Word: parlay
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Tall, talkative Albert Hibbs, a graduate student in mathematics at Chicago, had devised the system on a bet with Medical Student Roy Walford. They took a term off from the university to try it out. It was a "progressive parlay" based on mathematical probability, some intricate slide-rule calculations, and two assumptions: that any roulette wheel follows a pattern of its own, and that good or bad luck runs in streams. The key to the Hibbs-Walford approach: increase bets in streams of good luck, never increase or reduce them in streams of bad luck...
Dewey supporters knew they would have to pile up enough votes to win the nomination on an early ballot, before any such combustion could take place. To that end they tried to parlay a firm core of Dewey delegates into an illusion of Dewey's inevitability, thus roll up an overwhelming slate of backers well ahead of time. The kind of delegates they wanted were stampede-proof, blitz-proof, down-the-line Dewey...
Since 1930 the dictator has averaged $1,000 a day from his salt monopoly. The national lottery, nominally run by his brother-in-law Ramon Savinon, nets $15,000 a month. Brother Anibal makes the mahogany concession worth $400,000 a year. But the slickest parlay is in cattle. The biggest cattle raiser in the Republic, the Benefactor operates the most modern slaughterhouse, and sets his own price on all cattle sold in the country. The slaughterhouse, built with an Export-Import Bank loan, nominally belongs to the state; so do the ships that carry Trujillo's beef...
Meanwhile, three horses, one for each principal, do a lot of running, over a plethora of courses in England, South America and the U.S. They are nobly beautiful animals and interesting to watch. But for all their running, they cannot parlay Homestretch into anything better than just another race-track picture...
...election day, 675 hastily coached Talmadge backers scratched Old Gene's name off their ballots and wrote in Hummon's. This placed him second to Gene's 143,279. When Old Gene died, Hummon and an ex-Georgia legislator named Roy V. Harris set out to parlay this handful of paper into the governorship. They put their faith in a line in the constitution which read: "If no person shall have [a] majority (of the total votes cast) then from the two persons having the highest number of votes . . . the General Assembly shall immediately elect a governor...