Product Description

What are the odds against winning the Lottery, making money in a casino, or backing the right horse? Every day, people make judgements on these matters and face other decisions that rest on their understanding of probability: buying insurance, following medical advice, carrying an umbrella. Yet many of us have a frightening ignorance of how probability works. Taking Chances presents an entertaining and fascinating exploration of probability, revealing traps and fallacies in the field. It describes and analyses a remarkable variety of situations where chance plays a role, including football pools, the Lottery, TV games, sport, cards, roulette, coins, and dice. The book guides the reader round common pitfalls, demonstrates how to make better informed decisions, and shows where the odds can be unexpectedly in your favour. This new edition has been fully updated, and includes information on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" and "The Weakest Link", plus a new chapter on Probability for Lawyers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24350 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Most of us enjoy pleasant surprises and know that many of life's greatest rewards are obtained by taking chances. This is true whether we are playing the National Lottery or deciding whether or not to buy flowers when we are unsure if it might be our girlfriend's birthday. So if you enjoy taking chances, and winning--and it's a safe bet that you do--this book helps you do so in a more intelligent way.

John Haigh is Reader in Mathematics at Sussex University and his book covers a remarkably large number of topics. He tells you how to take chances playing the football pools and about the role of chance in sports such as tennis, golf, cricket and soccer. What points in tennis are most important? If a footballer gets a yellow card in 10 percent of games and is suspended for one game whenever he has accumulated two yellow cards, how often is he suspended? What is the chance that a team that scores the first goal goes on to win? He also writes about casino games, bridge and Monopoly, explaining why orange is the best colour of Monopoly property to own.

The book is practical rather than theoretical. It is written for anyone with a curious mind, aged perhaps 16 and up. It is not a textbook, but introduces concepts, such as random walk and game theory, that are familiar to professional mathematicians. There are technical appendices and test-yourself-quizzes for readers who want to explore more. A bonus is advice on the National Lotteries. Haig will help you choose UK National Lottery numbers that are more likely to give you a large prize. However, with typical vividness, he cautions that if the Lottery had begun with the ancient druids, and your ancestors had bought 50 tickets every week for the last 5000 years, then by now your family could expect to have won the jackpot just once! --Richard Weber

From the Publisher
Information about this book
Taking Chances Winning with Probability

John Haigh, University of Sussex

What are the odds against winning the Lottery, making money in a casino, or backing the right horse?

Every day, people make decisions that rest on their understanding of probability - buying insurance, following medical advice, carrying an umbrella - yet many of us have only the vaguest understanding of how probability works. Taking Chances presents an entertaining and practical exploration of probability, revealing traps and fallacies in the field. The book looks at a variety of situations where chance plays a role, including football pools, the Lottery, TV games, sport, cards, roulette, coins, and dice. The book guides us round common pitfalls, demonstrates how to make better informed decisions, and shows where the odds can be unexpectedly in our favour.

Curious facts and useful information found in John Haigh’s Taking Chances:

*How do the Football Pools, Premium Bonds and National Lottery match up? *What properties should you go for in Monopoly? *When should a football player risk a red card? *Where did Dostoyevsky and Graham Greene slip up in their roulette writings? *How does spread betting work? *Why should you ALWAYS buy flowers for your partner? *How often do the cards need shuffling? *How do you select the best hotel for your holiday?

About the Author
John Haigh is Reader in Statistics at the University of Sussex. His interest in probability was awakened by various card games, and he has made a particular study of lotteries, cards, and dice.

Customer Reviews

Probably the best introduction to gambling statistics
An excellent book looking at the application of probability to sporting propositions. It covers the pools, efficiently cheating at sports, fixed-odds casino games, and anything else you can bet on.

The nice thing about this book is that it proposes ways to turn a profit from each discovery (it doesn't work, but it's the right attitude). Along with probability theory the book has interesting factoids on most of the popular gambles in the UK.

There are some suprising ommissions: The financial markets are not mentioned. He has a long discussion of the number patterns chosen in large lotteries like the British Lotto, but he never calculates whether these leave the less popular combination under-invested enough to show a profit (they don't).

Like the author I was suprised by the results of his investigation into sequences. This chapter, detailing patterns in coin-flip series, is the best thing here and might teach you something even if you're an expert.

I can't give five stars here because some of the later chapters are overburdened with technical calculations that are just refinements of earlier material. I would have liked less of this detail and even more breadth.

Excellent introduction for the layman
I've bought quite a few books on probabilitytheory and stats lately (you can check my other reviews to verify) and I consider this book to be one of the most valuable in my growing collection.

Gambling adepts who mostly don't have a clue about the real odds, or miscalculate odds, might find this book very enlightening (or depressing depending on your preassumptions who are most likely to get smashed after reading this book).

If you are a mathphobic, you'll find the explications clear without being simplistic, and the practical value is excellent.

Adding an appendix in which all the calculations or concepts are mathematically backed up is an excellent surplus. This way, you can adopt the formula's needed to many different questions which involve getting a clear objective view on chance in a wide range of fields.

The title however, might bring false hope to the desperate ones. If anything, the author prooves beyond reasonable doubt how low the odds are exactly you could actually win big in popular gambling games such as the lottery or casino games.

In other cases, like investment, or sports betting, applying the knowledge in this book could be profitable. But, as the name 'probabilitytheory' implies: probability does not equal certainty. However, if you decide to gamble, one can better maximise his chances, what this book will teach you.

If you, like me, thought math and stats were simply not your cup of tea, have no fear. You won't be banging your head against the wall struggling with complicated formula's of which you are trying to figure out the symbols used. The author understands very well the art of explaining the complex in an approachable way which will keep you interested.

If you are a layman and would only buy one book on probabilitytheory, but can not decide which one: I can promise you from what I have read myself so far:

this is surely a very good way to start.

Slightly disappointing
I was hoping to use this book on my undergraduate course on numeric analysis (for social scientists). I guess I'm not the market the book was aimed at but I was disapointed that this book wouldn't be much use for my purposes. It's not particularly accessible for a 'popular science' type of text, and even though I'm fairly experienced in the field some of it was quite demanding. Top marks for including a chapter on the Prosecutor's Fallacy, though!