Rumor Control: GSN Picks Up “Double or Nothing”
I don’t know if any of you recall this show at all, but LMNO Productions piloted something called “Double or Nothing” a while ago. The game is basically one player sells everything they have and bets the cash on a roulette wheel: red or black. You get the point of the show from there. Looks like we have our first GSN pick-up we’ll hear on July 14th’s TCA announcements. According to a New York Craigslist posting, GSN has picked up the show. This still could be for a different network, another pilot, or something meaning the show isn’t officially picked up, but judging by the fact that the email address is gsncasting@yahoo.com, it looks like it is for GSN.
What do you all think of the idea for the show? I wasn’t a big fan of it when it was announced and I’m not a fan to this day. They provided a YouTube of the British version and I’m just not enjoying the entire idea. You’d think there would be some drama, but I feel nothing for a person that is stupid enough to bet everything they have on a roulette wheel. Plus I’m guessing some portion of this show is a lie. I’m doubting they make you sell everything, and if they do they probably give you some appearance fee.
televised roulette spins? An interesting thing to watch from time to time, but I think it’s terrible to have an entire show made out of them
After studying the Bible for a few months, I’ve come to the conclusion that, whether you win big or lose everything you have, gambling is wrong. This is horrible. People are going to be losing everything they own for the sake of GSN’s petty ratings. Even if it is a staged show, that still doesn’t make it right because it promotes this type of gambling.
We may have a new contender for dumbest game show ever.
Roulette? Is he nuts? Thankfully he’s playing on a European (single-zero) wheel, which has a house advantage* of 2.7%, as opposed to the American (double-zero) wheels with their dangerous 5.26% house advantage. Of classic casino table games, roulette is the absolute last I would select. Baccarat makes for a decent choice; the game itself is as simple as flipping a coin, and offers around a 1.06% house advantage. A single hand of blackjack would be much more dramatic, as cards would be flipped one at a time (and certainly in slow motion). Blackjack odds depend both on the rules in play and on the skill of the player; if the player uses optimal strategy, a good portion of the tables in Vegas offer a house advantage of .28%, but most hover around .44%. Craps is almost as good; a basic pass line bet has a 1.41% house advantage. The odds bet in craps (an additional bet that is made after a pass or don’t pass bet that isn’t resolved on the first roll) is technically the best bet in the casino; it pays true odds, which means there is *zero* house percentage on the odds bet. However, you can only do an odds bet after you’ve done a pass or don’t pass bet, meaning an odds bet serves to slash the house advantage. Most Vegas strip casinos offer 3x-4x-5x odds, which drops the house advantage to a mere .37% when full odds are taken. The moral of the story? If you’re invited to a single bet in a casino, drop it on the blackjack table. If they say a round of a game, do craps and find the absolute highest odds bet available. Since I’m on a roll with random casino statistics, I can’t help but tell you the worst game in the casino… Keno. At the hotels on and around the Strip, the house advantage ranges from 28.24% at the Rio to a whopping 34.74% at the Monte Carlo. At that rate, you might as well just stick to the arcade and play Skee-Ball.
KC, there are very few gambling houses around that would accept a bet in excess of $100,000 except from their very regular “whale” ultra-high-roller customers; all you need to do is walk around a Vegas casino floor and look at the maximum bets allowed and you’ll see they are well below that even in very nice casinos. The casinos don’t want you to gamble your life savings away, because if you do that you aren’t going to keep gambling there.
I would say that a show like this promotes gambling about as much as Survivor promotes getting stuck on a desert island; the televised poker tournaments have already done exponentially more promotion for gambling than Double Or Nothing can hope to do. Gambling is a form of entertainment. Simply put, in the long run, the house *always* wins. There’s a reason those hotels on the Las Vegas Strip are so huge ;-) The gambling itself is not wrong; what can make it wrong very quickly is the classic deadly sin of greed, which brings instant retribution in the forms of bigger losses than if you played responsibly.
As for gambling in the bible…
Leviticus 16:8 8 And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the LORD, and the other lot for the scapegoat.
Numbers 26:55 55 Notwithstanding the land shall be divided by lot: according to the names of the tribes of their fathers they shall inherit.
Yup, people drew lots to decide things in the Bible, as much a form of gambling as any other. The lesson here isn’t so much that the Bible is for or against gambling, it’s that the Bible can be used to back up just about any position you can name.
*for those not familiar with gambling terminology, the house advantage is the percentage of a player’s winnings that the house (the casino) can expect to end up with in the long run. Essentially, for every 100 dollars you gamble on a certain game, the house percentage shows how many of those dollars are kept by the casino.
This is show is destined to jump the shark from the time it hits the airwaves. I nominate this show for the biggest bomb in television.
In better news, it seems GSN picked up reruns of O’Hurley’s To Tell The Truth. So there’s some good to temper the bad.