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The Perfect Bet - Different Ways to Beat the Odds

In The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math are Taking the Luck out of Gambling, Adam
Kucharski argues that mathematics and sciences are revolutionizing optimal ways to gamble,
and beat the odds. Kucharski illuminates this theory by giving different experiments and
methods with casino games (roulette table), comparing sports (horse racing and soccer), and by
contrasting sports and wars(horse racing and the Cold War). He implies and and recommends
these methods in order to give the audience the best way to beat the odds, to this end,
Kucharski claims there is always a way loophole,into winning a bet by using math and science.
For example when Gerald Selbee noticed a loophole in a Michigan lottery game that also
included roll downs.(30). Kucharski ostensibly addresses gambler because he opens and
closes his book directly addressing scientist and mathematicians with the different gambling
situations in casinos, when a woman was accused of obtaining money by deception[by
using] a laser scanner to analyze the roulette table.,(2) and offering reader to use Henri
Poincare's three levels of ignorance to predict outcomes and comment on them, however, by
using other betting situations such as horse racing and soccer, Kucharski makes his book
palatable to gamblers, hoping to show the readers how science and math can influence the
odds of gambling.

Henri Poincare, a universalist and mathematician, was very mesmerized by the

randomness of the roulette table. Poincare decided to look into the events of a roulette table. He
claimed if a roulette wheel were spun an infinite number of times - and the zeros were ignored -
he would have expected the overall ration of the red to black approach 50/50., (5). He uses the
three level of ignorance to justify his claim. The first level of ignorance is when, we have all the
necessary information, we just need to do a few calculation, (3). The second level of ignorance
is when, we know the physical laws but don't know the exact initial state of the object, or
cannot measure it accurately. In this case we must either improve our measurements or limit our
predictions to what will happen to the object in the very near future (3). Gamblers can avoid
falling into this ignorance by measuring the initial path of a roulette ball (11). The third level
of ignorance is when we don't know the initial state of the object or the physical laws...without
knowing the cause we can still comment on the eventual effect.(3). Edward Thorp and Claude
Shannon began to have predictions with the roulette game. When the ball has looped around a
few times, a croupier would call no more bets. Once the ball hits one of the deflectors that are
scattered around the wheel and drops into pocket, mathematicians call this nonlinear; meaning
the input(its speed) is not directly proportional to the output(where it lands) [12]. Thorp and
Shannon realized they landed in the third level of ignorance and decided to just rely on past
observation insteading of trying to dig themselves out by deriving equations for the ball's motion.
Although roulette is only one type of way to gamble it the easiest - or most reliable- way to
make money. Lotteries in U.S are made of several different games. Mohan Srivastava, a
statistician in Toronto, claimed that each [scratchcard] contained a code that identified whether
it was a winner.(26). Srivastava's method was to find unique numbers on the scratchcard. One
day he bought a bundle of cards and reported that some numbers appeared several times, and
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some only once on the card. He also spotted the fact that if a row contained three of these
unique numbers, it usually signaled a winning card(27). Although Srivastava had an effective
and legal method to beat the odds with a scratchcard, the lottery company said the scratchcard
was a design flaw. He still suspects that other lotteries in the U.S and Canada are having the
same problem because Traditional lotteries don't not include controlled randomness..And when
lotteries have a loophole (28) like Srivastava found in a scratchcard it can be used as a
winning strategy. In 2010, the WinFall jackpot approached a rolldown limit. The total prize
money past $2 million, and surprised lottery officials that they decided to investigate the
probability of somebody deliberately nudging the draw into a roll down by buying a large
number of tickets. (31). However an MIT group thought otherwise. The group found that if the
jackpot failed the top $1.6 millions, the estimate for the next prize was almost always below the
crucial value of $2 million. in order to figure out how the total prize was past $2 million, they had
to understand the game better than many of their competitors; they knew the probabilities and
the payoff and exactly how much advantage they held (32). Their advantage paid off as they
estimated that they made $700,000 in a week! Blackjack is designed to give the house and
edge at a casino.Private Roger Baldwin and his fellow soldier friends had been playing cards,
when one suggested blackjack and the rules of it. Baldwin was amazed. He claimed if the
dealer had a low card, there was a good chance the dealer would have to draw several cards,
increasing the risk of going over twenty-one therefore get away with standing on a lower total
if the dealer had six (36-37). Baldwin needed to make several calculations for analytics
division. In addition to his findings players had the option of doubling their stake, on condition
that they would receive one more card to go with the one they already had (37). Persi Diaconis,
a mathematician professor at Stanford, published a paper stating it takes at least six dovetail
shuffles to properly mix up a deck of cards. One day he brought a bundle of coded messages
from prisoners, and decided to give the task of decoding them to one of his students, Marc
Coram, as a challenge. Coram claimed the the messages used a substitution cipher, with each
symbol representing a different letter (63). He could have used the Monte Carlo method which
was to input the symbols into a computer and have it shuffle the letters again and again and
then exam the resulting text until he hit upon a message that made sense (63), however that
would've taken a absurdly long time. He instead used the Markov chain Monte Carlo to
decipher the prisoners message. In order to break the prison code, Coram had to take a set of
unobserved values (the letters that corresponded to each symbol) and estimate them using
letter pairings (64). Diaconis mathematical riddle helped other gambling situation such as horse
racing predictions and how to beat the odds.

These methods aren't the only way to predict the best outcome. Anna Dreber and a
group of psychologist wanted to experiment to get the best outcome in markets. They used
presidential elections. Their prediction success rate was high as they correctly picked] the
winners of 11 out of 15 presidential races, and correctly identifying that the remaining 4 contests
would have extremely tight margins. The group also predicted the 2000 election with George
W. Bush and said he would be victorious with at 53.2% of the vote, exactly what he got.
Although they used different methods than finding a loophole but by collecting data and looking
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at polls like gamblers were doing with the Hong Kong horse racing to implement their strategy
(68) to get the best outcome.

Adam Kucharski convinces the audience that there a several ways to gamble legally and
still get the most money. He uses ethos, credibility generated by the author of a message, when
he introduces us the the three levels of ignorance (chapter 1) and by using them in the roulette
game. Kucharski also uses logos, logical appeal of the message, when Markov wanted to use
the Monte Carlo method but it was logical that it was going to take forever so instead he uses
the Markov chain Monte Carlo to decipher the prisoners coded message. Finally he uses
pathos, emotional appeal of the argument, when Stanislaw Ulam got a disease in his brain and
changed his views to be a UCLA mathematics professor to focus on mathematical puzzles he
attacked in inventive ways (59).
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Work Cited:
Kucharski, Adam. The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck
out of Gambling. New York: Basic, 2016. Print.
Mann, Adam. "The Power of Prediction Markets." Nature.com. Nature Publishing
Group, 18 Oct. 2016. Web. 24 Oct. 2016.