By David McDowell.
The huge thrill,” mentioned Ed Thorp, “came from learning things nobody else in the world had ever known.”[i] Edward Oakley Thorp was a 28-yr-outdated Assistant Professor at New Mexico State University when he got here up with the concept of Ace Prediction: “I believe that I began to think in detail about non-random shuffling in 1961 and 1962. My initial thoughts were that it could very substantially affect the odds of many games.”
“This was confirmed by the subsequent work I did. I had a two-pronged attack: build mathematical models to approximate real shuffling, and do empirical studies of real shuffling. While doing this, I wanted a simple, practical method for exploiting this and the idea of Ace locating, using neighboring cards, occurred to me. Why Aces? Because an Ace is the best card for the player to get as one of his initial two cards at Blackjack.”
“I tried it out at home and it worked well. I didn’t focus on using it at the casinos because many other projects with higher priority were going on in my life at the same time.”
Among Thorp’s “other projects” had been inventing with Claude Shannon[ii] (1916–2001) the world’s first wearable laptop to efficiently predict roulette outcomes in Las Vegas, and writing the world’s finest-promoting playing e book, Beon the Dealer,[iii] which contained the primary mathematical system ever found for beating a serious on line casino sport—card counting at blackjack.
Paul O’Neil, writing of Thorp’s exploits in Life journal in 1964, noticed: “Thorp delved into a stratum of impure chaos—a phenomenon involving both pattern and lack of pattern—to which comparatively little attention had ever been paid.”[iv]
While Thorp’s e book made the New York Times finest-vendor listing, his Ace Prediction concept remained the intently guarded secret of a handful of excessive-stakes skilled blackjack gamers for greater than 20 years.
The thought of predicting Aces first appeared in Thorp’s 1973 tutorial paper, “Nonrandom Shuffling with Applications to the Game of Faro,”[v] by which he wrote: “ … nonrandomness yields simple winning strategies at Blackjack, Baccarat and Faro (Thorp and Walden, unpublished)[vi] … ” After outlining his non-random shuffling theories, Thorp commented: “Note … the immediate application to ace-location … ”[vii]
In 1997, Arnold Snyder, blackjack writer and writer, requested Professor Thorp if he had explored non-random shuffling extra completely within the seventies. Thorp replied: “I did. Most of it never got written up. It is mostly in my mind and in a few sketch notes.”
Richard Reid, Webmaster of www.bjmath.com, (an internet site to which Thorp contributed) requested the professor if his “simple winning strategies” would ever be printed. “They may,” Thorp replied, “appear in a future reprint of [his book] The Mathematics of Gambling.”[viii]
[i] O’Neil, Paul, “The Professor Who Breaks the Bank,” Life Magazine, Chicago, Illinois: Time, Inc., March 27, 1964, p. 84.
[ii] Calderbank, Robert and Neil J. A. Sloane, “Obituary: Claude Shannon,” Nature, Vol. 410, No. 768, 2001.
[iii] Thorp, Edward O., Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One, New York: Blaisdell Publishing Company, 1st ed., 1962.
[iv] O’Neil, 1964, p. 91.
[v] Thorp, Edward O., “Nonrandom Shuffling with Applications to the Game of Faro,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 68, No. 344, December, 1973, p. 844.
[vi] Thorp, Edward O. and William E. Walden, “The Solution of Games by Computer,” (unpublished manuscript), 1963.
[vii] Thorp, 1973, p. 464.
[viii] Thorp, Edward O., The Mathematics of Gambling. Secaucus, New Jersey: Lyle Stuart, March, 1985.
BLOG MENU
