Word: thorp
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...DETECTIVE by Roderick Thorp. 598 pages. Dial...
Those who pursue this detective story to its finish may be reminded of a Rube Goldberg invention, not because it is comically ingenious but because the elaborate machinery of its plot does not justify the picayune results. The awesome bulk of Author Thorp's contraption is achieved by extraneous detail; he is one of those authors who, having informed the reader that some character has picked up a phone, cannot get on with the story before informing the reader that the character has put the phone down. Thorp, his publisher and the Literary Guild (whose June selection...
...This is Thorp's basic strategy; his full-dress system involves a much more complex technique of betting in terms of the number of tens, aces and fives remaining in the deck in relation to the number of cards left in the pack before the next shuffle...
...Small Martingale. Professional gamblers generally take Mathematician Thorp and his computerized charts with a sneer and a leer; system players, they say, are always ultimate losers because they play on and on, giving the house odds a chance to operate. The only successful system, known as the Small Martingale, is to double the bet after each losing play, a maneuver the casinos effectively counter by establishing a bet limit. With a limit of $500, a doubler starting at $1 would have to bet an illegal $512 after only nine consecutive losses...
...Thorp claims, however, that in Reno and Las Vegas the casino operators took him very seriously indeed after the system began to click. The dealer's most effective stratagem is to shuffle between each hand. This destroys Thorp's carefully arrived at calculations, but the operators use it only as a last resort because it slows down the play at the table and hence the overall profit...