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 Gambling
is central to almost everything we do as human beings. At its core gambling is simply a person risking something of value on an uncertain event.
Life itself is uncertain. Driving in busy traffic is uncertain -- we risk our time and even our lives. But there is a world of difference between
sensible risk to reward actions and risk taking. We drive across town, risking getting caught in a traffic jam or even a deadly accident, but we
conclude the rewards do outweigh those risks. Mario Puzo once said it could be argued the only reason the human species ever descended from the
trees was due to our fundamental gambling nature. The risk of leaving those trees seemed worth it. And in fact, it was.
A quarterback throwing a long pass on third down and one yard to go is taking a gamble, risking that the payoff of the potential long gain
against an unprepared opponent will be greater than the rewards would be of calling a running play. Skillful risk versus potential reward.
The most common way people think of gambling is playing games for money. While many of these games are purely games of chance,
some are fundamentally the skillful mathematical leveraging of risk against potential rewards. The most skillful of the gambling
games involve a battle of wits where opponents also act with risk and reward in mind. Chance is fundamental to it, and to life,
but the ability to manipulate the math of the chance involved is what sets apart the skillful games. When a skilled player
chooses to bluff in poker that act is simply the result of a mathematical calculation of the risks to the rewards.
The mission of this site is to examine the interaction of random luck and skill in different gambling games, and
the skillful profit potential in each. We will look at where and how you can get the best of it and how you can't.
Our economic life as human beings is the result of sensible and un-sensible choices. If life is a gamble, let's do it right.
Let's put risk-to-reward in our favor as best we can, or at least understand the risk factors versus the skill factors in each
game we play. Fun is fun -- we can play any game for the sheer pleasure of it as long as we look at it as merely entertainment.
But fun isn't what we will talk about here. Basically... fun is for suckers. Our goal is to discover how to make a mule of
our money by sensibly risking it in gambling games.
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