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ODDS_ARE

                                         August 10, 2004

Reading Casino Royale (1953)
by Ian Fleming...

I think it's funny that after all            SPOILERS
the verbiage explaining the rules
to Baccarat, after all the scenes
of Baccarat being played, I'm still
a little unclear on the rules.

   What happens on a tie?
   Is it a do-over?  Do the
   stakes stay on the table?


Bond's mission in this story is a
believably pathetic cold war errand:          In contrast to the films
the head of a lefty French trade              where the stakes are
union has been embezzling and needs           always nuclear doom and
to make the money back fast by                world conquest.
gambling.  The Brits would rather
he fall on his face.


What's astounding is the scheme that they
follow: they send in Bond to gamble against
the bad guy, staking Bond with a huge sum
of money.

That's it.  They figure Bond can't lose.

There are some extremely
dubious ideas about gambling
being put forth here, without
being explicitly stated.

In trying to show that Bond is a professional,
serious gambler, Fleming has Bond insisting
huffilly that he only bets on odds as close to
even as he can get them.

But that's insane.  You can't possibly win over
the long haul unless you can get odds *better*
than even, and needless to say, the house is
not going out of business, which means that the
odds are always less than that.
                                      
   The presumption                    (Or nearly always: I've heard that
   seems to be that                   there are card counting strategies
   there's some                       that could get you better than
   sort of psychic                    even odds at Blackjack.  The
   ability to                         Casinos responded by increasing
   detect when                        the size of the deck, e.g.  by
   you're lucky and                   using quintuple decks it gets much
   likely to win.                     harder to get anywhere by counting.)
                 
   I've been confused a few times
   by apparently intelligent
   people who buy lottery tickets:

     "You do understand that the
     odds are against you?"

     "Why of course I do!
     Do you think I'm stupid!"
                                   
   What I think is that they don't          
   understand what it means when you        
   say that "the odds are against you."     
                                            
                                            
                                           

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