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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 
him, staking him 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.            (Or nearly always: I've heard that    
                                  there are card counting strategies    
                                  that could get you better than    
                                  even odds at Blackjack.  The      
   The presumption                Casinos responded by increasing    
   seems to be that               the size of the deck, e.g.  by      
   there's some                   using quintuple decks it gets much    
   sort of psychic                harder to get anywhere by counting.)    
   ability to                                                         
   detect when                    
   you're lucky and
   likely to win.  
                                                             
   
      
   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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