Betting News

What is Gambler’s Fallacy

author: andrew submitted: 29 July 2019

Betting and numbers have a long story together. The Law of Large Numbers was established in the 17th century by Jacob Bernoulli. The law states that the bigger the sample of the events, the better it will describe the real probability of it happening. The whole theory has been a huge struggle for punters for over 400 years that it’s got the name of Gambler’s Fallacy.

To make the whole thing look really simple, let’s use the coin toss example. It is not a secret that the chances of getting tails or heads are equal. Bernoulli found that as the number of tosses gets bigger, the probability of getting either side come closer to 50%, moreover the difference between the number of tails and head gets bigger as well.

That is that last part that gets people confused. It got so popular and common among gamblers that it even got itself its own name - Gambler’s Fallacy. If, for example, it happened that the coin’s landed tails up 10 times in a row, the most common prediction would be that the heads will land next. Such a statement by default is incorrect, due to the fact that coin has no memory of its landings and the possibility of each side facing up is 50%.

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