Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
On a success, you lose money at a rate corresponding to the house edge. On a failure, you lose money faster than that.
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More complicated than that, because it is possible to win money in the short term. The house edge in most games is narrow, and so it's not all that unlikely to have an imbalance of results (not even necessarily a run) against the house. Not that there's a skill component here, but if you're using a single die roll to simulate the realistic outcome of playing casino games, if the table only has results for "lose a little" and "lose a lot", it's pretty inaccurate.
As the number of games increases, it becomes less and less likely to vary far from the expected value. This is probably a case where a dice pool mechanic would work better than 3d6-N, because you do want the roll results to get peakier and peakier.
Gambling skill might better be viewed as modifying the house edge than changing the probability of the results in a particular game. That is, you can learn the rules for optimal baccarat play easily, learn which bets are better or worse on a craps table with somewhat more work, get "good" at blackjack with a little effort, get "really good" at blackjack only with even more work, and then progress to the card-counting stage. None of that changes the way the dice or cards fall, but it does change your likelihood of walking away with a profit over a series of trials.