匹茲堡住了一個賭馬高手

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambler-who-cracked-the-horse-racing-code

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Benter was struck by the similarities between Kelly’s hypothetical tip wire and his own prediction-generating software. They amounted to the same thing: a private system of odds that was slightly more accurate than the public odds. To simplify, imagine that the gambling public can bet on a given horse at a payout of 4 to 1. Benter’s model might show that the horse is more likely to win than those odds suggest—say, a chance of one in three. That means Benter can put less at risk and get the same return; a seemingly small edge can turn into a big profit. And the impact of bad luck can be diminished by betting thousands and thousands of times. Kelly’s equations, applied to the scale of betting made possible by computer modeling, seemed to guarantee success.

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Between races, Benter struggled to make his algorithms stay ahead of a statistical phenomenon called gambler’s ruin. It holds that if a player with limited funds keeps betting against an opponent with unlimited funds (that is, a casino, or the betting population of Hong Kong), he will eventually go broke, even if the game is fair. All lucky streaks come to an end, and losing runs are fatal.

One approach—familiar to Benter from his blackjack days—was to adapt the work of a gunslinging Texas physicist named John Kelly Jr., who’d studied the problem in the 1950s. Kelly imagined a scenario in which a horse-racing gambler has an edge: a “private wire” of fairly reliable tips. How should he bet? Wager too little, and the advantage is squandered. Too much, and ruin beckons. (Remember, the tips are good but not perfect.) Kelly’s solution was to wager an amount in line with the gambler’s confidence in the tip.

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這一篇寫的很好，幫友，您看了嗎?