Are Hot Streaks Real in Gambling?

The myth

You have won five hands in a row and you feel “hot”, so you raise your bets to ride it. Or the table is hot: the shooter keeps making points, so you press your bets. The belief is that a run of wins means more wins are coming.

Streaks happen all the time

Random sequences are full of streaks. Flip a fair coin 100 times and a run of six or more heads or tails in a row is more likely than not. Casino games are no different. Long runs of red at roulette, or several wins in a row at blackjack, are exactly what randomness looks like. In games of pure chance, the cards, dice and wheel do not know what happened before, so a streak tells you nothing about the next result.

What the research says

In 1985, Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky studied basketball shooting and concluded that the “hot hand” was largely a misperception: people saw streaks in data that looked random. In 2018, Miller and Sanjurjo showed that the original analysis had a subtle statistical bias, and that once it is corrected there is some evidence of a real hot hand in basketball shooting. That makes sense for a sport, where confidence, fatigue and skill can change from one shot to the next.

A roulette wheel or a shuffled shoe has no confidence to gain. Croson and Sundali (2005) studied videotapes of real casino players and found small but significant evidence of both biases: the hot hand (acting as if a win makes the next win likelier) and the gambler’s fallacy (betting that a streak on the wheel must end). Both are reactions to streaks that, in a game of chance, carry no information.

Why it matters

Raising your bets during a “hot” run doesn’t change the house edge, but it does mean more money is exposed to it. Our betting system tester shows that changing bet sizes based on wins and losses leaves the return per dollar wagered where it was. Decide your bet size before you play, and keep it there. See bankroll management.