TIL that in the early days of Fed-Ex, there was one time the company couldn't afford the fuel bill for their planes, so the founder took the company's last $5,000 and went to Las Vegas and won $27,000
I’ve heard this story a few times and supposedly it happened over a weekend but yeah either the guy was a very good card counter and played a ton or recklessly bet it on roulette and got insanely lucky if this is true.
Seems so absurd to me that there is an officially sanctioned game in the gambling scene that can be gamed by a skilled player to win, and they just blatantly ban doing that, and yet people still play it. Not the game
is banned mind you, the winning through logic part. Cant have anyone make bank but, well, the bank.
To illustrate, let's play a game. We each put in a dollar, and whoever wins a coin flip gets the two dollars. Completely fair, even odds, right? We'll play until one of us decides to stop or someone runs out of money.
I'll start with $1000 and you start with $10. Let's see how it turns out.
If it helps, picture a graph where the bottom axis is number of coin flips and the Y axis is the amount each player is up or down in total. Each flip can move the graph by $1, up or down randomly. So it's going to bounce a little, because it's random. Some bounces will be bigger than others.
The house can offer you completely fair odds and still take your money just fine.