HOW LONG CAN YOU ENJOY BLACKJACK WITH 100 CHIPS?

摘要

Gambling-related research has implications in ¯nancial area understandings and appli-ncations. Researches in this area usually focus on pathology, risk-taking, decision-makingnand addiction. Few works have been done to demonstrate the distribution of the playingntime before players go bankrupt. One problem is that it is di±cult to get statistics in realnworld gambling. In this paper, we do simulations in a Blackjack game with a selectednstrategy. We ¯nd the distribution of playing time before players lose a certain amountnof money is a power law distribution, indicating the existence of very long playing timenplayers. We also ¯nd that double is the most important factor that causes the fat tail.nComparison shows that when removing double, split and three to two payo®, Blackjackngoes back to a random walk. The increase of the number of decks somewhat decreasesnthe average playing time. Our results may have pathologic gambling intervention impli-ncations.