A random journey through the math of gambling

Abstract

The laws of chance are often subtle and deceptive. This is why games of chance work. People are convinced that they obey seemingly intuitive laws, while the underlying mathematical structure reveals a different and more complex reality. This article is a brief and rigorous journey through the implications that the mathematical laws governing stochastic processes have on gambling. It addresses a specific process, the random walk, and analyze some instances of fair and unfair games by highlighting the fallacy of many of our intuitions and beliefs. The paper gradually moves from the analysis of the random walk properties to a comprehensive description of the ruin problem. The introduction of the idea of transient and persistent states concludes the discussion. Much emphasis is placed on concrete examples and on the numerical values, in particular of the involved probabilities, and the interpretation of the results is always more central than the demonstrative technical details, which are nevertheless available to the reader.