FYI: My country club locker room is a fascinating 19th hole observatory where human nature and intelligence
often come into conflict. Almost all of my golfing buddies are risk takers by nature and many of them are
gamblers – not just in the card room but also in the casinos in Las Vegas. Having spent some time in Sin
City myself in my early 20s as one of the first blackjack counters, I was, and still am, most familiar with odds
and the impossibility of beating the “House” in any game other than blackjack over a long period of time.
Still, this commonsensical conclusion is not so obvious to many of my friends, who first of all, claim that they
usually “break even” on any particular weekend jaunt, and secondly, suggest that they can win by using
various betting “systems” that somehow allow them to claw back losses or stabilize winnings. An absurd
example of this would be to triple your bet if you’ve lost 3 times in a row, and if you lose that, to quadruple
your bet and so on. All of these illusions are derivatives of the so-called Martingale System, which claims that
it is mathematically impossible to lose, given enough money and the willingness of the casino to take the
increasing bet. The latter conditions, however, are where reality meets the road. A string of 4, 5 or perhaps 3
Regards,
Ted
https://17eb94422c7de298ec1b-8601c126654e9663374c173ae837a562.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/Documents/umbrella/bill gross/Bill Gross Investment Outlook_October 2016.pdf 
