A ciência da sorte: A matemática e o mundo das apostas: de loterias e cassinos ao mercado financeiro

by Adam Kucharski, George Schlesinger (Translator)

Um relato acessível e divertido do intercâmbio entre o mundo das apostas e a ciência

Houve um tempo em que a banca sempre ganhava. Agora, cientistas e matemáticos estão dando aos jogadores uma vantagem competitiva. Físicos domaram a aleatoriedade da roleta, cientistas de computação estão transformando a estratégia do pôquer e estatísticos sabem o que faz um cavalo campeão. Matemática e ciência revolucionaram os jogos de apostas.

Mas a recíproca é verdadeira: as apostas também revolucionaram a ciência e a matemática. Fermat e Pascal usaram jogos de dados para fixar as bases da teoria da probabilidade; Von Neumann e Turing acharam inspiração no pôquer; o jogo de paciência ajudou Stanis aw Ulam a desenvolver a bomba de hidrogênio. A busca pela aposta perfeita tem influenciado campos tão diversos quanto teoria do caos, psicologia comportamental e inteligência artificial.

Em A ciência da sorte, o premiado escritor Adam Kucharski nos leva por mesas de roleta de Las Vegas, loterias e pistas de corrida de cavalos de Hong Kong para contar a história de homens e mulheres que venceram a banca — e mudaram as nossas ideias fundamentais sobre chance, aleatoriedade e sorte. Num percurso que abrange matemática, psicologia, economia e física, você conhecerá robôs capazes de blefar e manipular oponentes, o matemático que jogou uma moeda para o alto 25.000 vezes para estudar probabilidade e universitários que lucraram explorando uma brecha nas loterias.

***

"Sensacional: belamente escrito, solidamente pesquisado e cheio de surpresas." New York Times, blog Numberplay

"Elegante e divertido... Se você planeja entrar num cassino ou apostar online, deveria manter esse livro por perto." Wall Street Journal

"O que torna o livro tão bom de ler é a maneira como as histórias são contadas: sempre com um viés humano que facilita acompanhar a narrativa e compreender os princípios por trás dela." Prospect Magazine

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Mathematics, Business, Finance, Economics, Popular Science

353 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 8, 2015

About the author

Adam Kucharski is a professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, an award-winning writer, and bestselling author of The Rules of Contagion, which was a Book of the Year in The Times, Guardian and Financial Times.

A mathematician by training, his work on global outbreaks has included Ebola, Zika and COVID. He is in the top 0.1% of cited researchers globally, and he has advised multiple governments and health agencies. He is a TED senior fellow and winner of the University of Cambridge Adams Prize and the Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize.

His writing has appeared in The Times, Observer, Financial Times, New Statesman and Wired, among others, and he has contributed to several documentaries, including BBC Horizon. He has spoken at venues like TED, Google and the Royal Institution, with his talks viewed over 6 million times online.

Reviews

[David Webber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I'm not a gambler at all, the game theory, math and science intrigue me, and this book delivers. Not so much in the specific instructions of how, but in the history and development of this industry at the highest level and the major leaps forward in statistics and computer science that drove it forward.

The author discusses topics as diverse as horse racing bets in Hong Kong to sports statistics and sabermetrics to stock market betting exchanges to the development of computer bots for blackjack, checkers, chess, poker -- all in an effort to show what great strides math, physics and computer modeling have taken to exploit small advantages of strategy, time or statistics. Many of the early strategies were developed from other mathematical or scientific theories -- or even (as in the case of Ulam) in work on a hydrogen bomb. However as betting became more lucrative and computers became faster, it quickly grew into a massive effort to develop the perfect systems and strategies. Frankly, it is shocking and sad how much effort, time and computational energy had gone into taking advantage of each other for profit. The book does not discuss the many lives that have been ruined by attempting to make a living off professional gambling.

From the Monte Carlo method to the Nash equilibrium to poker bots that utilize artificial intelligence, this book is a fascinating history of the role of math, science, statistics and computing in the human effort to take the luck out of gambling.

[Monika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nie myślałam, że ta książka tak mi się spodoba, a jednak.
Autor pokazuje piękno matematyki - w jak wielu dziedzinach życia jest ona obecna i jak doskonale potrafi opisać różne mechanizmy i wydarzenia dziejące się naokoło nas. I to tylko na podstawie gier hazardowych.
Książka omawia syndykaty, które obstawiają z sukcesem na wyścigach - dzięki matematycznym algorytmom. Zdrapki okazują się być matematycznie przewidywalne. Mecze piłki nożnej, osiągnięcia poszczególnych piłkarzy dają się zamknąć we wzorach statystycznych, z czego korzystają kluby piłkarskie, selekcjonerzy i bukmacherzy.
Na giełdach akcji główne transakcje są wykonywane przez boty, które szybko potrafią reagować na informacje i wydarzenia - przez co mogą powodować też niestety różne niepożądane spadki na giełdzie.
Ale okazuje się, że do osiągania sukcesów w grach hazardowych przydaje się także uczucie żalu. Dlaczego? Przeczytajcie koniecznie!

[Odo · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5.0

[Nick Davies · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well researched, readable, and interesting.. this was a very decent introduction to the subject, touching on casino gambling, the stock exchange, the lottery, game theory and the impact of AI and high-level computing. It was however a little underwhelming as far as I was concerned, which I acknowledge is probably mainly because I have read other books on similar subjects and hence relatively little of this was new to me. The title makes a bold claim that isn't completely realised within the book. However, there were a few little moments which I found intriguing, such as discussion of the limitation of sports statistics applied to the likes of top football defenders (who have so good a positional sense they seldom actually have to make a tackle) and top NFL cornerbacks (who are so good the opposing quarterback knows never to throw in their direction, hence they rarely ever touch the ball).

[Ardon · Rating 4 out of 5]

To me, making a bet and making a trade are almost equivalent actions. In both situations, you are acting without all the available information but are using various tools in order to develop an edge and identify good arbitrage opportunities (e.g. finding a value stock or a good time to bluff in poker). Indeed, many important mathematical tools have actually come out of academics looking to try to make money gambling! For example, Monte Carlo simulations came about because Stanislaw Ulam was trying to optimise his Solitaire performance.

Kucharski unveils the hidden mathematics and theory behind what appears to be rather senseless gambling, showing us how the science and maths of betting has evolved over the years, become increasingly rigorous and data driven. I really enjoyed the exploration of how computer bots have presented money-making opportunities for poker aficionados out there (albeit with an interesting set of challenges).

I’d wholeheartedly recommend this - it’s a very well-written and, ultimately, fun read.

[TheBookWarren · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 Stars - An excellent read for some light-hearted but comically intelligent fun.

As a big fan of using statistics in sports & casino game trends, this appealed to me on the shelf but was in-fact a far deeper & intriguing read than I had imagined. The author uses a combination of sarcasm and dry but sharp Witt to portray some truly incredible stories of very intelligent folk using numbers to their advantage.

A must for any Racing, sports, casino or card game enthusiast be it casual or hardcore, but an enjoyable read for anyone whom can appreciate a smart, witty & enlightening tale or two.

[Steve Gross · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun overview of current trends in gambling. The last chapter was kind of pointless.

[Elizabeth]

Heard the author speak about mathematics and infections disease and the approach he is taking to learn more about the spread of epidemics at TED2018.

[Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book about the application of mathematics to gambling and sports betting. The book started out discussing how gamblers have used math to beat casinos roulette table games. The author is a mathematician and didn't understand the information he was presenting was really physics and not math and could not be correct Without boring you with the scientific details the author repeated a story about a team that had a computer in a shoe and could tell where the little marble would end up, giving them a 20% edge over the house. What he was saying was nonsense. I was going to discard the book at that point, but decided to try a little more and was rewarded with the rest of the book being quite interesting (and correct) mathematics, and a description of the huge sports gambling industry that exists today around the world.
Recommended for those with an interest in sports betting and gambling.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bit esoteric but a very interesting review of gaming and how probabilities, chance, human factors and the nature of the game impact outcomes. Also an interesting reminder of how huge personalities in the high tech, mathematics and physics world have driven the understanding of all kinds of games and gaming. Probably only for those with at least a basic understanding of math and stochastic processes.

[Byrne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty light fare, even for pop-sci. 220 pages, big font, blank pages between chapters—I, too, have had a hard time hitting page count quotas.

But the content is good! Nice overview of computer-enhanced gambling, from Thorpe through the online poker bots.

[Chris Esposo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A satisfying tour through the mathematics and computing of gambling, some games of chance, and brief tour of "recent" (circa 2015) attempts to apply computing and AI to mastering those games. The author's premise is that there has been a bidirectional influence on gambling and games of chance on one end, and mathematics, computing, and statistics on the other. One would suspect the science to gambling direction, the book convincingly demonstrates the other direction. In demonstrating the direction from gambling to math, the author helps the reader understand the motivation for some of the "bread and butter" statistical tools she may have learned or currently use in practice. Therefore this book serves as a good supplementary text in an instructional setting for a basic probability or statistics course.

The book starts off with a survey of some casino games like roulette, blackjack etc., and describes how mid-18th-century statisticians attempted to analyze these games. The author does a good job of showing how these analyses as a type of informal multi-generational research program that motivated a lot of rich advances in the computing fields. From Pearson's classical distributional/tests, which drove statistical analysis that helped demonstrate bias in the game of roulette in the 19th century, to Poincare's analysis of the mechanics of the roulette ball, leading to insights in his "3-bodies problem", to yet a further evolution in the mid 20th century to study the roulette wheel using Monte-Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) simulation techniques in the early history of statistical computing in the 60s, at each step, the understanding of these games have helped refine and expand techniques in statistics and computer science.

The most interesting topics for me were the analysis of gambling on horse races or sports games, namely soccer, baseball, football, and basketball. As the author shows, modelling a horse race could be a matter of a straightforward regression from physical characteristics of the horse and jockey. However, a basketball or soccer game is much more intricate. Soccer, in particular, is a relatively low scoring game, thus offering little objective variation from a scores-standpoint for games that could be dramatically different in reality. This sort of thing would pose a challenge to a technique like simple regression analysis.

The last section of the book is the weakest, which is a small intro to the use of AI in gambling, specifically the building of bots and agents to compete in different versions of Poker, including card-games like 21. The treatment is standard, the book mentions Edward Thorpe, and his innovations in the study of 21, and more recent attempts at solving various games combinatorially (chess, checkers etc.). This section has less technical material and more history. It also missed the innovation of applying deep neural networks, accomplished by a team at CMU just a year or so after this book was published (perhaps a 2nd edition will include that?), a shame. I would say there are better books to read for card-games in particular if you're interested, including Thorpe's own book, "Beat the Dealer" and his autobiography.

Overall, the book is still pretty good and serves as a great unofficial sequel to the Drunkards Walk, dealing with topics that are "post-classical", whereas that book stopped with statistics developed in the 1700s. Like that book, this one goes more in depth into the material, although the Drunkards Walk probably more so. Yet, that material has a more elementary subject matter, so I guess it's a "toss-up". Definitely a recommend.

[Fuzzy Cow · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are eight chapters in this book. Each chapter looks at a different game or aspect of a game. The book kind of goes from old to new, showing how advances in math and science have changed how the smart player plays. For each chapter, the game is broken down and a flaw, if there is one, is exposed. Then the author goes through the history of how that flaw was exploited or the challenges overcome. This process starts with a scientific discovery or idea, describes it's context for discovery, then tells of it's surprising application to games of chance. This book doesn't tell you how to make money; it tells you how math, science and deliberate strategy are slowly chipping away at what humans interpret as luck. It's very cool.

I love games of chance. I love the idea that I can know everything about a system and still be surprised by the result. This makes me a bad gambler, but it makes a excited about gambling systems. I loved learning how these games are perceived to work, and how people have broken them down to their base essence to really figure out what's going on. There's so many concepts in this book that are fascinating. It's not just beating the system either. This book tells stories about how the human element, and how anticipating your opponent's actions can prove just as important as statistical analysis. Particularly I loved the chapter about bluffing and the history of how blackjack was broken.

With all books that have a kind of academic context, you need to have a base understanding of statistics to really understand what's going on. You need to know how these games work, and it wouldn't hurt if you had tried to break them yourself. There are certain barriers of entry for this book, but that doesn't mean it's completely esoteric. The language is very accessible. The stories are told with a focus on the humans developing the strategies, illustrating their personal quirks. The math and concepts are not brought out in force, but illustrated through examples and the occasional graph. They are briefly touched, shown vaguely how they work and then described exactly what aspect about them was needed for how they were used. This book was made to be read. If you've taken a class devoted to statistics, then you should be fine. If you're an enthusiastic player, someone who has tried to mechanically break the game down before, then you should have some touch stone for comparison.

This is an incredible book. It's not easy, and I found it took a little while to get into. However, once it got going every story was fascinating. I can tell that Adam loves poker, and his need to talk about poker bots is what drove him to write this book. With that said, it's hard to share this book, and not just because of it's mathematics nature. Gambling has such a connotation, upon first description most people have made up their minds about whether to listen to you or not. I'll admit, this problem is not the fault of the author or the book. But life's not fair.

[Alastair · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps I’ve simply read too many of these kinds of books recently. You tend to realise this when you start to recognise what must be obscure stories. Like how some students at MIT beat the Massachusetts’ state lottery, or how Kurt Gödel wanted to point out in his US citizenship interview how logical flaws in the constitution could open the way to a dictatorship.

I suppose I shouldn’t hold Adam Kucharski responsible for this, but I can’t help but feel that my awareness of all this repetition of my recent pop-maths reading betokens something more problematic.

The Perfect Bet – Taking the Luck out of Gambling seriously needs a through line, a thread to hold it all together. As it stands, we get a series of interesting, adequately written chapters coverings various happenings in the worlds of gambling and prediction, but with no clear reason why we are reading all these bits and pieces together.

Some chapters hold to the ‘taking on the house’ line on the book’s back cover, with stories like the MIT students who realised that a certain type of lottery resulting in (on average) a net pay-out (a very unusual position for any lottery to be in). Or clever betting strategies in blackjack that can make you (almost) break-even; throw a little card counting in and you can move nicely into the black (no pun intended). Then there are the chapters that discuss predictive models – covering topics like sports betting. The back of the book veers jarringly again, this time into discussion of automated poker machines and how to make computers unbeatable at various games.

Even this makes it sound more coherent than it is, though. The discussion of card games and probabilities brings in some history of probability discussion, making this feel very much like a popular maths history book. We get ‘statistics for dummies’ with descriptions of regression and overfitting in the chapters on prediction. From here, we stray into the theory of games and onto artificial intelligence and Turing’s test. It’s all incredibly bitty and utterly lacks any flow.

While much of the book is fairly well written and the science seems sound enough, there are some very poor sections. The layman description of regression was so bad that I (someone with a pretty good grounding in statistics) genuinely didn’t realise that the author was describing this very familiar technique. Admittedly, non-technical descriptions are not easy so perhaps I’m being over-harsh. Where I’m not being over-harsh is in calling out the awful use of the ‘scientific’ principle of Occam’s razor: scientists avoid putting too many parameters in models because they overfit, not for any questionable philosophical (note: not scientific) principle of least complexity.

This book went a bit awry. Kucharski did not, I believe, have a clear vision of what he wanted the book to cover, which is a pity. There are truly interesting sections of this book, but it almost wants to be a series of newspaper articles or blog posts – detailing this or that fascinating mathematical discovery or computational marvel – rather than a single work to be read straight through.

[William Schram · Rating 5 out of 5]

With The Perfect Bet, we find a well-researched exploration of how Gambling has contributed to the advancement of human knowledge. As long as Gambling has existed, there have been people trying to beat the system, to find a loophole or gambit that would give them the upper hand against the House. In some cases this has proved to be a fruitful endeavor, earning the person money and pushing forth the realms of probability and computation. In others, it might not have won money, but it did advance knowledge.

The book does meander a little bit, I thought it would start out with the development of Probability back in the 1500s with Cardano and then later on in the 1600s with Pascal and Fermat. While it does cover those things, it starts out with Roulette. Sprinkled throughout the book are the names of luminaries like Richard Feynman and John von Neumann. The Monte Carlo method arose from gambling, as did Markov Chains and other theoretical models. It even talks about Pseudorandom number generators and the like.

The book seems to go by game and by subject. For instance, it doesn’t treat computer-assisted gambling as one chapter but rather spreads instances throughout the book. It talks about famous gambling rings, Hong Kong horse races, crime syndicates, and other such topics. It even talks about the Watson appearance on Jeopardy as part of the development of Artificial Intelligence.

Gambling and Probability played a large part in the development of “the Super,” the Hydrogen Bomb. The same idea can be stated for computers though. Using the Monte Carlo Method, they were able to take large amounts of numbers and process them with the new electronic computers that were being developed.

So all in all this book was really fascinating and easy to read.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book reminded me a lot of The Signal and The Noise by Nate Silver. Both books are a whirlwind tour of topics steeped in uncertainty, prediction, and luck. However, while TSATN is more about modeling and creating predictions, The Perfect Bet focuses on games (of chance) and how it is possible to change the parameters of the games themselves. Many games and topics are discussed, the most interesting of which are: Roulette and the Eudaemons, Chaos Theory, Stability of Ecosystems (incl. stock markets), Arbitrage/Sports Betting, Modeling, Poker, Blackjack, and oddly enough, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.

When at it's best, the book sheds interesting light on how theories can come in and completely change the way we look at certain "random" processes. For example, the discussion of of how larger and more complex ecosystems reduce stability is an interesting one.

My principal frustration with this book is that, while it is heavy on examples, it is light on takeaways. Often the authors skips through applications of a theory so fast there is no real lesson to be learned. I think the book would have benefitted from a longer form discussion of the theories (and perhaps another 100 pages).

Overall I enjoyed it and would recommend it. 3.5 stars.

[Jorge Diaz · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first half of the book takes the reader on a fun and informative ride about probabilities and the clever people who have exploited flaws in different games, I really enjoyed it. The second half, however, was disappointing for me. I am more interested in the mathematics of the topic than the details about poker and horse races. The story about exploiting roulette at casinos barely mentions the fantastic developments by Ed Thorp and Claude Shannon and focuses on other less interesting stories filling pages and pages. I bought the book after watching the author's lecture at The Royal Institution available on YouTube (highly recommended).

[Mark Andrew Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable read into how first maths and later computational power increasing have allowed teams to develop bots and systems to attempt to profit from gambling. As a sports gambler found it interesting to see how people achieved success. And also how many systems encounter limitations as they progress. Enjoyed the theory relating to Texas hold ‘em poker as it’s something I’ve thought about attempting. But seeing the development of AI and how machines play something close to a “perfect game” maybe one to attempt in person as it maybe easier to fill in the blanks from being in the same room as opponents.

[Bryce · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a subject I've read a lot about because the intersection of science and gambling is interesting to me. This book didn't cover any new ground for me but it was very wide-ranging and did a good job of covering the background and explaining the basics of a lot of different fields. As a first book in this field, this would be an excellent choice.

The extensively noted list of sources is a nice bonus if you decided you wanted to dive deeper on one of the topics that is discussed in the book.

[Bjkeefe · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little superficial in some places. Not that I was hoping to discover secrets that would allow me to make a killing in the casinos, but I did crave more detail. I can appreciate the reluctance of authors to include "too much math" in general interest books, but I can also remind them, that's what appendices are for.

The recent explosion of sports gambling is a highly depressing (to me) story, so that didn't help me like the book. This might have been the best written part of the book, though.

[Tom Frost · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a pretty decent book. it explores betting strategy on casinos and sports from their origin to the present day. very interesting to anyone with these interests but probably not written in a way that would appeal wider. there was a fair amount in there I already knew. a fair amount I sort of knew but still plenty I didn't.
however the best bit for me was learning a card trick from a throwaway line.
I'm not going to make my millions after reading this. but I suspect Adam isn't going to make his from writing it either!!

[Helfren · Rating 5 out of 5]

What if there is a perfect bet? What if you could never lose? This book discusses the very interesting aspect of gambling, betting. The existence of mathematics is changing how the world winning casino and earning money through pure guess. Firs time knowing about the arbitrage which is the exploit of discrepancy in bet with large amount of bookmaker. Reach nash equilibrium based on game theory in order to achieve the neutrality over number of games.

[Orb Sole]

I still believe that in gambling, luck decides everything. No matter what algorithms are used, I don’t really understand them well enough to make conclusions about how they affect the outcome of my game. I like playing slots at winthepokies.com primarily because I don’t have to worry about the result. I completely let go of the situation and try to enjoy the game, even when I'm not having luck.

[Alinka Pakhomova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eu pessoalmente gosto da opção de jogo online. Frequentemente venho ao https://1win-bet-brasileiro.com.br . Selecionei um site desses de uma grande lista de cassinos online. Gostei do feedback de jogadores reais e do grande número de jogos. Eu penso nisso como um trabalho? Provavelmente não. Prefiro que isso continue sendo meu hobby, o que me dá surpresas agradáveis.

[Robert B · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cursory look at the ways gambling and scientific thinking, including game theory, statistics, and artificial intelligence, have influenced one another. Examples come from the usual Vegas-style games, like roulette and poker, as well as horse racing. The examples and stories are interesting, but there is little depth to the discussion.

[Maciek Orczykowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I was expecting work packed with equations, I need to give huge credit to this book. It delivers great experience, presenting the fascinating history of gambling-science romance.

Very well written, surprising and funny. The Perfect Bet helps to understand true nature of probability and its influence on our lives.

[Lei · Rating 4 out of 5]

The sport betting section is pretty good. The stories on roulette, blackjack and lottery have been [better] covered in books like Fortune's Formula and How not to be Wrong. I am not convinced that IBM's Deep Blue's indecision case has anything to do with Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Slightly more explicit math and more plots should improve the book further. It is still a fun read overall.

[Harry Harman]

Although the dealer and player both appear to have the same aim—drawing cards to get a total near to twenty-one—the dealer has the advantage because the player always goes first. If the player asks for one card too many, and overshoots the target, the dealer wins without doing anything.

[Mike Hill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bit all over the place. Didn't go deep enough to the topic for my liking, but was a pleasant listen. The listener gets a good overview of the topic and is challenged to think of probability Ina new way. One of the biggest points was how difficult to it is to simulate randomness and how some beliefs we have about probability are relatively new.

[Emiler Bernardo · Rating 3 out of 5]

O livro conta a relação histórica da ciência estatística e o mundo das apostas, como cientistas e apostadores desenvolveram as melhores estrategias para vencer a sorte, mas não necessariamente fala detalhadamente sobre as estratégias vencedoras.