In this article we are going to show how mathematics and numbers are closely linked to gambling and casino table games in general.
Many scientists and mathematicians have dedicated part of their studies to explain the inner mechanisms of such games and how mathematics is able to foresee and help to win a bet or a pot.

Already on 1663 Girolamo Cardano, a Renaissance learned of Pavia, Italy, keen on table games and gambling, published the treatise “De Ludo Aleae”, about dice game, which started the history of probabilities in gambling. After him, other eminent scientists, masters of probability theories like Pascal, Fermat, Huygens and Bernoulli, have been fascinated by the world of gambling.

Others came over years, who sharpened classic theories into modern theories (Montecarlo method) and axioms (Kolmogorov).

But what may probabilities theories teach you in practice?
Let’s start with a simple example.
Let’s say you are playing at roulette and the ball stops 20/30 consecutive times on the red box. Anyone would say: “Well, it’s time to bet on black!” Wrong! Probability tells you that any spin of the roulette is independent with respect of all the previous spins.

This and many other aspects have to be deeply understood by professional gamblers who play any day with probabilities trying to maximize their return, minimizing the risk.

For sure learning how to properly count your outs and non-outs, and figure out pot odds is a fundamental requirement of poker games, such as Texas Hold’em. Both if you are an experienced player and a novice “The Theory of Poker” by David Sklansky is something you should not miss. In this book Sklansky focuses on the math of poker, how to calculate odds, pot odds, reverse implied pot odds, etc. and psychology and how combine all these factors to make the correct decisions at the poker table.