gambler's ruin


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gambler's ruin

[¦gam·blərz ′rü·ən]
(statistics)
A game of chance which can be considered to be a series of Bernoulli trials at which each player wins a specified sum of money for every success and loses another sum for every failure; play goes on until the initial capital is lost and the player is ruined.
References in periodicals archive ?
Then he develops enough machinery to allow students to solve some problems and analyze card games and lotteries, and before anyone notices they have stumbled into the non-trivial questions, they are working out the gambler's ruin problem.
Knowing the odds; an introduction to probability
Tempting the gambler's ruin through leveraged betting, they eventually lost.
The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It
But I would say the gambler's ruin problem is the most interesting topic to readers, as it presents the cases when the player will be ruined in a repeated game with different winning probabilities.
The Mathematics of Games and Gambling (2nd edition)
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