| Thursday, October 11, 2007 2:12PM | | | | Turning Fortune's Wheel | Posted By: Joseph Mazur
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Turning Fortune's Wheel begins with a brief history of gambling in the gambling houses of Louis XIV’s Paris at a time when the common person on the street believed his or her destiny is predicted by astrology, tarot, or palm reading, when amulets and crosses were worn to ward off the evil eye, and a time when the momentous ideas of probability where just being discovered and formulated by Pascal and Fermat.
A general history of seventeenth and eighteenth century gambling rooms of Europe follows before with a focal shift to nineteenth century America and Mississippi river boat gambling, and then onto twentieth century casinos from Monte Carlo to Las Vegas where the mathematics behind roulette and blackjack is described and explored alongside the pathology of compulsive gambling. This is where the mathematics of both gambling and coincidence is explained along with what it takes to win at various organized games from horse racing to several street games such as craps, poker, pool, and other odd sorts of races of the Damon Runyon world of bookies—numbers, raindrops down windowpanes and flies on sugar cubes. And then there are the state lotteries, how they work and how they are run.
Centering on the general mathematics of gambling, primarily on probability and statistics through a simple—very simple—tutorial on what probability and statistics are about, this book moves on to explain expected value, the law of large numbers, coincidences, distribution functions and the mathematics of decision making. Illustrious problems, such as the prisoner’s dilemma and other paradoxes of likelihood, lead us to game theory, and that will give a partial idea—the mathematical piece—of what luck in gambling really is.
Internet gambling, along with the usual Internet risks, is now popular, along with reality TV shows such as Deal or No Deal, which counts on both the psychological makeup of the contestants as well as on how little those contestants know about the mathematics of decision-making. Greed and compulsivity are behind the essential entertainment factors of those shows. The psychology of the audiences and contestants is investigated along with the contestant’s mixed problems of greed and stardom craving. In Deal or No Deal, almost all contestants take the deal too late because some compound combination of greed, ignorance of expected value and moment-of-fame glory takes over. And this will supply the psychological answer to the question of what luck really is.
Ultimately, we begin to understand greed and luck in gambling as well as why people accept bets with negative expectation and finally answer the central question of the book from both mathematical and psychological positions—what makes us feel lucky in gambling?
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