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"Although the major gambling casinos do not maintain statistical records on the results of games of Craps, one event has been recorded-that wherein a young man achieved 28 consecutive "passes" at the D…"

"A weakness of the random-walk model lies in its assumption of instantaneous adjustment, whereas the information impelling a stock market toward its "intrinsic value" gradually becomes disseminated thr…"

"While no rigorous proof of an optimal strategy has been achieved, Robbins has proposed the principal of "staying on a winner" and has shown it to be uniformly better than a strategy of random selectio…"

"The first-known public lottery was sponsored by Augustus Caesar to raise funds for repairing the city of Rome; the first public lottery awarding money prizes, the Lotto de Firenze, was established in …"

"One of the oldest mythological fables tells of Mercury playing at dice with Selene and winning from her the five days of the epact ."

"A proven theorem of game theory states that every game with complete information possesses a saddle point and therefore a solution."

"The earliest full-length account of a chariot race appears in Book xxiii of the Iliad."

"Shortly after pithecanthropus erectus gained the ascendancy, he turned his attention to the higher-order abstractions."

"Breaking the bank at Monte Carlo" is a euphemism for closing a single gaming table. It was last accomplished at the Casino Ste. des Bains de Mer during the final days of 1957, with a harvest of 180 mi…"

"In 1423, the Franciscan friar St. Bernardino of Siena preached a celebrated sermon against cards at Bologna, attributing their invention to the devil. Despite such ecclesiastic interdiction, Johannes …"

"The assumption that individuals act objectively in accordance with purely mathematical dictates to maximize their gain or utility cannot be sustained by empirical observation."

"From a rational standpoint, it might be expected that man should be far more willing to express financial confidence in his skills rather than risking his earnings on the mindless meanderings of chanc…"

"Against human opposition the machine usually emerges victorious, since individual patterns tend to be not random but a function of emotions and previous training and experience."

"Reflecting an amalgam of economics, monetary, and psychological factors, the stock market represents possibly the most subtly intricate game invented by man."

"Because the fluctuations in the composition of the deck as it is dependent over successive trials, it is intuitively apparent that altering decisions or the magnitude of the wager or both in accordanc…"

"Anthropologists have often commented on the striking resemblance between the uneducated gambler and the primitive."

"Coin matching and finger flashing were among the first formal games to arise in the history of gambling. The class of Morra games extends back to the pre-Christian era, although not until comparativel…"

"Generally, a betting system for which each wager depends only on present resources and present probability of success is known as a Markov betting system."

"In our most Puritan of society, gambling-like other pleasures-is either taxed, restricted to certain hours, or forbidden altogether. Yet the impulse to gamble remains an eternal aspect of the irration…"

"Contract Bridge is likely the most challenging card game extant; it is certainly the the most obsessive for its ranks of zealous followers. The initial progenitor of all Bridge forms is the game of Tr…"

"Treatment of the apparently whimsical fluctuations of the stock quotations as truly non stationary processes requires a model of such complexity that its practical value is likely to be limited. An ad…"

"The essence of the phenomenon of gambling is decision making. The act of making a decision consists of selecting one course of action, or strategy, from among the set of admissible strategies."

"The hope of a positive expected gain lies in detecting a wheel with sufficient bias."

"The French philosopher Pierre-Hyacinthe Azaïs formalized the statement that good and evil fortune are exactly balanced in that they produce for each person an equivalent result."

"Blackjack does possess a memory and a conscience and is not democratic ."

"There are no conventional games involving conditions of uncertainty without risk."

"In general statistics can be considered as the offspring of the theory of probability, it builds on its parent and extends the area of patronymic jurisdiction."