Category Archives: Poker-Free Content

The Benford’s Law Hustle™

Posted by on March 9, 2012 Comments Off on The Benford’s Law Hustle™

Hi, poker blog readers! I was going to post this on my new nerd blog, and maybe I’ll do that as well. But, I figured that poker players might like this, even if it’s not strictly related to poker.

Basically, this is the simplest, most convincing +EV prop bet that I know of. In other words, it’s an awesome hustle. I’ve occasionally imagined walking into a poker room, finding the nearest guy with a visible newspaper or smart phone, and leaving with his money in my pocket, but unfortunately, nerds don’t make good hustlers.

Here’s how you do the Benford’s Law Hustle™:

  1. Walk into a casino and find one of a very large class of (pseudo)random number generators that roughly satisfy Benford’s law. (Don’t cheat and google that yet.) You can pick random numbers from newspaper articles (Turn to page A5 and find the first number in the first article) or something similar. Tons of things will work; just about the only things that won’t will be numbers from casino games. (E.g., dice and keno boards are no good.)
  2. Find someone who’s willing to bet on the first digit of the random number. (The first digit of 2,458,193 is two. Nothing fancier than that)
  3. Bet on one and two.
  4. Give your opponent both eight and nine.
  5. Lay two to one… (E.g., you pay him $200 if the number is 8,283 or 9,722, and he pays you $100 if the number is 10,136 or 2. If it’s 637, then no money changes hands.)
  6. Make an absurd profit.

Wait… what?

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New Blog

Posted by on January 3, 2012 Comments Off on New Blog

Hi blog readers.

I just started another one of these things. It’s called Solipsist’s Log, and it’s conveniently located at http://www.solipsistslog.com.

I’ll write about non-poker stuff that interests me there. Topics of interest include virtually anything nerdy, with a specialization in computer science theory. (I’m currently waiting to hear back from PhD programs in that field.) I assume that my readership will start out as roughly the nerdier 10% of the people who read Subject: Poker or this blog, most of whom don’t have formal math training. So, for now at least, I’ll try to keep the content accessible to laypeople.

My first post is about my favorite fact: the halting problem. I also made one of those introductory posts that typically accompany new blogs.

So, check it out if you like that sort of thing.

I’ll still maintain my this blog in the sense that I won’t rule out writing future posts for it–I’ve even got some in mind—but, as a blogger with a history of breaking promises to his readers, I ain’t makin’ no more of those right now.

As always, you can follow me on Twitter if you want to stay up-to-date on NoahSD-related news.

Your Body Is Awesome and Really Complicated; Please Don’t Trust It To Idiots and Charlatans. (No Poker Content)

Posted by on February 14, 2011 21 comments

(Seriously.. No poker content at all.)

The human body is unquestionably the most complicated machine that any person has ever encountered, and it’s likely to hold that title. Each of the about 6.8 billion people on Earth is composed of a unique set of roughly 100 trillion cells (Whenever you hear the word trillion, be amazed) of a huge variety of types. Each of these cells is way more complicated and elegant than your high school bio textbook said. The organelles in your cell exist in this terrifyingly confusing and surreal world in which incredibly weird objects of a huge variety of scales interact according to the bizarre laws of organic chemistry, three-dimensional geometry, and quantum mechanics. This is explained way better than I ever could by this insanely awesome video created for Harvard students:

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