is long enough for that strategy to make it into the "long-term" or not. That can be argued on and on and on.

But the fact remains: If I have a pocket with $57,200 stuffed inside and I'm in dire need of an additional minimum $2500, it would be downright foolish if I didn't play my strategy to get the extra funds. Every. Single. Time.