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MIT Blackjack Whiz - 'The House Advantage'

Andy Nguyen

Andy Nguyen

Joined
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While recently selling his sports media company Citizen Sports to Yahoo!, Ma is best known as the blackjack whiz who inspired the book Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich and later the blockbuster Hollywood movie 21. The movie, adapted from the book, tells the story of Ma’s days as a member of an elite card-counting blackjack group at MIT that won millions from casinos.

The day of our interview, however, Ma was appearing at the Book Passage in San Francisco’s Ferry Building to promote his new book, The House Advantage: Playing the Odds to Win Big in Business. Essentially an introduction for non-experts to business analytics -- or as he prefers to call it, “using the past to predict the future” -- The House Advantage combines Ma’s love of gambling and sports to explain how statistical analysis can help in making decisions.

Full article here MIT Blackjack Whiz Jeff Ma Publishes | Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics
 
Man, all of these blackjack kids owe all their success to the originator of the strategy and father of all quants--Ed Thorp!

If only the guy was immortal, because I would have loved to meet him =[.
 
Dan, Dan, Dan...you are not reading between the lines.

Ilya has told us the following:
1. Mr. Thorp is not alive ;).
2. He didn't have a chance to meet him, probably because he was doing something else (with him) ;).
3. Mr. Thorp is not immortal (I assume Ilya has a first hand experience with that) ;).

So, adding/multiplying/dividing the three things mentionded yields...



P.S. I hope nobody will take seriously any of things I (or Ilya) have written.
 
Your hope is incorrect. I have alerted the authorities.






Flee the country. Flee it now.
 
It isn't that. It's that I realize I probably won't get the chance to meet him because by the time I'd be someone of any importance, he'd be long retired.
 
I'm wary of gambling analogies for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that a casino game exists within a known universe of probabilities. I suppose as long as the rest of life plods along predictably we can, most of the time, live by a gambler's rules. Just beware of the Black Swan.

Speaking of which, in Taleb's book he has this story about consulting casinos, who were really worried about people cheating. It turns out they spend hundreds of millions to prevent cheating. But for one casino at least, the biggest loss they experienced was when a white tiger attacked a magician.
 
There's no such thing as a black swan in iterated instances of gambling. The entire point is to play lots and lots of small games so that you take the positive expectation and win regularly. And in a casino, the odds are very well defined. What isn't so defined is the cheating dealers.
 
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