by Edward O. Thorp
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Product Description
A winning strategy for the game of 21. The essentials, consolidated in simple charts, can be understood and memorized by the average player.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 A Classic, 2008-06-04
I find the story surrounding this book to be just as interesting as the book's content. [...]
Few books are ever this popular, never mind this popular for decades. Beat the Dealer is approaching 50 years of incredible popularity among readers. This is reason enough to check it out. This is the best book for anyone eager to dive in to blackjack and move beyond the game's basics. It's not for a passive reader. It's also for anyone interested in gambling in general, or the history of gambling. This book is a classic.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
This book and your own brain are all you need....well...a team..., 2007-08-27
Next stop Macau
Still the classic for the high-low method, but nowadays you need to work in teams and with the perpetual continuous shuffle machines/decks the method has become harder to deploy in lots of casinos. Which is why those who use this with refined forced-card deck cutting are in the current gravy boat, although their day in the sun will also pass.
Most folks can intuitively understand card counting and shoe-skew. There are plenty of books on the topic of card counting. However, Thorp's original work is best and overlooked on several important points by most folks. The first point is: rigor. Thorp has backed up his method with solid empirical and theoretical underpinnings. This gave confidence to generations of card counters who refined his method. The second point is: clarity. Thorp is a first-string mathematician and easily could have stayed conversing with peers in jargon, or he even could have purposefully employed obscurantism to keep tables thin. Instead his prose style is lean, direct, and clear. Such is his brevity and Wittgensteinian exactness that you may need to re-read a few sentences here and there to absorb what he is saying, but on the whole this is an accessible narrative written by a mathematician for an intelligent audience.
A wonderful gift that opens up a new world combining math, fun and money.
Now about Kelly criterion in betting strategies......
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
The Book that Started the Blackjack Revolution, 2007-03-07
Edward O. Thorp started the blackjack revolution way back in the early 1960s with a difficult but successful card counting system. This book explains that early system and why blackjack is a beatable game. There are now many easier card counting systems such as the Hi-Lo, the KO, the High Opt and the easiest of all Speed Count.
Thorp's book is a must have for your gambling library as he started it all.
Frank Scoblete: author of Golden Touch Dice Control Revolution!
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
The Grandfather of Blackjack Strategy, 2007-01-22
Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One by Edward Thorp started a craze toward card counting in casinos, prompted several rules changes including increased numbers of decks, shorter cuts, and more frequent shuffles. It's the grandfather of Blackjack strategy books and the first mathematical analysis of the game published outside academia. For those reasons alone it's worth having and studying even if its effectiveness has been diminished by the rules changes I noted above.
The other advantage that Thorp's book has over the dozens of blackjack books available is that it includes the probability charts. You can take the numbers from the appendix, see where the strategy was developed and make your own adjustments based on the conditions you encounter at your local game or casino.
It's tricky, his counting system and strategy, but once you have the hang of it you can be assured a fair game with a casino. And, all told, it's not that difficult a system to master with some practice ahead of time. Don't read this volume on the plane flight into Vegas and expect to beat the dealers in a day, but spend a week or two with some decks of cards, practice, go online and play, then take your shot against the pros. Good luck.
- CV Rick
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Used it and won--when they didn't cheat!, 2007-01-21
The book was very useful in understanding how much to bet given your hand and where you are in the deck. The casinos do still cheat, so I would advise watching for opportunities to play at a fair table (then clean their clocks with these methods).
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