Even the most knowledgeable and disciplined exponent of any particular game of chance is likely to fall prey to emotion from time to time. Rather than sticking to safe bets, it’s tempting to follow a hunch, or put too much confidence in a “hot streak.” The really smart folks, however, know that in the long run the laws of probability rule. They always know the percentages, and they always play accordingly.

It’s the same with online coupons. You might see a very attractive offer of a generous percentage savings, alongside an offer that saves you only a buck or two. Be careful. You may be comparing apples to oranges. Before you jump on the offer that appeals to your gut instinct, be sure to take a look at the actual percentages involved.

For example, let’s take a look at several offers from the same online storefront. “Offer A” gets you 10% off any order. “Offer B” gets you $5 off an order of $30 or more. “Offer C” gets you a product that normally sells for $10.69 at a discounted price of $7.49 (a savings of $3.20). How do you decide which offer to choose?

Well, first of all, let’s say you’re not interested in the product available through Offer C. We’ll come back to it in a moment. First let’s do a comparison between Offers A and B.

• If you’re order is under $30, you’ll have to use Offer A, since B isn’t available to you.
• If your order is exactly $30, ten percent would be only $3, so if you choose Offer A, you’re cheating yourself out of an additional $2 you’d get with Offer B.
• At $40 total, B is still the better choice, saving you 5 bucks rather than the 4 you’d save with A.
• By the time your total is $50, either A or B gets you the same $5 discount. Obviously, anything over $50 you’d be smart to use Offer A, since it gets you more than the $5 available with B at that point. Got it?

Now let’s throw Offer C into the mix. If you’re planning to buy 4 of whatever product is available under C, your total before the discount will be $42.76, so you want to use Offer B, yes? WRONG!

Your savings using Offer B would be $5. Using Offer A, it would be $4.27 (10%). But Offer C saves you a whopping $12.80! That’s more than twice what Offer B saves you and almost three times as much as Offer A.

See why you have to play the percentages?

It pays to take a little bit of time to compare the various offers so you’ll know which one to select. In our example above, you could either convert everything to dollar savings as we did for the comparison, or you could convert it all to percentages. So Offer A always saves you 10%. Offer B saves you 16.6% on an order of $30 (decreasing to 10% on an order of $50). Offer C saves you almost 30% on a particular item.

You might have to do a little research to find out what the usual price of an item is in order to determine the amount or percentage of savings if it’s not mentioned in the offer, but the extra effort is often worth it.

By the way, if the offers given for example seem familiar to you it may be because they are among the discounts available right here from  for products and services at GoDaddy.com.

Now, if somebody could remind me that just because the last guy hit on red fifteen times in a row, that doesn't mean i should put my money on black. Hoo boy…