Whether you’re new to online gambling or not, there are practices that you should avoid to ensure a great gaming experience and of course, to avoid problematic gambling behaviors. One of the most common phenomena that would happen in online and offline casinos is the gambler’s fallacy.
If you’ve never heard of this before, it’s defined as an erroneous belief that a random event is more or less going to happen based on the results of previous events.
This could happen if you’re playing games like slots on your favorite USA online casinos. Slot machine games are pure games of chance and there are instances when players think they’re due to win because the game they’ve been playing has been giving them so many losses in the previous rounds.
Getting the whole picture? Don’t worry if you need to learn more about it. Simply keep on reading because we’ll be diving into more details.
Understanding the Gambler’s Fallacy
So, let’s go back to that example and make it more specific. Eamon loves to play slot machine games and he’s been playing one for hours. In the last two hours, he hasn’t experienced any big win, so he keeps on playing because he thinks he’s due for one.
It could be because he simply thinks that slots have a winning or losing streak that is bound to eventually end or he had a similar experience wherein he eventually won a huge amount after a losing streak of two hours. So, Eamon most likely thinks that he just really needs to warm the game for that long to win big.
That is a good example of the gambler’s fallacy. He thinks that a win is due because of the previous outcome of the bets he placed. It’s a fallacy because slots are meant to produce random results.
Therefore, you shouldn’t rely on the previous outcomes of your game. It has nothing to do with the possible results you’ll get. Thinking so may just end up being a problem. You may end up losing a lot before you win.
That’s what happened the very first time that the Gambler’s Fallacy was observed in Las Vegas at the Monte Carlo Casino in 1913.
During this time, a group of people was playing a roulette game. A very rare occurrence happened which was the ball fell on black 26 times in a row.
No one would’ve seen that coming and because this rarely or never really happens, the players always thought that the ball will be landing on red since it’s been landing on black consecutively. By the 27th round, millions of dollars were lost.
This is why the Gambler’s Policy is also often referred to as the Monte Carlo Fallacy. Do know that this fallacy is also not only seen in gambling activities. It’s also applicable to other events. A common one is when flipping a coin. Someone may think they will get the head face up since they’ve gotten the tails five or six times already.
The result of flipping a coin also has nothing to do with the previous results you got. Getting heads repeatedly doesn’t increase the odds of getting tails. The odds will always be 50-50 and that won’t change because there are always only two possible outcomes.
Ways to Avoid the Gambler’s Fallacy
Awareness is an effective way to avoid falling into this loophole of a belief. However, there are debiasing techniques that you can use like emphasizing the independence of the different events by always keeping in mind that the outcomes of these events cannot affect each other.
You might also want to look into why the reasoning behind this fallacy is flawed. For example, when playing slots, consider logical reasoning like the RTP of the game and pay lines. Understand how RTP works and what it means for a game to have high or low percentages.
Does having a high RTP mean that you have better chances of winning big in a short time? You need to be able to understand how slot machines work to avoid thinking that you’re due for a win.
That said, dump the idea of the winning and losing streak. There’s no such thing as warming up the machine to give you a big win. This is also the case and vice versa. Winning on the previous rounds doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re bound to lose soon. Always start fresh every round and forget the previous result. It’s all about luck – at least for this game.
