Some Interesting Things About Gambling

Posted by amirthaa on September 27th, 2010

Gambling is a great way to pass the time for most of us, but to a small few, gambling is a very serious
sport by which they make their bread and butter from, and if you?re good enough at it, we?re talking
a lot of fancy bread and truckloads of butter. High-stakes gambling is an old trade, perhaps not as
old as prostitution, but an old trade nevertheless and a few people have gotten very, very good at it.

Of course when I say high-stakes gambling, I?m not talking about the people who put their house, wife
and children as chips on the table in order to make the next bet, I?m talking the actual polished, card-
counting, strategy-planning, high-swinging professional that takes the sport of gambling as seriously as
Tiger Woods swings a club.

An example of a famous gambler is John Montagu, he was the Earl of Sandwich and had a most
unfortunate gambling problem but because of his addiction to the tables the sandwich was invented
simply because he wanted a faster meal!

Another group of very famous gambler are the MIT Blackjack group. Sounds like espionage about to
happen doesn?t it? Well it does get pretty fancy. It began in the late 70?s when these brilliant MIT
geniuses attended a class on gambling and learned about card-counting. Well, between the lot of them
they probably had enough IQ points to start their own gravitational pull so they came up with the idea
of bringing their card counting skills to the Blackjack tables.

The MIT Blackjack Team began recruiting other members from around campus to join their little club,
and created difficult tests in order to be rest assured that the people they were picking to be in their
team could truly handle themselves at the high-stakes tables. In fact, blackjack tables were even
simulated so that these people could become accustomed to how the systems worked in a real casino!

Eventually however one the MIT Blackjack Team started doubling their original seed money of 5,000 US
Dollar, and then tripling it and then quadrupling that, casinos began catching whiffs of card-counters,
which are if you didn?t know, basically people who looked at the cards that were on the table and
then did some fancy math in order to calculate which cards were left and what was most likely where.

Once the casinos heard about it however they began taking precautions against these high-stakes
geniuses and started weeding them out one by one, in effect making card counting a very dangerous
game to play at casino tables today.

Gambling is probably one of the sports in the world that is played or practiced everywhere, and takes
root in all cultures. For some reason it seems to be in our innate natures to bet on stakes, whether it?s
a race, an outcome or the luck of the draw, and as long as there has been gambling, there has been
some hero in the backdrop trying to cheat. I suppose that?s what makes it fun isn?t? Playing with fire and
getting away with not getting burned.