Way of the turtle

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Way of the Turtle

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on any combination of cards up to 16. If there are a large number
of high cards remaining in the deck, that means that there is a
higher possibility that one of these cards will cause the house to go
bust, since any combination of cards over 21 points will cause the
house to lose.
So a skillful card player plays with small bets during the major-
ity of the time when the house has an edge. They lie in wait for
the occasion when due to random chance the player gains a tem-
porary edge over the house. At these times the players bet with
large bets to press their advantage over the house. In practice, this
is not so easy because one sure way of getting noticed by the
house and getting kicked out of the casino is to bet minimums
and then suddenly bet maximums when the odds turn in your
favor. 
This is one of the reasons that many successful gamblers oper-
ate in teams. One team member might count at the table and then
indicate to another team member when the odds had turned. That
other member would show up as a new player and then proceed
to bet from the start at a much higher level. Team members would
then pool their money at the end of the night. These methods
work because the professional gamblers have a system with an
edge.
Rich and Bill taught us expectation so we would have a firm
intellectual basis for being able to continue with our methods dur-
ing the periods of losing trades which come when trading any strat-
egy. The systems we were taught had a very significant edge during
the markets when we traded them. Expectation was one way of
quantifying that edge. It was also an intellectual foundation for
avoiding the outcome bias.
The First $2 Million Is the Toughest
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35

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Remember outcome bias: the tendency to judge a decision on
the basis of its outcome rather than on the quality of that decision
at the time it was made? We were trained explicitly to avoid out-
come bias, to ignore the individual outcomes of particular trades
and focus on expectation instead.