I spent last weekend in British Columbia at a friend’s wedding.  As part of an impromptu mini bachelor party, or “stag” as Canadians call it, we ended up in an unremarkable casino in a Vancouver suburb wearing black and purple velvet top hats we bought on clearance at Wal-Mart.  After my experience I’m ready to make the conclusive statement that Canadian casinos are similar to American casinos in that they are generally filled with pathetic degenerates and people who seem too old to be anywhere alone, but are different in the sense that people tell you their weight in killograms.

The casino was exceedingly small and extremely crowded so our gang descended upon the “Casino War” tables, which were the only ones with open seats.  The reason there were open seats is that Casino War, for those who have never played, is that it is like blackjack, only it could be played effectively by anyone, including pets, or people in a persistent vegetative state.  It consists of the dealer giving you one card, and then giving herself one card, and seeing whether hers is higher than yours.  Sometimes, you and the dealer have the same card, which means each of you gets one more card, where you see which one is higher. The last time I played War was in Mrs. Barrett’s second grade class and if not for the end of the school year I suspect my game might still be taking place.  The simple reason for this is that the odds of victory as between the two combatants are equal[1]. 

If the odds are 50/50, one might wonder how the casino plans to make any money.  If one wondered this, and they’d come with us to the Cascade Casino, they would have the answer, and would also be reminded of one similarity between degenerates of all nativities, which is that they all love to explain how they have been so successful.  Just as we began wondering about the intricacies of the game we were blessed by the presence of a War expert sitting next to us in the person of a forty-something gentleman wearing a sweat suit bearing the word “Canada” on both the pants and shirt.  Fortunately for us, he had come to the casino alone, on a Friday night, so had ample time to impart his wisdom upon us about odds of Casino War, about which he knew a great deal and which he would soon know a great deal more given that he had “a guy running a computer model on it”. 

I only spent an hour or so absorbing his wisdom about the game but from what I could gather his philosophy was largely based on the theory that the popular thinking that the odds of isolated events with even probabilities such a flipping a coin would result in a 50/50 outcome each and every time is flawed because it fails to account for the “global aspect of things”, which means that the coin will be driven to even out to a 50/50 spread, which means that each time you lose, the next time your odds of winning are increased.  Using this as a foundation, our neighbor explained that the zenith of Casino war could be reached only when a person lost 9 times in a row, and then “bet the maximum” because he was assured of a victory on the 10^th.

When we challenged his reasoning, he informed us that we weren’t “thinking globally” and told my friend about a time that the plan would have worked perfectly after five straight losses, but for the fact that he “blinked” and didn’t put down the $155 needed to perfectly play the strategy because he didn’t have $155, which lead him to admit the second problem with his plan, which was that one “could run out of money by losing a lot in the beginning” which seems like a silly problem for a guy whose strategy requires 9-straight losses but which accurately states the general challenge with gambling.

My strategy was to bet a lot on hands where I had a “great feeling”.  Sometimes, when I had a “really great feeling” I also bet money on the “tie” position, which paid 10-1 for the 1 in 13 chance that you and the dealer drew the same card.  Fortunately, my “really great feelings” were correct an obnoxious 60% of the time.  Admittedly, my strategy is flawed from a global perspective but since I was able to pocket $140 in profit in 25 hands it could catch on.  Don’t run out and try it but I’ll let you know more in a couple of weeks when my guy gets back to me about the model he’s running.