Peter webb?

[Taker]

Hi all,

I just wanted to know your opinions about Peter Webb and his probability theory. 
He is a successful gambler but is he right about everything?

[Kelly]

He sounds okay to me:


A chance event is uninfluenced by the events which have gone before. If a true die has not shown 6 for 30 throws, the probability of a 6 is still 1/6 on the 31st throw. One wonders if this simple idea offends some human instinct, because it is not difficult to find gambling experts who will agree with all the above remarks, and will express them themselves in books and articles, only to advocate elsewhere the principle of 'stepping in when a corrective is due'.

It is interesting that despite significant statistical evidence and proof of all of the above people will go to extreme lengths to fulfill there belief in the fact that a corrective is due. The number 53 in an Italian lottery had failed to appear for some time and this lead to an obsession with the public to bet ever larger amounts on the number. People staked so much on this corrective that the failure of the number 53 to occur for two years was blamed for several deaths and bankruptcies. It seems that a large number of human minds are just simply unable to cope with the often seemingly contradictory laws of probability. If only they had listened to their maths teacher. The full story is publish here.

An understanding of the law of the large numbers leads to a realisation that what appear to be fantastic improbabilities are not remarkable at all but, merely to be expected.

[2nd12forlife]

Some people including myself do not agree with this in terms of roulette because of the physics of the wheel, but it would be opposite, where as lets say 8 came out more than any number, you would assume 8 has a higher probability to land again.  Ive noticed that many people, esecially new members on here immediately and somewhat angrily say that past spins dont matter, when they havent even looked into the possible physics side of it, which there is much literature on here to look up.

[2nd12forlife]

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