GRAPHICALLY EXPLAINING EXPECTED LOSS ON CHANCE GAMBLING

摘要

Mathematics teachers are uniquely placed to bolster the common sense understanding that the gambling industry makes profits from its players, by teaching the mathematics which explains those losses. A brief adolescent curriculum is proposed. From the collection of participants' game data, we graph outcomes from pure chance games, then compare these with predicted outcomes, to counter the intuitive cognitive distortions readily associated with gambling. Consideration of game structure, and calculation of how game odds differ from payment odds, followed by basic practical introduction to probability distributions, provides material for several mathematics lessons, which may be used from middle high school onwards with varying sophistication. This presentation is a development on those of recent years, introducing material for higher levels, including use of combinatorics to calculate probabilities.