All or Nothing

Part 3 of our back-to-back challenges in Goa

Oliver Halpern challenged us to “invest three days’ living expenses on a visit to a casino. Whatever you leave with is your budget for the following three days”.

I think my brother set us this challenge because he wanted to see how we would live on either a much larger or smaller budget. I expect he had visions of us sleeping in doorways and busking for our supper, or dining on curried caviar while getting an eight hand massage. I think that is what Natalie wanted too. I, however, had other plans.

Goa, is one of the only parts of India that allows gambling. In other areas, it is very much frowned open, we even got told off by a waiter for playing Rummi in a Dunkin’ Donuts.

Earlier that week we scoped out the casino and learnt that they were doing a very interesting promotion to lure unwitting pundits into their lair, the “Indulgent package”. It cost 10,000 rupees and you get 22,000 rupees in Casino chips. It also entitled us to free food, drinks and entertainment. In effect, we were going to have a free night out on the house and leave with more cash than we started with. There has to be a catch, right?

The chips they give you are called OTP chips, which stands for One Time Play. You can’t just go straight to the cashier and ask them to be turned back into cash, you have to actually play with them. When you bet a normal chip, if you win, you keep your bet as well as your payout. With an OTP chip, if you win you keep the payout, but you have to give the croupier your chip, hence: one time play. If you were playing a fair game with 50% odds, you would expect to convert half the chips to cash thus ended up with 11,000 rupees. Sadly, casinos aren’t really into fair games, but the odds are still in favour of you finishing with more than the 10,000 rupee entrance fee. I’ll go through the mathsy bit at the end for the small proportion of Jonny-minded oddballs who get a kick out that sort of thing.

Our chosen game was roulette, since it gave the best odds. In essence, if the ball landed on red, we converted an OTP chip to a real cash chip and if it landed on black, we ordered another gin and tonic and wished a bit harder next time. You might think this is a game of zero skill, yet our fellow gamblers were carefully scrutinizing the previous results in search of patterns. They would put down a smorgasbord of bets across the numbers and then make panicked last-second changes. At one point, Natalie was even advised by a croupier to “analyse” the hot and cold numbers so she could make a better bet. I don’t think he would have believed that our mathematically sound system was any better than superstitious guesswork.

Yes, dear reader, we did get rather tiddly and we also managed to leave 4000 rupees (£43.50) up. Feeling rather satisfied with ourselves, we left the casino but, at the door, the fatalistic receptionist informed us that we could come back and get the same package tomorrow – in fact we could get 5 of them each! We probably should have let the matter rest there, but my pupils had been replaced with rupee symbols.

So Oliver, please forgive me, but I decided to go a little off-piste with this challenge. I thought it would be ‘fun’ to come back every day for a week and use the profits to live an ‘indulgent’ lifestyle. Natalie, however, was not so keen. She thought going to the soulless cavern of a casino every day sounded awful, especially since it was our last week together before going separate ways for a month. She relented after I told her I had a life ambition of using a system to beat a casino. This isn’t entirely untrue: I had tried card counting in Vegas when I was younger, but my profits then were mostly from a kind stranger I hitched a lift with, who gave me $500 to spend on this very activity. So I guess that doesn’t count. Nonetheless, I’m still a bit of a rebel inside and I couldn’t pass by a chance to try and beat the system. I was also curious about the curried caviar.

After our first evening, we consistently did much worse than was statistically expected. Some days we made tiny profits, other days we broke even. The staff quickly got to know us and would greet us with: “Good morning Sir Jonathan, 10 packages today?” Our 45 minute ‘commute’ down a busy Indian highway, got old pretty quickly.

I was confident that if we kept going, our luck would even out. I also found a way to optimize the system. The casino days run from 6 am to 6 am. In theory if you are crazy enough, you could get to the casino in time to get two sets of Indulgent packages in one outing. That way, you get loads of ‘time off’ in between visits. Again, Natalie wasn’t the most keen, but eventually consented to waking up at 4 am to give us time to get to the casino and play through our stack of chips. Our first set went pretty badly and we left with a small loss. As did the next set.

As such, we spent our last full day together very sleep deprived and without any budget to treat ourselves.

We even did our laundry in the sink to save a few rupees and certainly did not feel at all indulgent, especially when Natty’s drying knickers were snatched off the tree (probably for lowering the tone of an otherwise lovely resort).

Clearly, enough was enough and so, sounding somewhat like her mother, Natalie said she had “wasted enough bloody time with this challenge already”, so I should write this one up. [Natty: as editor, I just want to mention that I forgave Jonny pretty quickly, especially after he created a resort-bound escape room challenge, proving that the most fun can be achieved without spending any money. I admit I was a moody cow in the morning…but wouldn’t you be too!?]

By coming everyday and getting 10 packages each time, statistically we should have made about £500 profit over the week (go on, read the maths at the end, maths is cool). This would have justified our move to the very fancy Planet Hollywood resort and would have also provided us with many treats. The trouble is that probability can be a real bitch.

We did make 6500 rupees (£70) profit over the whole thing, though it probably took us around 35 hours between us. It depends if you think a £2/hour wage whilst on holiday is worth it.

So does this count as a challenge completion? Perhaps. Not in the original wording but, ultimately, the challenge was about living an alternative lifestyle as a result of a casino. We did that… even if the ‘alternative’ part meant traveling many miles each day and waking up at ridiculous-o-clock. Was the challenge enjoyable? No, we wasted a lot of time in a beautiful part of the world and went way over our budget. However, we tried a thing and stuck to it and we got to stay in a lovely resort, which we did really enjoy. Thank you Natalie for putting up with my whims with a smile on your face (most of the time); and thank you Oliver for giving us an unusual week… albeit one that shall not be repeated.

The Mathsy bit (due to popular demand)

A roulette wheel has 36 numbers along with a zero. Half the non-zero numbers are red, so each bet has an 18/37 (48.6%) chance of paying off

Each package cost 10,000 rupees

This gives you 22,000 rupees in OTP chips

The estimated return will be 220,000 x 18/37 = 10,703 rupees

Therefore, the estimated profit is 703 rupees

Between us we could take out 10 packages, so the estimated daily profit was 7030 rupees (£76.50)

To hedge our bets, we wanted to make as many bets as possible. The OTP chips had a value of 500 rupees each. This means with 10 packages, we had 440 chips.

The roulette was spun about once every 2 minutes. This would mean it would take almost 15 hours to play through every chip. We optimised in a few ways:

1. We played on separate tables. Yes, it was a bit sad
2. Rather than just betting on red, we simultaneously bet on low numbers (1-18) and even numbers during the same spin, to give us three independent ways of winning
3. We drunk green tea (the novelty of free booze quickly wore off, especially when we visited around breakfast time)
4. We bet two chips instead of one. This did increase our risk, perhaps too much

Consequently, we were getting through 12 chips each spin and got our play time down to about 1hr 15mins.

There are some very decent 4* hotels near the casino for less than £40 a night, so if you go as a couple and don’t have our awful luck, you can make this work as a statistically free holiday in Goa. Maybe you’ll get lucky and end up trying the curried caviar.