Baccarat Summiting the Un-Climbable Mountian

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away... oh...no wait, it was right here eleven years ago.

I used to write for Blackjack Insider Newsletter. I had some unfinished articles which I co-authored with Dr. William G. McCown, the lead researcher into pathological gambling in America, and Dean of the University of Louisiana at Munroe. (He was a guest on my show 4 times)

Here's an updated 2021 version of one article that was never published in PDF format.

Even if you disagree, you should still find it amusing.

I don't know if anyone will like it. The only thing I know for sure is that it wasn't doing any good sitting on my computer for over a decade...

~Thinking Well isn't merely a good idea...

 

Summiting


Un-Climbable Mountains


~By Francis Kneeland 2021​

There is no shame in failure at impossible tasks, only in attempting them. ~FK 2009​

A popular conception is that casinos intentionally deceive their patrons. This boldly espoused view is solidly within the domain of “things I wish I had a dollar for every time I head it” category. Is it true? The truth is that while there have certainly been some rare instances of casinos defrauding their customers, 99% of the time they don’t need to. Without any encouragement, gamblers do it all to themselves.

If offered $.95 cents in exchange for a dollar, you would likely refuse. This is exactly the type of trade that most casino patrons make every day. There is no functional difference between politely handing a casino a dollar and getting back $.95 cents or making a dollar wager on roulette. One is accepted and the other is rejected. Why is this? It is because one situation contains a random element and the other does not. These identical scenarios seem different in our minds, and so we use different criteria to judge them. The divergent decisions aren’t error, they are merely an outgrowth of our skewed perceptions. We humans aren't very good at quantifying probability and randomness, or making rational decisions involving anything that contains even the vaguest whiff of their presence. Gambling contains a full-blown waft.

No one should accept less than a dollar for a dollar in even exchange. Yet people do, primarily because their minds lead them astray. It is the rule, not the exception. Why would a casino need to waste time on subterfuge, when all that’s required to get gamblers to take bad bets is to leave their doors slightly ajar?

The main factor that pertains to this common human tendency to accept trades with negative expectation, provided they contain random elements, is that evolutionarily we have developed stunningly “good” pattern recognition infrastructure. All learning and thought (patterns of neurons) is, by definition, pattern driven; what goes with this, what goes with that, what pertains to something else, etc... Our brains are pattern using, pattern powered, pattern creating, pattern recognition engines, that without our patterns would be pointless lumps of fat. Spotting patterns is all fine and dandy for things like correctly predicting the yearly salmon run (which has a real pattern). However, in casinos, surrounded by truly random games, our brains just don’t know when to quit.

Breaking Hot Non-Fake News Flash

It’s not just in casinos! In the wider world, the misjudgments, misattributions, misconceptions, and misunderstandings surrounding randomness are so great, we could use all the words in the dictionary beginning with “mis” and still fall short of fully defining the issue. Moreover, in daily life the mistaken conclusions we reach because of misinterpretation of random events are harder to spot and almost always missed. Outside of casinos, helpful columnists like myself can’t use clear-cut easy to understand examples like Roulette, where you get paid 36 to 1 on an event with a frequency of 1 in 38 to define and explain the error. Casino games provide the easy to prove part of this problem, they are but a tiny tip of a much larger unnoticed iceberg.

Why are we so bad at this? The answer is quite simple. They say that the first step to fixing any problem is admitting that you have one. As a society, we have not only failed to admit we have a problem, we have scarcely begun to acknowledge that there is one and we aren’t looking for it. To take some of the onus off our backs, there are clear reasons for this, and they don’t require malfeasance or negligence to function.

By far the biggest factor to our failure in this regard is that we have been attempting to climb an unclimbable mountain—we simply missed the signs and didn’t get the memo. You may wish to consider this article to be:

“the memo”.

The Memo
Perhaps the most memorable quote from the entire Star Wars franchise was when Yoda said to Luke, “Do or do not, there is no try.” Had our adorable green diminutive Jedi Master been discussing the quantification of randomness he might have given slightly different advice:

“Do not, or attempt to try, there is no do.”​

There are many cognitive distortions, which make accurate in-head evaluation of random events impossible for everyone. It is not a mental deviation to which some rare, gifted individuals are immune. It is a ubiquitous human attribute we all share. People who dispassionately follow the maths may appear to have limited immunity; even they do not. What they have is a workaround (more on this later).

Imagine you had a flat fair two-sided coin. Logic tells us that each side should come up exactly half the time (50/50). Now imagine that instead of looking to see how many sides it has, and scientifically verifying that it was flat and weighted evenly, you simply flipped it 10,000 times and recorded the results to ascertain the probability of each side appearing. Do we think that method of investigation would render a more accurate result? I could list the probability of getting precisely (5,000 heads) & (5,000 tails) in a 10,000-coin-flip trial. If I did type it out the rest of this article would be nothing more than a decimal point followed by a whole bunch of “0”. Even a fair coin will NOT come up heads and tails exactly 50/50 if you are silly enough to flip it—and yet we do similar things—and plan our lives around the tally.

Recording results and trying to deduce the probabilities that generated them, does not work (even with perfect record keeping). However, the vast bulk of our society gambles on bad bets daily. They make their life decisions on their memory of success and failure and on assessments of the random elements involved—often with no records. Imagine the above example of attempting to deduce probabilities from 10,000-coin flips if you weren’t writing them down.

Let’s take another example of a casino game. To accurately assess the fairness of video poker, one would need to accurately remember all the hands they had ever been dealt. They would need to remember all the cards they had ever held, and all the results they had ever gotten to their draws...but wait that's not all. One would also have to remember each combination with equal weight. This means that regardless of whether they had been dealt a pat Royal Flush in hearts, or the 2♠ 4♣ 6♥ 8♠ 10♦, neither could stand out more in their minds than the other. After all, these hands have an equal frequency of occurrence. How much these five cards pay is also irrelevant to the calculation, though good luck convincing your brain of this fact.

Unfortunately, for the cause of clear thought, how much those equally probable hands pay in cash is not so irrelevant to the human mind. You will remember a dealt Royal in Hearts and the money you got paid for it. Good luck remembering when you got dealt a 2♠ 4♣ 6♥ 8♠ 10♦, off-suit, and got paid zilch.

In some interesting studies, researchers showed participants truly random number sequences, along with simulated random number sequences (sequences made by people) and discovered a 28% correlation-bias towards believing that the truly random numbers were non-random. Conversely, people thought the fake human-generated ones were truly random. The result of the study determined that if left to their own devices, 78% of the time, the subjects could not spot true randomness, even when it randomly hit them in the face. Most favored the non-random number sequences over the real ones.

In the book, “The Drunkard's Walk—How Randomness Rules Our Lives” by Leonard Mlodinow there was a science study referenced where they compared the ability of chickens, rats, and humans to identify and account for randomness. Care to guess who won? The chickens came in first, rats close behind, with humans in dead last. The test was simple, you had to press one of two buttons to get a reward. Each button had its own independent random number generator, and though next to each other, they were not connected in any way. The left button was “right” 30% of the time. The right button was correct 70% of the time. The chickens and rats quickly learned that pressing the right button was more likely to reward them. And merrily upon the morrow, they chose to press the right button, much to human sorrow, surcease to other—evermore, only this and nothing more.

It seems the reason humans preformed so poorly in this study is largely because the buttons were next to each other. Most of the participants concluded that the buttons were linked in some way. Out of a hundred test subjects, not one of them gave up on the left button completely. More amazing, even after being told how the test worked, and that the buttons were unconnected, some of the participants disagreed with the scientists which had set up the test. These sure-they-almost-had-it dissenters asked for a little more time, to figure out the pattern they just knew had to be there. Beaten in a contest of cognition skills by rats and chickens. Oh woe is us, quoth the chicken nevermore.

The conclusion is clear: truly random events seem non-random to our pattern seeking minds, and vice versa. Seeing connections is good, but this asset hurts us when we connect the unconnected. We cannot see the forest for the trees because we have no idea what a twree looks like, or how to spell it.

Herein lies the problem: We lack the mental capability to identify or quantify randomness in our heads. We only remember our successes and standout failures. The boring monotonous mundane trials are lost to us like tears in the rain. Unless we want to keeping losing out to birds and rodents, we need to better grasp those things for which success is not an option and stop trying to do them. There are some huge hurdles in our way.

This human failing isn’t in question. The question is why do so many people rely on inaccurate methods of decision making when they have no chance of success? The short answer was, “no one told them it was impossible.” The longer answer is the rest of this article.

There are three main topics you’ll need to understand to grasp the full depth of this problem and how it effects all aspects of our lives in and out of casinos. They are:

1. Criteria for Success and Failure

2. Overuse of Heuristics (mental shortcuts used in decision making)

3. Cognitive Biases (especially attentional bias)

Crossing the Rubicon—How We Judge Success—or—(Where’s the Finish Line???)
The first speedbump we need to get over is defining our criteria for failure and success, when it comes to judging any decision involving random chance. It might be a little harder than you expect. Rather than a speedbump, it might be another even higher unclimbable mountain—in no small part, because no one attempts to climb it.

We all know who wins a race, the person that crosses the finish line first. Now picture a race with no defined direction to run, and the “winner” was the participant that happened to wander over an unremarkable patch of ground. We’d give them a medal, and by the rules they would have won, but were they really the best runner? I think we can agree that blindly stumbling over an unmarked finish line doesn’t make you the best runner or best anything. The bizarre thing is that we use exactly this type of reckoning to hand out bonuses, raises, accolades, and pats on the back—especially for ourselves.

Ever guessed about anything? If you have, the reason you had to “guess” was undoubtedly because you weren’t sure. (Five-hundred people surveyed: Top Answer— “sure people don’t guess”) Did it turn out to be “a good guess”, or did you make “a bad guess”, and by what criteria did you judge it? If you are like most, when it comes to guessing, the major, if not only measure of success by which they are ever judged is their outcome. If one were to make a totally incompetent guess on incomplete and inaccurate information, their guess would still not be considered “bad”, so long as it turned out to be right. This remains true, even if random chance was the lion’s share of determining the result.

It shouldn’t be but guessing correctly is disenfranchised from the method used. Throw the bones, darts at a board, look at some tea leaves, consult the stars, we don’t care; just get it right. Our current paradigm is to scorn losers, and award medals to the victors, even if both parties were doing the exact same thing in the same way with identical skills.

Heading back to casinos for a second, think of picking a slot machine and hitting a jackpot. We’ve already established that accurate in-head assessment of random events is totally impossible. What do we think about folks that use this fatally flawed method of reasoning, and (due to no fault of their own) just happen to have a positive result? I’ll answer this question for you. In a casino, we call them winners, even if they did nothing right. In the wider world, we promote them and put them on the highest of tall pedestals. We idolize them as our great heroes.

Julius Caesar threw some dice and uttered the now famous phrase, “alea iacta est” (The Die Was Cast) before crossing the Rubicon to be immortalized as a great leader. Napoleon spent weeks of subterfuge, planning, and covert research to decide on the best course of action, before rare and impossible to predict weather delivered unto him his Waterloo. One is remembered as a success, the other as a failure. Now ask yourself, in who’s army would you rather serve? Personally, I would not work for a guy that bet my life on the toss of a die!

If we face a question like this in those clear terms, most will agree. Random judgment is not as good as well-thought-out planning. Caveat: we need to know we are being asked this question. We rarely do. We put our faith in lucky successful random-die-rollers far too often because we don’t know or won’t acknowledge that this is what they really are. One study showed conclusively that there were slightly less successful stockbrokers on Wallstreet than would be expected if they had all been flipping coins. These types of people never admit publicly or to themselves, that random chance played any part in their achievements.

One exception, a retired movie exec, with an eight-year run of nothing but successes, did admit he’d picked which shows to greenlight based on which script his cat slept on. Knowing Hollywood, his admission of guilt upset no one and probably got the cat hired as a consultant.

I don’t know anyone that would intentionally work for a company which paid their highest salary to the employee that rolled the most “6’s” in ten rolls of a die, totally ignoring the quality of their work. I know far too many people that do exactly this, they simply choose to deny that alea iacta est.

If we judged people on their method and due diligence, rather than their results, we could fix it. It’s not likely to happen. How people make their decisions is not generally available data, so we will continue to judge them based on success and failure, ignoring their decision-making process entirely—and the prognosticating cat on their desk, snoring softly on their next big hit.

It is not possible to judge other people on their decision-making process, unless they are kind enough to expressly tell us that it is somnambulistic-feline powered, but what about us? Could we at least be more honest with ourselves about how we make decisions? Cognitive scientists would render a resounding “no-way”. As bad as we are at picking our company executives and war leaders, based often on dumb luck—it is but a pale shadow of the far greater problem; how we judge ourselves. Currently, our society is leaning so far towards valuing results over method, we aren’t just climbing an unclimbable mountain, we’ve added a large boulder and joined Sisyphus.

Until we admit this failing in our culture, whatever lies beyond this first speedbump in the road to clear thought is unattainable. We will keep taking bad bets, and our metal energy will be too busy convincing ourselves they were good bets to allow room for improvement. Decisions cannot by judged by their outcomes, yet it is the only method we use.

We could take a first step by changing the language of success. We could alter the meaning of the phrase, “bad decision” from “something which ended up badly” to the more efficacious “failure to take the correct and appropriate steps”. The meaning of “good guess” would change to, “Getting as much information as possible before making a decision” and stop meaning, “lucky”. When making a mistake, stays a mistake, even when things end up in our favor—rational thought would be within our grasp.

If you did just make a “good guess” (new better definition) then you weren’t using a heuristic. Heuristics are the fast and dirty metal shortcuts we use to make decisions when we have incomplete information. Overreliance on heuristics is a major factor in our troubles with the comprehension of randomness and brings us to our next topic.


A Shortcut to Heuristics
Cognitive biases and heuristics are not insanities, nor are they unusual, aberrant, or in any way exceptional. They are a description of how all minds work. The human mind (the animal mind as well) cannot always (or ever) make decisions with perfect and complete information. Conventional thought therefore uses heuristics (short-cuts) to reach decisions when perfect information is not available. No one would fault you if you classified that as, “most of the time”. Heuristics are fast and useful, but they are also inaccurate.

Heuristics are typically an advantage. We wouldn’t be here without them. There are some uncommon exceptions that bear mention. Total reliance on heuristics, even when more complete information is available, can lead to cognitive distortion. Only when an individual is completely unaware and unwilling to accept that they have made a snap decision based on imperfect information, when better and more complete information was readily available, does the field of psychology step in and say, “Hey, you might have a problem”. Using a shortcut is fine. Taking a shortcut when the long way was quicker and safer is imprudent. Denying emphatically that you took the inferior path, starts to become an issue.

Example: If you wished to buy a car in under a lifetime, you would not look at (and test drive) every car for sale in the entire world. You would look at the newspaper, pick out a few that fit your criteria, and make your purchase, knowing full well that you were employing a time saving shortcut (heuristic). Only if you insisted that buying a car after looking at four of them, was equally accurate to looking at thousands of them would your biased application of a common useful heuristic be upgraded to “a problem”.

The two methods of acquiring a car are not equally yoked. The see-four-and-buy method is preferable, even though it would render a less informed result. Big world, too many cars—we get that. Test driving a few cars vs. every car in the world is clearly the better plan. One only needs to understand and accept why it is better—which isn’t—getting the best car in the whole wide world.

We are often forced to use heuristics in lieu of perfect information. However, if random elements are present, shortcuts cannot be used with even a modicum of accuracy. It’s hubris to try.

Example: Doctors who were trained to ignore personal experience and anecdotal evidence, had over an 80% failure rate when asked to guess which medications they’d proscribed to patients rendered the most positive outcomes. The reason doctors did so poorly, when forced to guess, has a lot to do with our next topic. All it took for a licensed medical practitioner to favor one drug over another, was a single standout incident, like a patient sending a thank-you-letter for their speedy recovery, to get them to undervalue all the other patients receiving the same medication which saw no improvement. One bad reaction from a single patient was all that was required for a medication to be thought of poorly, even if its overall performance was better. This is known as attentional bias.

The Road Not Taken (Because it was Ignored)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. And sorry I could not travel both, walked into a tree.​

Perhaps the most problematic bias that alters perceptions and renders our assessment of random events, irrational at best, is attentional bias. If left unchecked attentional bias will ride roughshod through what's left of our rational thought, leaving confirmation bias and the illusion of control in its wake. The Wikipedia example of attentional bias is when one states emphatically that God answered their prayers. One in four people feel that god answers prayers, though this percentage remains consistent across all religions, regardless of which god is prayed to. Food for thought, but off topic. Perhaps god does answer prayers, I’ll make no comment about it here. What we are discussing is how would one go about proving it.

The reason prayer is such a good example of attentional bias is that praying and getting what you prayed for grabs all your attention. Forgotten are the times one prayed without effect or got something desired without praying.

There are four (+1: the base rate occurrence of whatever was asked for) avenues of information that are imperative to make a rational and accurate assessment of whether God was really the source of one's wish fulfillment. If we assign “P” for praying and “G” for getting what you asked for, and use plus and minus symbols to signify their presence or absence we get:

+P +G = Praying and getting

+P -G = Praying, but not getting

-P +G = Not praying, getting anyway

-P -G = Not praying, and not getting (most common)

In the biased (normal) mind, only option #1 is given attention. Options 2-4 are completely overlooked, or intentionally disregarded. What we are left with is unfounded confirmation in the thinker’s head.

The only way to prove scientifically that prayer was corelated to the result would be to go back in time, refrain from praying, and see if that resulted in failure to get what was asked for in the other timeline. That's one way to say, “It's not possible.” The believer says, “I prayed, I got. Prayer Answered!” 75% of the information needed to make an informed decision is not present and will never be available. People seem very happy to declare the puzzle completed and solved, with only 25% of the pieces present. Having your prayers answered, is of course, only one representational example indicative of any situation where we attribute effect to a cause that empowers us.

Where attention bias rear’s its ugly head in casinos, and especially video poker, is when people make a certain play and get the hand they wanted on the draw. Humorously, this may also involve some “praying”. They attribute their hold to achieving the result. The road not taken is neither considered nor available. It wasn’t taken. We are left only with their destination, and their biased belief that it was their choice of path that got them there. This is obviously related to our tendency to judge things by their outcomes, and while detrimental all by itself, it is magnified exponentially by our attention to wins and forgetfulness of losses.

Whenever one reaches a fork in the road and turns left or right, the only way to be sure they have taken the best path is to take both ways and compare results. As this is impossible, outside of laboratory triple blind studies with control groups, we never know what vistas the road not taken would have shown us.

I’m reminded of the sci-fi quote, “When you have reached the end of the road, then you can decide whether to go to the left or to the right, to fire or to water. If you make those decisions before you have even set foot upon the road, it will take you nowhere. - Except to a bad end.” (~Galen, Crusade)

It’s good advice, except for the reality that in real life, we go left or right, and spend the rest of our lives convincing ourselves (and others) it was the best way, and we are the better person for having chosen it.

Climbing Mount Everest Naked in the Snow (the workaround)

Everest Climber to Fan: Do not try this at home! Fan to Climber: No worries, I don’t have a 29,000 ft dung covered mountain at my house. ~Anon​

You were wondering where the article and subheading title came from? It turns out, climbing Mount Everest naked in the snow and accurately making decisions on random events which you quantified in your head, are about on par in impossibility. Their difficulty level diverges only in how they are perceived. People don't oft try to climb the highest mountain on Earth in the buff. Everyone tries to make in-head judgments about events containing random elements daily, with roughly an equal chance of success. I don’t know anyone that would attempt a task they were told and conclusively shown was impossible. It really irks me that this sort of instruction is not given to our children. What is and is not possible, and what types of mental analysis are doomed to fail, should be part of the standard curriculum. It would save lives.

How then do we quantify randomness in our heads, or summit the roof of the world in our full Monty???

Simple Answer: Don’t let the Chickens Win! We Don't! It is impossible! Quit trying.​

We all get to stay warm at home and keep our clothes on. By the time we are done factoring in imperfect memory, selective memory, attention bias, outcome bias, results bias, information bias, and all the other biased biases our only option is to stop trying to do impossible things and try a workaround. There are many things we can do, if we only accept that we need to do them.

To make any kind of accurate assessment of events containing random components, we need as much information as possible, and we need to analyze the data with other than our own judgment. A choice as trivial as the fastest way to work is impossible for our minds to calculate. If even once in a lifetime, we were lucky/un-lucky enough to have had an exceptional result, things would go south quickly. A bad delay that made you late, will entrench itself into your mind like an Alabama tick in summer, as will the time you passed unimpeded through every single light. They are standouts, but they get overvalued in our memories.

If trying to decide which of four similar routes to work was really the fastest, timing each different path and keeping a daily diary for several months would be the first step. Next, using Bayesian theorem, Poisson distribution, or at the very least Pearson's Chi-Squared test to reduce the data to comparable standard-deviations would be step two. Once you knew the expected variation in the sample set, with a few more comparisons using other maths, invented by people whose names are even harder to pronounce than “Poisson”, one might have a chance of rendering the correct answer.

(+ or – [X] for sample-size).

For randomness generated by a computer, such as casino games, the best tool at our disposal is another computer. It takes a thief to catch a thief, and only by fighting fire with fire do we have the best chance for victory. Computers, though complex, use very simple math to function, so it is possible to do the calculations by hand, albeit much slower. I’d recommend going the computer route. It’s possible either way, so long as you don’t try to guess. You want the best definition for, “a good guess”? —turns out it’s: “not guessing”.

The key element to any workaround for our imperfect recollections and biased conclusions is that we don't use our brains to make any judgments. Do the calculations outside of your head, never allowing the pursuit of pointless personal preference to poison your perceptions. (add “P” words to that sentence at your own discretion)

The only way to have limited immunity to human biases is to adopt external workarounds. Don’t try to climb Mt. Everest in the snow sans kit. Accept that it is impossible, and lazily lounge on the beaches of Tahiti, margarita in hand, letting math do all the heavy lifting. We need to use probability to guide our decisions in every possible situation where it is feasible to do so. We need to be more honest with ourselves about what those situations are and most importantly, we need to stop taking credit when our bad decisions fail to fail.

They say that success is about 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Of course, in the world of science, success is 10% inspiration, 10% perspiration, and 80% flagellation—making sure the other 20% wasn’t biased by flawed perceptions. We all need to take a page out of the scientific method. This is one job best outsourced (not to China) to pure provable mathematics. Put your faith in unbiased dispassionate probability math. It is far more likely to be telling you the truth than your own brain.

The opening quote of this article was, “There is no shame in failure at impossible tasks, only in attempting them.” In truth there is no shame in attempting them, so long as you didn’t know they were impossible. Well, now you do. This was the memo…

I have adopted this policy: Doubt all that I suspect, and dismiss all of which I am sure.​

The only way to win, is not to play the game ~War Games​

~Frank Kneeland 2009 (Edited: 2021)

P.S.: Why am I concerned the only emails I’ll be getting on this article will be questions on which breeds of cat are the most prescient?

References & Further Reading:
Best Possible Odds by Dr. Willliam G. McCown & Linda L. Chamberlain

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Randomness (Harvard University Press, 1998) by Deborah J. Bennett

Can You Tell Random and Non-Random Apart? ~Paul May

The Book of N( )THING by John d. Barrow (Never was so much said about so little so well)

What the Numbers Say: A Field Guide to Mastering Our Numerical World by Derrick Niederman

Doctors Don’t Know Best National Health Institute article on Cognitive Distortions in the medical field.

Epilogue:

When asked about their victory over humans, one chicken had this to say...

With brains so large and always thinking,
​

You’d think there’d be at least an inkling,
​

Of better thought than had with drink—
​

Or the peckings of a bird.
​

Sadly though, with all your guessing,
​

Long laments and pointless musings,
​

The more you think,
​

The more it wends absurd.
​

​

Regardless of your righteous rath,
​

Or countless years of pointless trying,
​

Many of you end up crying,
​

Since no one listens to the math—
​

They never will, and never have before.
​

Instead, they simply guess, only this and nothing more.
​

Quoth the Chicken nevermore…
​

​

~FK 2021
​

​

(Several Chickens are currently unaccounted for)
​

​

The rats were not available for comment​

 

We ate the chickens and poisoned the rats and play on, good fortune to all.