2 Articles: A Physicist’s Guide to Texas Hold ‘Em & What’s luck got to do with it? The math of gambling

Here are two articles on gambling- I hope they make some entertaining reading.

1. A Physicist’s Guide to Texas Hold ‘Em – Via Phys Org

What are the odds that poker can be explained by statistical physics, much the same as a variety of other complex systems? They’re pretty good, according to physicist Clément Sire of Université of Toulouse and CNRS in France, who demonstrates in a recent paper that many of the statistical properties of poker tournaments are universal. Sire’s model makes connections between poker and evolution, extreme value statistics and the physical model of persistence.

While Sire’s model provides an accurate description of poker tournaments, the model also shares similar characteristics with other seemingly unrelated areas. For example, the physical model of persistence tells the probability that some random process never falls below a certain level. Or, in poker talk, the persistence model describes the number of surviving players (those that have not lost all their chips).

Sire notes that two famous mathematicians (e.g. Emile Borel and John von Neumann) have looked for optimal strategies in head-to-head poker, but prediction for tables with ten players including all-in events still presents a formidable task.

2. What’s luck got to do with it? The math of gambling: A Journey With Ed Thorp - Via New Scientist

When Thorp stood at the roulette wheel in the summer of 1961 there was no need for nerves – he was armed with the first “wearable” computer, one that could predict the outcome of the spin. Once the ball was in play, Thorp fed the computer information about the speed and position of the ball and the wheel using a microswitch inside his shoe. “It would make a forecast about a probable result, and I’d bet on neighbouring numbers,” he says.

Thorp’s device would now be illegal in a casino, and in any case getting a computer to do the work wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. However, there is a simple and sure-fire way to win at the roulette table – as long as you have deep pockets and a faith in probability theory.

With that in mind, I turned my back on roulette and followed Thorp into the card game blackjack. In 1962 he published a book called Beat the Dealer, which proved what many had long suspected: by keeping track of the cards, you can tip the odds in your favour. He earned thousands of dollars putting his proof into practice.