Ed was initially an academic, but he favored learning by doing, with his skin in the game. When you reincarnate as practitioner, you want the mountain to give birth to the simplest possible strategy, and one that has the smallest number of side effects, the minimum possible hidden complications. Ed’s genius is demonstrated in the way he came up with very simple rules in blackjack. Instead of engaging in complicated combinatorics and memory-challenging card counting (something that requires one to be a savant), he crystallizes all his sophisticated research into simple rules:
