Gambler's ruin

In statistics, gambler's ruin is the fact that a gambler playing a game with negative expected value will eventually go broke, regardless of his betting system.

The concept was initially stated: A persistent gambler who raises his bet to a fixed fraction of the gambler's bankroll after a win, but does not reduce it after a loss, will eventually and inevitably go broke, even if each bet has a positive expected value.^[1]

Another statement of the concept is that a persistent gambler with finite wealth, playing a fair game (that is, each bet has expected value of zero to both sides) will eventually and inevitably go broke against an opponent with infinite wealth. Such a situation can be modeled by a random walk on the real number line. In that context, it is probable that the gambler will, with virtual certainty, return to his point of origin, which means going broke, and is ruined an infinite number of times if the random walk continues forever. This is a corollary of a general theorem by Christiaan Huygens, which is also known as gambler's ruin. That theorem shows how to compute the probability of each player winning a series of bets that continues until one's entire initial stake is lost, given the initial stakes of the two players and the constant probability of winning. This is the oldest mathematical idea that goes by the name gambler's ruin, but not the first idea to which the name was applied. The term's common usage today is another corollary to Huygens's result.

The concept has specific relevance for gamblers. However it also leads to mathematical theorems with wide application and many related results in probability and statistics. Huygens's result in particular led to important advances in the mathematical theory of probability.