The significance of the word “large” is that there is no guarantee that in a “small” sample, the ball will land on red half the time.
In fact, the law of large numbers only states that if the Roulette table was spun for a large enough number of times, the average number of times the ball would have landed on either red or black would be close to 50% of the total spins. Just like there is no law that bars a coin toss resulting in heads for 10 times on the trot. The gamblers thought that since the probability of the ball landing on red was the same as the probability of the ball landing on black, sooner, rather than later, the ball was sure to land on red.īut there is no rule or law in statistics that either predicts or indeed guarantees that the ball will land on red after a certain number of spins.
They confused the law of large numbers with what is now commonly referred to as the law of averages.
