Your calling him out makes you look ignorant.
Thorpe is a dyed in wool information theory, probability theory academic who happens to be a super cool hacker at heart *.
Among his many accomplishments are, him obtaining a more general version of Black-Scholes model, independently and before Black, Scholes and Mertens had derived theirs. You may recall that got them the Nobel prize.
Managing money and breaking Las Vegas casinos were one of his, side, and mostly academic, entertainments.
There is a nice story of him visiting Shannon to discuss an information theory research paper that he, Thorpe, was writing. The meeting had taken a lot effort to schedule -- Shannon was a busy man, already a celebrity. But then they ended up over-extending their scheduled meeting, discussing, brainstorming with playful eagerness, different mathematical methods to break several popular gambling games, starting with Blackjack. Turns out Shannon was a sucker for such entertaining hacks. (This would be one of the first formulations of card counting [0]) Thorpe and his students would then try these out in Vegas.
*Taking things apart logically, to probe where things break, to understand how they work, that's as quintessentially an exercise in hacking as you can get.
Prof Thorpe wrote about and proved his strategies along with characterizing the assumptions under which they would and had worked.
Finally, you are you and then there is Prof. Thorpe.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_counting#History