Comments on: Monte and Blackjack

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 16 Oct 2003 11:02:54 +0000

I think I could pretty fairly describe myself as an egalitarian conservative if the term didn’t carry such a strong flavour of oxymoron.

By: marc

marc — Thu, 16 Oct 2003 07:25:14 +0000

An interesting blogpost. What struck me is how conservative, in the litteral meaning of that word, your arguement is. Because there are so many interdependencies between different parts of our society, we should be wary of attractive sounding bold ideas; they will likely have more unintended consequences than you have bargined for. Let’s err on the side of the status quo. When applied to the issue of privitising pensions, the conservatism is on behalf of an established social welfare policy, and thus is leftist in today’s political alliance. I am not saying that this makes you wrong, it is just intereting to see conservative arguements for leftist causes. Hmmm.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 22:37:01 +0000

So what I want to know is: which one is Tony Blair- a vicar or a bookie?

By: Paul Orwin

Paul Orwin — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 15:49:51 +0000

Just a quick note on the blackjack case. It turns out that if you are counting cards, and you make a small mistake, you can utterly ruin your advantage. Even worse, if you bet thinking you have an advantage, but you don’t, you will get creamed (note; learned from experience, the hard way!). So while there are varying strategies that will give you different odds of winning, they are not particularly robust. The so-called “basic strategy” is robust, in the sense that small variations in it will change your expected outcome slightly (there is a math word for this, but I can’t remember it; stable to perturbation or something like that). The strategies that attempt to gain significant advantage over the house are much less stable, however.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 06:55:30 +0000

If we assume that a player memorized the exact order of an entire deck, the dealer would simply shuffle. Not if you didn’t tell them you were doing it …

By: pj

pj — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 03:12:56 +0000

I spent all that time reading just to find that I was being shown a shell game. Lots of words, little substance. I suppose my best response is now to attack your motives?

By: dwight meredith

dwight meredith — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 02:25:09 +0000

It is hard to see how there can be a perfect strategy at Blackjack. If we assume that a player memorized the exact order of an entire deck, the dealer would simply shuffle.

By: Shane

Shane — Tue, 14 Oct 2003 22:28:38 +0000

An analogy worthy of theft. So much better than the one from my Micro teacher. In his, there are two types of model airplanes. One realistic, which doesn’t fly. The other unrealistic, which does. Econ 101 is like the latter. …

By: Harry Tuttle

Harry Tuttle — Tue, 14 Oct 2003 21:23:40 +0000

I’ll stick with the E-Type thanks.