How To Get Rich -- Mark Cuban | Hacker News Reader

How To Get Rich -- Mark Cuban

blogmaverick.com

10 pointssgoraya12 comments

This isn't an article on how to get rich. This is an article on how possibly you might not be poor. The rich invest. The poor and the middle-class try to get this thing called careers and earn paychecks. The rich make paychecks and move, create, or destroy careers. Do you want to be a paycheck signer or a paycheck earner? A career seeker or a career maker?

If all you can think about is saving money, then you'll never think about how to use money to lobby congress and entertain foreign officials.

If you want to save money, why not do as the rich? Hire a top-tier wealth manager, and put some of the best accounting firms on your retainer.

Hm, he didn't mention having a company over pay for your startup.

The one thing I have noticed over the year in reading and talking to very successful people is that the one factor they almost alway leave out is luck. The truth is, if they are really really honest, is that random chance played a huge role. They do not like to admit that to themselves because it is much more ego enriching to imagine that it was all due to how great they are, but really, if Bill Gates Mommy had not been on the board of directors of IBM... come on. Almost every example is like that. Sorry to burst anyones bubble but life is largely a game of craps...

That is probably the worst advice ever. Wonder how this guy can sleep at night. Here's some good advice:http://appsumo.com/sivers/

The worst advice EVER came from a cab driver at the Las Vegas airport who told me his winning strategy - play blackjack and every time you lose, double your bet until you're up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system) for some background on this idea.

To be fair, this is a good way to make money if you don't plan on gambling often.. like once every 5 years. The probability of losing all your money with such a small number of occurrences is low.

I've thought about this a lot. The problem for me is how much money to bring to the table - you would have to get some kind of credit or show up in Vegas with a lot to even attempt it. Also, most tables have max bets (~$3000 for a $25 table) so you would have to start at a high stakes table just in case.

The Martingale strategy is perhaps the most likely reason that casinos have table limits. The strategy works exceedingly well if 1) you have an unlimited budget (or unlimited credit) and 2) don't have table stakes to worry about.

It's possible, but highly unlikely that you can find a high roller casino that won't enforce minimums, and has very high maximums (which would allow you to start with $1 bets, for example), but even with that, you're likely still limited by budget.

...except that almost every table in existence has something that messes up the system. Usually it's an upper limit on the amount you can bet (called a "table limit"), which puts an upper bound on the number of successive losses you can win back.

The wikipedia article[1] covers this relatively well under "An alternative mathematical analysis."

The short of it, though, is that everything at a casino is there to put the odds in the house's favor. They spend enormous amounts of time and money on researching this very problem, and their entire business depends on carefully walking the space between their patrons having a good time and winning a mint.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system)

Wait what, after recent articles talking about AppSumo spam, we're getting this in a HN thread now?

Too bad that site takes ages to load up an iPad specific theme which makes the site slower and harder to use. This is getting to be a real irritation when trying to read sites on an iPad.

I'm hoping Erica Sadun can be persuaded to extend her sites of shame to include this.

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