{"id":10396,"date":"2017-01-20T13:53:22","date_gmt":"2017-01-20T21:53:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/associatednews.info\/content\/episode-749-professor-blackjack\/"},"modified":"2017-01-20T13:53:22","modified_gmt":"2017-01-20T21:53:22","slug":"episode-749-professor-blackjack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/associatednews.info\/content\/episode-749-professor-blackjack\/","title":{"rendered":"Episode 749: Professor Blackjack"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A croupier deals a card on a blackjack table at a Gaming Partners International Corp. (Brent Lewin\/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Brent Lewin\/Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/strong> hide caption<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Brent Lewin\/Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Ed Thorp was the first ‘quant’, the first person to make mathematical analysis and statistics the center of his investing. But he only got there because of a card game.<\/p>\n

As a young man, Ed Thorp was a mathematician doing pretty much what you’d expect a mathematician to do: teaching, studying, trying to solve hard problems. There was one particular problem that nobody else had been able to solve. He wanted to come up with a mathematical system to beat the casino at blackjack.<\/p>\n

He had a flash of insight, spent a year working out the details and wound up getting a big-money offer to test his theory in the casinos.<\/p>\n

It involved an unexpected conversation with a man in a cadillac and a regular payment of deli meats. It also set him on a course to discover a key insight about setting and beating the odds that had implications far bigger than any casino game winnings could be.<\/p>\n

He went on to bring his math skills to the financial markets, where he made hundreds of millions of dollars and changed the way people think about investing.<\/p>\n

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