A friend who knows I like to bet sports and play poker sent me this link he stumbled upon:
http://mikkorusso.blogspot.com/
about some russian kid who's like a prodigy games player and starts off playing dominoes for money when he was 14 in a Miami domino park during the late '90s.
don't know if it's a real story or fiction because each blog entry is headed by "chapter x"
here's one paragraph that made an impression on me:
"Now the question was of strategy: Can betting on something as seemingly random as cockfights have positive expected value? The answer is yes. In my experience, anytime you can bet without a vig or a rake and against people who are drunk, you can get into +EV situations. After a few hours at the fights, I noticed that many guajiros used very long spurs for their birds. These made the fights high variance, and roosters that looked all but dead actually had decent chances, because with long spurs even a single stab could suddenly kill. But gamblers who were stuck and steaming would lay as much as 3 or 4 to 1 odds on roosters that were winning in long-spur fights. I felt intuitively that the losing rooster would come back to win a little more often than one out of every four fights, which is all I needed for the bet to be profitable over the long run. So on my first wager I got laid $80 to my $20, and I won and had suddenly tripled the $40 Vicente gave me. This is the mathy concept of odds, which Papo taught me. I was on a heater from the first bet, and when the cockfights closed I was up $260. When Moro and Vicente saw I was winning it reinforced my omen-ish image, and they began to bet huge on my picks, so when we went home they each gave me $200 and now I suddenly had an $800 bankroll."
you think it's a real story? either way, it's different from the the way most of us became degens through the internet. God, remember the 90s??
Last edited by Wazzle; 08-04-2014 at 10:43 PM.