The House Advantage: Playing the Odds to Win Big In Business
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- ISBN13: 9780230622722
- Condition: New
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Product Description
As part of the notorious MIT Team depicted in Ben Mezrich’s now classic Bringing Down the House, Jeff Ma used math and statistics to master the game of blackjack and reap handsome rewards at casinos. Years later, Ma has inspired not only a bestselling novel and hit movie, but has also ongoing three different companies—the latest of which, Citizen Sports, is an innovative marriage of sports, betting, and digital equipment—and launched a successful corporate language career. The House Advantage reveals Ma’s cutting-edge algebraic insights into the world of statistics and makes them applicable to a wide business audience. He argues that numbers are the key to analyzing nearly everything in the world of business, from how to spot and profit from global market inefficiencies to having multiple backup plans in anticipation of every probability. Ma’s tales and business lessons are as intriguing as they are universally applicable.
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There are two types of books you can read about business statistics: persons that clarify the science and persons that clarify the application. The House Advantage is fundamentally about the later. For a couple of years now I’ve been trying to apply a data driven culture at my company. Getting to the data is the simple part for many, understanding what to do with it is the hard part. Some of the mistakes we make are pure science (looking at averages rather than distributions) but most of them are about application.
The House Advantage is primarily about the subtlety of using statistics to drive decisions. Through many examples from his days as a professional card counter and sports statistician Jeff shows practical examples of where statistics can be used in the incorrect way even with the best of intentions. What THA does is layout a framework for how to approach choice building through statistics. While the book is not all ears on point business examples, it’s a tiny leap to know how to apply the ones Jeff outlines.
As an example, consider analyzing customer churn excise in a month to month service. When doing so, one needs to know the statistical distribution of how long customers stay with you and why they choose to place. If you pull all your churn rate data and analyze it you might determine that customers on average stay with your service 4.6 months. But is there omission bias here? What about customers that haven’t left yet? Perhaps you just added a feature that would increase retention 2x but you’re only 2 weeks into offering that feature.
This kind of scenario and the application based thinking is what this book is about. It’s meant to be consumed whole in the same way that statistics are meant to be consumed in context. For anyone serious about using statistics in the business the right way, this is a thoughtful primer to read before you wade into the data.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Each chapter is a gem. Ma weaves so many different areas together to tell such a compelling tale that you end up learning something on every page.
Politics, sports, gambling, finance — he connects them in a delicate yet thorough way, and he doesn’t just analyze existing or common tales, he interviews all the key players, researchers, managers, gamblers, and traders to uncover hidden depths.
The chapter on the hot hand is the single best discussion of the topic I have ever seen, and it is a topic that has seen a lot of ink spilled. And his view on it, coming from what you might reflect is just a pure analytical, algebraic perspective, is at the same time surprising and alluring. If you read nothing else from the book but the hot hand chapter, it is already worth the money.
And every chapter is like that. I have read some literary intuition research and all-purpose intuition studies, and Ma’s chapter on intuition is the most insightful thing about it I have ever read.
I don’t want to tell you his conclusions about the hot hand and intuition, because I wouldn’t have wanted to know them before I read it, but it is worth reading and enjoying.
Ma has a creative mind and a unique approach to problems that is calmly analytical, and he has the same measured approach to emotions, neither vilifying nor worshiping them, but acknowledging them as an input to be weighed and analyzed.
His blackjack exploits introduce the chapters and are not only thrilling to read but also help plant an image in your mind about the particular point being made. Unlike many additional business books, you will really remember the lessons and suggestions here, because they are expressed in such a holistic and visual way.
Brilliant book.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Loved the book. My wife and I own a tiny laundromat and I’m also just finishing an Accounting Degree at Brigham Young University-Idaho and had been putting off taking my required statistics class. Last semester I bit the bullet and made it through with a B+. Reading through this book made me wish I had read it before taking my statistics class. It helped me to gain a deeper appreciation for statistics and their uses and now I want to take an advanced statistics course to increase my knowledge of the theme. Ma doesn’t make the topic too heavy but he show the power of numbers in a simplified fashion that would make any kind of a math geek step back and smile at the prospects.
Fantastic read would recommend it to any tiny business owner like myself or any additional huge choice maker for any company.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
I loved Jeff Ma’s book because it showed the rather obvious, but regularly less discussed, positive correlation between business and gambling. Jeff shows how many of the “tricks” and “rules” of playing winning blackjack can and should be used in business. I especially loved the last couple of chapters that really pulled into focus the importance of knowing the hopes and fears of the people who you are effective with/for or against. It hit home for me the fact that sometimes a straight line is not the best way to get from point A to point B.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
As a name with a very similar background to Ma’s (engineering background, entrepreneur funding a company while playing poker well, and heavily involved in sports analytics from a extrapolative standpoint) I establish this book to be an an articulation and formalization of concepts that every successful gambler has honed and inherently understands and has a tough time explaining to the all-purpose population. By definition, gamblers have trained themselves to evaluate the EV of every situation and make the most +EV choice while remaining emotionally detached from the results. Successful gamblers also know bankroll management and non-results oriented thinking. We’re trained to learn from examination and error, to right mistakes via feedback, but variance has an inherent way of throwing these feedback mechanisms off. The way to better decisions, as Ma says, is to know the underlying mathematics, question the right questions, and maintain discipline.
Perhaps the most glowing recommendation I can make about this book is via my own personal experience. For the past couple months I’ve had a conversation with my father, a trained engineer and a brilliant man, about poker and investing. Each time, I tried to make the case for non results oriented thinking. The first example, I brought up the fact that I was up a large amount playing poker in Vegas and finished up marginally up. His statement is that I should have quit while yet to be while my argument was that as long as I had an advantage (I was +EV in the game) I should try to realize this advantage by playing as many hours as possible, because in the long run, I’d hit my hourly expectation. He argued while that was right, my time horizon in Vegas was 1 weekend. I tried, unsuccessfully to argue with him that my time horizon was every time I played poker going forwards, assuming my underlying assumptions about my EV in the game was still right.
Likewise, he owned a stock that he bought at 3.00 which went to 16.00. He didn’t sell it and kept adage he should have sold it while I argued that the stock was either +EV to own (undervalued), or overvalued and he should sell. If he thought it was undervalued, he should buy more, wagering a part of his retirement account (his bankroll) proportionate to his edge. The fundamental mistake he made was overbetting on that stock and his inability to separate himself emotionally from the results agreed his limited time horizon (retirement looming).
Ma’s text does a fantastic job of explaining these concepts to a name who hasn’t honed these thought processes, a name with no gambling or statistical background.
I reflect the book could have used a small bit more detail and explanation of some of the technical concepts. While Ma does a fantastic job of simplifying the concepts, he doesn’t provide very in depth technical explanation (he may have lost his audience). For example, more specifics on some of the metrics the 49ers used, more in depth explanation of the Kelly criterion, expected growth, how to manage an investment bankroll in relation to Kelly.
Either way, it’s a book that I reflect everyone should read and persons familiar with the concepts will gain something from it.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5