Here One Moment

by Liane Moriarty

It happened in 1913 at the Monte Carlo casino. The roulette table. The ball kept landing on black, causing more and more people to crowd around the table, placing bigger and bigger bets on red because they were convinced the streak was surely about to end. There were twenty-six consecutive blacks before the ball landed on red. People lost millions of francs. The belief that the probability of future events changes based on past events (assuming those events are independent) is known as the Monte Carlo fallacy, or the gambler’s fallacy.

You never know what your last words are going to be, so try to choose them all wisely.