Meet Edwin Throop. I think you'll be able to guess what's gonna happen next......

Chaper 2 (continued)

Doctor and Professor Edwin Throop, Assistant Chairman of the Mathematics Department at Stanford University, had never been to Las Vegas before despite the proximity of the state of California to Nevada.

Thirty-six years old, short, thin, bespectacled, and as average looking as a man could possibly be, there was absolutely no chance that he could ever stand out in a crowd, which was exactly how he wanted it, considering his plan to break the bank at the Tropicalla Hotel and Casino.

All of his life Professor Throop had been fascinated by (and displayed nothing less than a genius for) numbers. By the time he had entered the first grade of the run-down public school in the rural California town in which he had grown up, he had memorized the multiplication tables and taught himself long division, while his classmates still wrestled with simple addition and subtraction. When he was eight years old and halfway through the third grade he had fully mastered both elementary and intermediate algebra, and in his freshman year of High School was invited to, and regularly attended, the faculty meetings of the Mathematics Department, where he explained to his own teachers some of the advanced concepts and original theories he was working on.

He cared little for physical activity or sports, and displayed no interest whatsoever in members of the opposite sex or in learning any of the social graces of his time, fully concentrating instead on his studies. With the help of a full scholarship, made necessary by the fact that his family had always been poor, he attended College and Graduate School at Stanford, completing both a Masters Degree and Doctorate in Mathematics in under two years, culminating in the publication of his doctoral thesis in the leading mathematics journal in the world and being translated into eleven languages.

He was then regarded, despite his youth, as one of the leading mathematicians in the world and was rewarded with an offer from Stanford to join the faculty and immediately assume the assistant chairmanship of the Mathematics Department.

Completely unprepared for a career in anything but the academic world, Dr. Throop gratefully accepted the offer, despite the fact that on the day he signed his contract he was faced with a harsh realization: A Mathematics Professor, even an Assistant Chairman of the department of a great and world-renowned university such as Stanford, made barely enough money to live.

Or to live, at least, in a style in which Throop had long ago decided that a man of his stature in the world was entitled to.

So Dr. Throop made a decision that would have a far reaching effect on the rest of his life: That he would begin to use his spare time to look for ways in which he could employ his great abilities and huge body of knowledge in the world of mathematics, translating them into two things that the world at large found to be considerably more valuable and useful: Dollars and cents.

And now, in a cheap hotel room located two blocks off Las Vegas Boulevard, already known as “The Strip”, Dr. Edwin Throop had reached the point where he had decided that his research and investigations had led him to one inevitable conclusion. He had decided that he, a Doctor and Professor of Mathematics, could use his considerable talents to make a huge amount of money as a professional player of the game of blackjack.

He had first studied the stock and markets, attempting to determine mathematically if there was a way in which the price movements of these various securities could be predicted with certainty, and he had decided that there weren’t. These markets were controlled by people, and people were just too unpredictable for his taste. Next, he had studied currency markets, trying to see if there was a way to make money from the minute fluctuations of the dollar as compared to various foreign currencies, and discovered that these fluctuations were often the result of outside events over which no one had any control.

And then he discovered gambling. It was impossible to win at roulette and craps, those games being the most popular at the time. Both were games in which the player had to bet on the outcome of either the roll of a pair of dice or the spin of a wooden wheel, and, when they guessed correctly, were paid at less than actual odds of the outcome which they were betting on. Also, he realized that both games were games of what he called “independent probability”, meaning that the dice themselves, or the wheel, had no memory. He learned that when the color black came up three times in a row in roulette, there were people who bet on black on the next spin, believing that black was now “hot”. And he wasn’t surprised to find out that there were an equal number of people anxious to bet on red, thinking that red was now “due”.

But the game of blackjack, or twenty-one, was different. It was a simple game. The player and the dealer each received two cards at the beginning of each hand. Each card had a point value, deuces through nines being worth two through nine points, tens and picture cards were worth ten points, and aces worth either one point or eleven, depending upon the wishes of the player.

The player received two cards, face up, at the start of each hand, and added together their point values. He could then choose take more cards, to “hit” as they called it in the casino, or not, to “stand”, stopping whenever he wished, the object of the game being to reach a total of twenty-one or less which was closer to twenty-one than the total of the dealer. But the game had two problems, which gave the dealer, or the “house”, an advantage:

First, while the player received his two cards face up, the dealer received one face down. So the player was forced to make their decisions without knowing the dealer’s total. And, if the player’s total ended up exceeding twenty-one, a “bust”, he lost automatically, regardless of the dealer’s total. It was this second factor that gave the house a small, but inexorable, built in advantage.

But Throop noticed something interesting about the game as he studied it further. Blackjack, was not a game of independent probability. As various cards were played from the deck and not used again until the deck was finished and re-shuffled, the odds of a player busting could change, and he could alter his decisions to hit or stand accordingly based on those cards remaining to be played

He realized, for example, that when the deck had been played halfway through and there were a disproportionate number of lower cards – twos, threes, and fours – remaining, the player could hit a total of, say, 15 or 16, with less of a chance of busting. And when there were more higher valued cards remaining – tens and picture cards – there were cases when it was better to stand on those totals of 15 or 16, leaving the higher valued cards for the dealer to possibly bust with.

Simply stated, Throop realized that all he had to do to beat the game of blackjack was to determine those situations in which the odds favored the player, and increase his bet from those times in which the odds favored the house.

Sure you still needed to be lucky. Having a four or 5% edge over the house was not very much good on a single bet, but over the long run – and Throop knew that the way a casino made their money was based on the long run – betting with the odds in your favor had to ultimately prove to be profitable.

He had proven his theories. First, developing a way in which to count the cars played and determining which ones were left in the deck to be played. Then, deciding in which situations he should bet more, and finally, with the help of five graduate students, the playing of tens of thousands of practice hands to test his reasoning nd methods.

Now he was ready. With a bankroll of $10,000, which represented his meager life savings of $5,000 as well as an additional $5,000 he had been able to borrow, Edwin Throop planned to make a fortune. He knew he’d have to start small, risking little at the beginning while he built his bankroll up, but in the long run he was convinced that the success of his plan was as certain as such a thing could be.

Leaving his room, he almost had a smile on his face as he began walking the three short blocks to the nearest casino.