Ken's an Einstein, but what a waste!
From Wikipedia:
"At the age of 16 years, Uston was accepted to and henceforth began attending Yale University. Shortly after graduating from Yale, he went on to earn an MBA from Harvard University; subsequent to this latter achievement and after a couple of relatively short-term positions in the Northeast, he relocated to San Francisco, California, quickly climbing the corporate ladder to become the youngest Senior Vice-President in the history of the Pacific Stock Exchange...
...Uston related that he became fascinated by blackjack and its inherent strategies after meeting professional gambler Al Francesco in a poker game. Francesco had recently launched the first "big player" type of blackjack card counting team, and he recruited Uston to be one of his main team players.
Although Al Francesco and other team members have recounted in subsequent Blackjack Forum interviews that Uston made very little money for their team...
On the morning of September 19, 1987, Ken Uston, age 52, was found dead in his rented apartment in Paris, France. His official cause of death was listed as heart failure. "
According to the above, Ken was an Einstein, but he wasted his life in blackjack and died at the age of 52. I personally think that Ken would probably contribute/invent much more useful stuff in the financial world than in the blackjack world. Before you guys jump on my bones for my remarks, just think of Dr. Albert Einstein's contributions in physics (not bj!). What if Albert quit his physics world & became a bj player like Ken? Then today's high-tech stuff would not exist without Albert's inventions such as:
E = mc2
General relativity
Special relativity
Brownian motion
Summation convention
Photoelectric effect
Mass-energy equivalence
Einstein field equations
Unified Field Theory
Bose�Einstein statistics
EPR paradox
By the way, why did Dr. Edward Oakley Thorp stop wasting time in blackjack? An answer could be inferred from here:
"
Since the late 1960s Thorp has used his knowledge of probability and statistics in the stock market by discovering and exploiting a number of pricing anomalies in the securities markets he has made a significant fortune.. Princeton/Newport Partners was Thorp's first hedge fund, achieving an annualized net return of 15.1 percent over 19 years. He is currently the President of Edward O. Thorp & Associates, based in Newport Beach, CA. In May 1998 Thorp reported that his personal investments yielded an annualized 20 percent rate of return averaged over 28.5 years."
