I just received the trial issue of Wilmott this week. Great stuff Paul! (expensive though) Here is my question. Ed was one of the original developers of a blackjack system. I have read about blackjack back in my college days. I know the math is simple. But, does anyone know of where you can get a spreadsheet model that would have the probabilities for playing a 'system' of sorts.Similarly, How about a model for say NCAA tournament. I remember seeing an article about this a couple of years ago. Really any Excel model that takes a chance bet for the unknowing and tries to 'Beat the system'-RF

The probabilities for a fresh deck are easily computed in Excel. You can also do good approximations for decks with known numbers of 10's and Aces, which is what most counting systems are based on. The extra accuracy you get from full simulation is not significant for play.

Before his 'work' on Blackjack (see Article by Ed Thorp and Beat The Dealer) Ed invented, along with Claude Shannon, the world's first wearable computer.His Blackjack book inspired the MIT students who regularly 'raided' Las Vegas (see Bringing Down The House), and who have passed their knowledge from generation to generation.Later (1967) he became probably the first person to use the Black-Scholes option formulae. Starting his quantitative finance-based hedge fund shortly afterwards.You can see why we wanted his story for Issue 1 of the magazine!P

Wired is running a story about the latest in busting card counters.A technology called Quote MindPlay works by placing a set of 14 digital cameras around a specially built blackjack table tray. The optical equipment registers every card in play by reading special invisible ink printed on themWhile reading Bringing Down the House there is a mention of "plymouth" an agency which identifies and tracks with a database a list of card counting teams, this is believed to be Griffin investigations This is a service every casino apparently subscribes to or risk losing tons of money."plymouth" although a tad disappointing to the card counter is still fair game, but Mindplay does appear to alter the game altogetherwith the dealer possibly having an edge and access to the odds.. that seems a little unfair. Shouldn't the players and the dealers play by the same rules ?