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Comment by amir734jj | Hacker News Reader

I work at a large financial company in the investment department writing software to analyze public market. Your statement is very wrong. We literally write a bucketing application that makes calculated risks that works almost all the time. From outside yes. It looks like a casino but when you get deeper into it, it's very calculated and the math behind risk calculation can get very complex.

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Not disagreeing with your main point, but you can also make calculated risks at a casino. If you're clever you can even get average positive returns.

I think you mean lucky. Unless you're talking about games where your adversary is other players such as poker rather than the house like blackjack.

I believe that for a while some video poker games like jacks or better had bugs in their pay table that meant with perfect strategy you could make a positive return in the long run, but I'd be very surprised if this is still the case

I assume you haven't heard of "card counting", which is a famous way to beat the house advantage in blackjack. Of course, if they suspect you're doing it, they'll kick you out.

Also many casinos offer special blackjack promotions that mean you don't even need to count cards to win.

I was under the impression that casino's operated with either continuous shuffling, or enough packs of cards to effectively negate the benefits of card counting these days

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