Share This Paper. Background Citations. Methods Citations. Results Citations. Topics from this paper. Blackjack The New York Times. Chart Rule guideline. Citation Type. Has PDF. View 1 excerpt, cites background. Basic strategy and expectation in casino Blackjack.
We describe the probability theory behind a casino game, blackjack, and the procedure to compute the optimal strategy for a deck of arbitrary cards and player's expected win given that he follows the … Expand. View 1 excerpt, cites methods. Casinos are a place for people to participate in irrational and risky behaviour.
Optimizing the winnings is an interesting exploration of probability and decision making. This paper delves into the … Expand. The … Expand.
View 3 excerpts, cites methods and background. I admired the heroes who, through extraordinary abilities and resourcefulness, achieved great things. Introverted and thoughtful, I may have been inspired to mirror this in the future by using my mind to overcome intellectual obstacles, instead of my body to defeat human opponents.
The books helped establish lifelong values of fair play, a level playing field for everyone, and treating others as I myself wish to be treated. This led to an occasional unique pronunciation. For instance, for a couple of years I thought misled miss-LED was pronounced MYE-zzled, and for years afterward when I saw the word in print I would hesitate for a beat as I mentally corrected my pronunciation.
When I was reading or just thinking, my concentration was so complete that I lost all awareness of my surroundings. My mother would call me, with no response. Thinking I was willfully ignoring her, the shout would became a yell, then she would bring her flushed face right up to me.
Only when she appeared in my visual field did I snap back into the here and now and respond. She had a hard time deciding whether her son was stubborn and badly behaved or was really as unaware as he claimed. Though we were poor, my parents valued books and managed to buy me one occasionally. My father made challenging choices. As a result, between the ages of five and seven I carried around adult-looking books and strangers wondered if I actually knew what was in them.
One man put me to an unexpected and potentially embarrassing test. It happened because my parents became friends with the Kesters, who lived on a farm in Crete, Illinois, about forty-five miles from our home.
They invited us out for two weeks every summer, starting in when I was turning five. These special days were what I most looked forward to each year. In our basement back home my father built racks for the rubber-sealed mason jars of corn, peaches, and apricots that we brought back.
Then there were the rows of fruit jellies, jams, and preserves in glasses sealed with a layer of paraffin on top. This cornucopia would last us well into the next year. My father helped Marvin and his father, Old Man Kester, with the work of the farm, and sometimes I tagged along.
One sunny forenoon during the second summer of our two weeks in Crete, my father took me to pick up supplies at a local store.
I was just turning six, tall and thin with a mop of curly brown hair, lightly tanned, pants too short, the bare ankles ending in a pair of tennis shoes with frayed laces. Silently he handed me back the book. I felt that this stranger was using me to put him down and I realized that I had stopped it. Between the ages of three and five I learned to add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers of any size. I also learned the US version of the prefixes million, billion, trillion, and so on, up to decillion.
I found that I could add columns of figures quickly by either seeing them or hearing them. When he announced the answer, I said no, and gave him my number. He laughed good-naturedly, added the numbers again, and found I was right. To my delight he rewarded me with an ice-cream cone. After that I dropped by when I could and checked his totals. On the rare occasions when we disagreed, I was usually correct and would get another cone. This isn't a criticism, just an observation. The writing style is dated, and will sound a little bit funny to modern readers.
That's no big deal, and it's certainly not a reason to avoid reading the book. A nice aspect of that particular writing style is the detailed table of contents. Not only are the chapters listed, but what's covered in each chapter is also presented in the table of contents. When I took education classes in college, we learned about meta-reading, and one of the elements of meta-reading that helped people learn was a detailed overview or table of contents.
Numbers of players. The pack. The deal. Numerical value of the cards, hard and soft hands. Object of the player.
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