The Angry Statistician

Gambling to optimize your expected bankroll mean is extremely risky, as you wager your entire bankroll for any favorable gamble, making ruin almost inevitable. But what if, instead, we gambled not to maximize the expected bankroll mean, but the expected bankroll median? Let the probability of winning a favorable bet be \(p\), and the net odds be \(b\). That is, if we wager \(1\) unit and win, we get back \(b\) units (in addition to our wager). Assume our betting strategy is to wager some fraction \(f\) of our bankroll, hence \(0 \leq f \leq 1\). By our assumption, our betting strategy is invariant with respect to the actual size of our bankroll, and so if we were to repeat this gamble \(n\) times with the same \(p\) and \(b\), the strategy wouldn't change. It follows we may assume an initial bankroll of size \(1\). Let \( q = 1-p \). Now, after \(n\)  such gambles our bankroll would have a binomial distribution with probability mass function \[ \Pr(k,n,p) = \binom{n}{k} p^k q^{...