We went to Los Vegas. Los Vegas is a place where people gamble. Gambling is betting money on a chance of something happening. If you win you get your money back plus some more. If you lose you lose all your money. In my maths class at school we are doing probability. So we decided to do some probably in Vegas. Kids can't gamble but I had fun working out some of the probabilities of winning the games.
For my maths we assumed that the machines were fair. But there's a saying in Vegas that says "The House Always Wins." Which means the casino always wins. The casino is place with lots of gambling machines. The machines are set to return slightly less to the players. Sometimes you can see the percentage written on side of the machine and it's always less than 100%.
First I did the Monopoly Dice...
Then I worked out this Golden Phoenix Machine...
There were lots of spinning wheels in Vegas....
If if i spun this wheel what is the chance I will get yellow
total number 23
number of yellow 4
fraction 4/23
This is a very popular game called Roulette. They put a ball in a spinning wheel and see where the ball lands when the wheel stops spinning. Before it stops spinning you can put your tokens on a number, or a colour or a line of numbers. If you line/colour/number comes up on the wheel you get money.
The lower the probablility of getting a number the more money you make. For example if you bet on black/red or even/odd numbers the payout is 2 to 1. So if you bet $1 on red and red comes up you get $2 back.
If you look at the wheel there are the numbers 1 to 36 which are black and red. Also a zero and a double zero which are green.
So you might think the probability of it being red would be 1/2 or 50% but because of the two zeros it's slightly less - 9/19. I worked out on a calculator that it's 47.4%.
That means that chance of you winning is 47.4 % and the chance of you losing (so the house wins is 52.6%). Can you see why the house always wins?!?!
If you just choose one number there's much less chance it will come up. One number pays out 35 to 1. So if you picked the number 9 and bet $1 and it came up you would get $35. The chance of the number 9 coming up is 1/38 or 2.6%. When lots and lots of people play over time the house has higher probability of winning than the players.
I got a little carried away with doing probability in Vegas!
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