Gambling casinos are there to make money, so in almost every instance, the games you can bet on will, in the long run, make money for the casino. However, to make people gamble, it is to the casino’s advantage to make the bets appear to be "fair bets," or even advantageous to the gambler. Similarly, "sucker bets" are propositions that look advantageous to one person but are really biased in favor of the other. We’ll examine what is meant by a fair or biased bet and look in detail at some casino games and sucker bets. Various problems can be extracted from this article that will make excellent Math Circle explorations for students or teachers.

Combinatorics
Probability and Statistics

Problem Sets

MP1 - Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
MP2 - Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
MP3 - Construct viable arguments and critique others' reasoning.
MP4 - Model with mathematics.
MP6 - Attend to precision.
MP7 - Look for and make use of structure.