Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market, and Just About Everything Else

Chance by Amir D Aczel is quite the gem. This slim volume on probability is packed with information and applications. The book makes for a great primer to the subject, mainly due to its focus on practical applications rather than some ivory tower pure mathematics.

Pros and cons of the book are as follows;
The book is very short.
Despite that, the book is packed with information.
While it has few equations, it does not detract from the enjoyment.
The book contains a lot of gambling and gaming advice.
The end of the book contains workable problems with solutions.

-Some typos still exist in this book, mainly misspellings.
-Some of the advice is silly.

When I took this out from the Library I was not sure if I had read it before, but that does show more not seem to be the case. If you can find it out there, this book might be worth your time. show less

Slender volume, good in parts, but patchy and not very well edited. The substitution of "match" for "natch" (short for naturally) really jumps out at the reader.

The nineteen chapters are quite short. I'ld say that the chapter 1 through 11 are all quite good. The remaining chapters are inferior for several reasons. The formulas are exceedingly poorly typeset, so as to be nearly incomprehensible. Sometimes, several reductions are required to arrive at a simplified or numeric solution; these reductions are even less readable than the individual formulas. Some of the applications of probability are unconvincing or stupid. As the claims get larger the amount of supporting mathematics presented is simply not enough to back them up, so they show more seem vacuous. The problems are fun, and the von Neumann device introduced in one problem is clever and pleasing.

The frequent mention of Persi Diaconis reminds me of the one time when he was a guest lecturer at the UW-Madison when I was a graduate student. As math lectures go his was memorable. show less