It’s a gift to born losers. Researchers have demonstrated that two games of chance, each guaranteed to give a player a predominance of losses in the long term, can add up to a winning outcome if the player alternates randomly between the two games.
This striking new result in game theory is now called Parrondo’s paradox, after its discoverer, Juan M.R. Parrondo, a physicist at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain (see http://seneca.fis.ucm.es/parr/GAMES/inbrief.html).