This article is excerpted from the forthcoming book Wrong Number (Wiley, May 12, 2026)
In 1974, an economist at the University of Nevada–Reno named Bill Eadington called a conference. He invited the obvious people — mathematicians who studied gambling, statisticians who modeled probability, economists who studied risk, psychologists who treated problem gamblers, casino executives, gambling regulators. Notably, he did not invite many finance professors, who in 1974 were largely uninterested in gambling and who would in any case have constituted a different and friendlier audience. The Reno academics were the applied-probability people, and they brought the applied-probability worldview: clean models, closed-form solutions, the assumption that anything resembling a free lunch could not, by virtue of being claimed, actually exist.
Read Full Article »
