Good Job Thank's!

I would prefer it, but it wouldn't influence selection. The model is the basis for making a decision, the money is the opportunity. OTOH, if an arbitrage opportunity appears, the model is secondary.

It depends on the game. I generally have more confidence in the models prediction of an outcome than the estimate of degree. The fourth quarter results of a football game will deviate a lot more from the first three quarters than the ninth inning of a baseball game deviates from the first eight. So, as an example, I might look favorably on a third quarter wager.

Yes. I could have written that I make ~100 wagers where I entertain a significant risk in the outcome

Great thread, wish I could think of something interesting to ask.

Thank you guys. It's fun to talk shop and reflect on a lot of years. There is something very special about this business, and if it's in your blood there's probably nothing -- even repeated failure -- that can keep you away from it. I certainly don't mean to romanticize gaming, as it has ups and downs like any profession -- although I would wager both will be more extreme than you'll find anywhere else. As I said in the beginning -- high highs and low lows. Good luck.

We've really enjoyed your thoughts and stories.

You talk of the little retirement joint you'd like to have. What would be the minimum stake to open this?

Ever talk with Barney Vinson? I love his stories.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2me8s0tX1w
Barneys instructional video on craps!

The bold made me laugh given the topic at hand.

There are a wide range of mixed opportunities -- staking the bank, assuming and restructuring existing debt, buyout agreements and options. Licensing and legal work is complex, but in today's market you can find opportunities and develop a plan with as little as 10M to play the hand out.

Never met him, but have enjoyed his column. A lot of the old-timers came from Texas, and they definitely brought a lot of color.

Going off what I just saw in another thread - SheetWise Simulator. Can you tell us about it? Do you have plans to make it available in any way? Any details (how long you've worked on it, what language it is, what you're proud of, etc.)?

Looks nice to me and I've been thinking of doing something similar for myself, just haven't gotten off the ground yet (lazy).

My library of code went all the way back to the seventies, and I would periodically get around to rewriting parts of it as I was discarding old operating systems and languages. During the 90's I migrated the bulk of the code to PDS 7.x and added a lot of features, and then around 2000 I eventually tied it all together into a single library and user interface in Visual Studio. I do have plans to make it available, but there is a lot in there that I don't want to expose yet.

any stories about violence in a casino?

Any insight on the benefits/disadvantages of "modern" programming languages as applied to BJ simulations and the like? Are you pure VC++, VB, Java, C#, etc?

When you're writing your own code to run simulations, how do you validate your results? Obviously we wouldn't want to mistakenly believe a -EV situation is actually +EV, but if we're simming rather unique situations, it must be hard to be sure, right?

No. It all happens outside. The rule is to never sh*t where you eat

I'm not the person to ask. For the past ten years or more all of the "new" languages and middle-ware I've spent time learning are Internet related, PHP, mySQL, Javascript, etc. -- and before that I was already a dinosaur and working with private libraries that had evolved over many years. There are certainly a lot of impressive tools out there, but I have little interest in learning them as the functions I have already written and tested are a language -- and one I know intimately.

There's always some reason I'm doing a simulation, and some expected result -- so that's first -- and relatively simple math defines many of the expectations. I struggled with randomness for years, and I found many of the attempts to create randomness in the physical world were less than random -- so I have gone my own direction there, eg, when shuffling a deck I can simulate various properties of a hand shuffle, a CSM, a machine shuffle, etc. Other peoples work adds confidence, and playing the games -- letting other people play my code or me play theirs -- helps, as well as real play. The simulations are actually pretty simply once you trust the code the simulations depend on.

Always good to hear from you. Bummed we (including Jimbo) didn't get together in Vegas a few years ago when I burned up the last of my lucrative comps over at the V.

With any luck I'll be down in AZ in a few years working for an MLB club doing quant work. Spring training tickets are on me, if so.