"21", Movie about MIT Las Vegas Card Counters Opens Tomorrow
wired.com
wired.com
Poker, on the other hand, is much more difficult, and just as dependent on mathematics. Your strategies depend on who you're playing, and how they're playing against you in any particular hand. Much more fun. And with poker, you're playing against other individuals, so you don't have to worry about the house shutting you down if you're playing too well.
That said, I actually do find it fascinating, mainly because of the history behind it. A lot of discoveries look simple in retrospect, but keep in mind this was a complicated game that was essentially intractable until the advent of supercomputers (early reviews of thousands of hands weren't even enough to get accurate readings on the odds).
It took a math professor from UCLA (Thorpe) with an interest in programming to really get a handle on the odds. We could all write a program to calculate basic strategy odds now, but at the time, it was very, very innovative.
While Hi-Lo and other counting systems seem pretty simple, I think it was a stroke of genius to think of this the first time. And it was another stroke of genius to use a programming language to determine exactly when the count turned the expected return in favor of the player. Add in statistical systems for bankroll management (ie., how do you use a small but positive expected return into a 99% chance of making money while keeping bankroll growth as high as possible), and you have some real sophistication considering that it hadn't been done before.
The people who did this the first time were brilliant, and personally, I think it is pretty fascinating.
"Bringing Down the House" (the book the movie was based on) was one of the best of the 100 or so books I've read in the last year.
PS How cool is it that Kevin Spacey reads Wired?
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/courses/mobwear/resourc... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_counting#History_of_blackj...
That (hedge funds) and all such things seem to be basically about one thing : Know of a statistical advantage that others don't know and then play mechanically with zero emotions as possible. Play for the long term, play for sensible gains/expectations and put risk-management above everything else.
[Edit] As I am thinking about this : Startups are probably a similar kind of game as well.
But IMO what these folks did was cheat. You can count cards as long as you do not use an external device to aid you in the counting. These folks collaborated with others to share each one's counts so as to take advantage of the system. Not that I am a big fan of the casino (or their making tons of money).
Edit: downmodding someone asking for clarification is just being a jerk.