A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market

by Edward O. Thorp

model is a simplified version of reality, like a street map that shows you how to travel from one part of a city to another or the vision of a gas as a swarm of tiny elastic balls ceaselessly bouncing against one another. I learned that simple devices such as gears, levers, and pulleys follow basic rules. You could discover the rules by experimenting and, if you got them right, could then use the rules to predict what would happen in new situations. Most amazing to me was the magic of a crystal set—an early primitive radio made with wire, a mineral crystal, and headphones. Suddenly, I heard voices coming from hundreds or thousands of miles away, carried through the air by some mysterious process. The notion that things I couldn’t even see followed rules I could discover just by thinking—and that I could use what I discovered to change the world—inspired me from an early age. Because of circumstances, I was largely self-taught and that led me to think differently. First, rather than subscribing to widely accepted views—such as you can’t beat the casinos—I checked for myself.