[jsweojtj]

> This bet either has a positive EV or a negative one and if it’s positive it’s going to tend to infinity when repeated.

This is wrong. The bet as described has a positive EV and the time average for a single player tends to zero as the bet is repeated.

> There is one assymmetry at the zero point (assuming people can’t recover from bankruptcy by borrowing another dollar) ...

The result is not due to zero being an absorbing value. In the setup you can go arbitrarily small and come back without issue. The result is the same.

[alkonaut]

For a 50% chance you need odds of over 2.0 (regardless of bet size) to have positive EV.

This is a bet of 0.4.

With 2.0 odds the payout would be 0.8, and here it is 0.9? That looks like odds over 2.0 for 50/50 chance.

So the individual bet is positive EV but the EV of an infinite sequence of such bets is still zero and that’s without the zero limit? There is just nothing in the article that begins to explain how that works. Maybe the video is better

[alkonaut]

If I just stay away from the 0 point (by betting a fraction of the bankroll) then regardless of sequence length the ensemble stats positive. I must simply not be understanding the rules of the simulation.

https://dotnetfiddle.net/5r4ARk