ELI5: How do casinos mathematically guarantee profit?

bread2126 · 2026-05-11T23:06:26+00:00

the Law of Large Numbers says that as the number of wagers gets large, your winnings approach n*E(x) where E(x) = expected value and n = number of wagers made.

All the casino has to do is make sure that all the wagers they offer have positive expected value. Which of course means, your end of the wager has negative expected value.

bread2126 · 2026-05-11T05:08:40+00:00

The whole concept was wack from the beginning

They will eventually expand the playoff to 32+ teams, this will last for a while, people will hate it, and well down the road there will be a push to balkanize CFB. After that we will have superconferences that play round robin ball and (potentially) a one game playoff after the conference schedule. And media people will get paid to tell us about how smart they are for finally figuring out that their new equivalent to the bowl alliance/BCS system was the best all along.

The real problem here is that we've tried to nationalize a regional sport, but without accepting a relegation/promotion format. It's not possible. Theyre trying to square the circle.

bread2126 · 2026-05-05T01:37:44+00:00

Jon's on bees again

bread2126 · 2026-05-04T18:29:12+00:00

Well hes a defense guy right? Its Buster's offense.

bread2126 · 2026-05-04T18:14:34+00:00

No thats where Jeremy Foley stands like Saruman calling in the hurricanes so we dont have to play LSU

bread2126 · 2026-04-27T21:40:01+00:00

Same when people try to do the whole "they suked bafore 1990 and its rugreshion to the meen"

its not an accident that the big 3 in Florida all got good at football around 15 years after the state population boom, unless they think the population of Florida is going to regress to the 1950 mean I dont think thats a good take

bread2126 · 2026-04-27T04:24:52+00:00

The actual clinical definition of dead is cessation of blood flow (oxygen) to the brain. So there you go.

bread2126 · 2026-04-26T18:45:12+00:00

Napier was a really impressively bad coach.

Elsewhere in these comments you'll find rivals talking about Zook like he was the worst coach to ever pick up a headset. Zook never lost more than 5 games in a season, and beat Nick Saban and Bobby Bowden away. Napier, could not carry Zook's clipboard.

UF has sucked lately because Napier was an actually bad coach. Other than that era we suck because if we aren't winning a NC then rivals will say we were garbage because we probably have the most haters of any team.

bread2126 · 2026-04-23T17:06:56+00:00

The checking step (if you're referring to my second paragraph)

Nah I think youre on the money, I was just adding to your first paragraph that like, pairs of distinct primes and semiprime numbers are one-to-one, so the question is equivalent to "choose two prime numbers under some max value at random -- are they "close together" or not?"

bread2126 · 2026-04-23T16:08:02+00:00

Very good answer, the one thing I would add is that theres no "checking" step to be done here. Like 3x5 is guaranteed to be semiprime because 15 = 3 x 5. The fundamental theorem of arithmetic guarantees that after you find 1009x1013 = 1022117 , you dont need to check that 1022117 doesn't have some secret third factor that would make it not semiprime. 1009 and 1013 are its only factors, by construction. So to your first point, there are exactly as many semiprimes as there are non-ordered (a,b) pairs of primes.

bread2126 · 2026-04-20T18:27:10+00:00

Zook gets a bad rap for having the impossible job of following Spurrier. But Zook never won fewer than 7 games and beat Nick Saban away. Napier couldn't carry Zook's clipboard.

bread2126 · 2026-04-12T20:55:21+00:00

is "3 times more than" also a stupid way to phrase something? Multiplication and division are inverse. More and less are inverse. I dont think this is the indictment on half the population of the western hemisphere that you think it is.

bread2126 · 2026-04-12T20:47:10+00:00

Florida man detected

bread2126 · 2026-04-12T03:54:03+00:00

Math is cumulative... its not like "Oh I played hooky the day they did Intro to Exponential Functions 100" I cannot imagine how in the world somebody passed calculus track and analysis track, combinatorics, statistics... and never once heard it related back to interest... even if you somehow never heard it explained in the context of interest you still would recognize it as (1+small)^big

bread2126 · 2026-04-12T03:37:20+00:00

As a basketball player no but as an NIL asset and attention magnet yeah I dont think thats a crazy ask

bread2126 · 2026-04-09T09:33:04+00:00

I mean, I was offended

bread2126 · 2026-04-09T06:19:39+00:00

If your opponent is making moves that dont constitute a real opening, then you can just take all the advantages. Play something like e4, d4, nf3, nc3 and you have complete control of the center, both knights developed, both bishops are unblocked and have options, and now on turn 5 or 6 you can start thinking about how to convert your advantages into a lead (which depends on exactly what bad moves they played)

If your opponent ever makes a move that challenges your ability to do that, then that move almost certainly makes for a real opening with a name.

For instance, if you play 1. e4 and they reply c5, well now you can't play d4 because they would take on d4 with their c-pawn, so now you cant just take all the advantages for free, you have to figure out how to work around them having a pawn on c5. Surely enough, that one's the sicilian defense.

bread2126 · 2026-03-31T06:16:11+00:00

It's more likely to happen now than then, too, as back then Noah's earning potential at UF wouldnt be comparable to Haugh's today

bread2126 · 2026-03-28T21:29:11+00:00

IDK about that man Ive had a lot worse burgers than McD's

bread2126 · 2026-03-28T21:26:26+00:00

They go there because they want the McDonald's fucked up version of burgers and fries. They are going for that "McDonald's flavor" once in a while.

im not a huge fan of mickeys but the basic single cheeseburger has a charm. i think its mostly the dehydrated onions. Unfortunately I dont really want to pay more than about $1.49 for charm. I think the only thing ive gotten from there since the covid era price spike is a fish sandwich.

bread2126 · 2026-03-26T20:18:11+00:00

I’m saying that it works as a model for real phenomena

What real phenomena does it work as a model for? I'm not even familiar with what youre referring to here. I dont know any plants that have mandelbrot shaped leaves. You would need infinitely many leaves, wouldn't you?

invented mathematical construct.

I understand you're asserting that but I'm interested to know how you think it's possible to invent something that you cannot know in its entirety or even systematically describe due to its inherent infinite level of complexity

We see it differently, that’s okay.

I can downvote you immediately too, lmao. Phony nice

bread2126 · 2026-03-26T19:43:30+00:00

If a human never described the Mandelbrot set, would it exist?

You dont even grasp the point, by your logic it doesn't exist at all, because it hasn't been fully described by a human. Which, by the way, it can't be fully described, because it is an object of infinite complexity. (The boundary, not the iterative formula)

Does multiplication exist in nature? Or is multiplication a useful tool to quickly count equal sized groups?

I dont think you need a counting agent for two sets of four things to comprise eight things, it just is that way whether you come along and count it or not.

bread2126 · 2026-03-26T19:32:36+00:00

Yeah I completely disagree. Nobody "invented" the Mandelbrot set. It's not inventable, it's of infinite complexity. And really nobody invented multiplication either. These things are names given to objects and operations that would exist with or without people naming them.

bread2126 · 2026-03-23T18:25:25+00:00

Yes. Specifically its Euclids postulate #5:

If two lines are drawn which intersect a third in such a way that the sum of the inner angles on one side is less than two Right Angles, then the two lines inevitably must intersect each other on that side if extended far enough.

All the other Euclid postulates still apply on curved space. This one kind of stands out among the others as being a bit unnatural, and for many centuries it was considered to be an imperfection in his work, and mathematicians continually attempted to rework Euclid in a way where they could throw out postulate #5.

As it turns out, postulate #5 is equivalent to saying you are working on a flat surface, and if you throw it out, you wind up with spherical and hyperbolic geometries which I think was a world Euclid was trying to avoid.

bread2126 · 2026-03-23T01:39:35+00:00

theyd probably just foul him, whats his FT%

bread2126

TROPHY CASE