''The Eudaemonic Pie'' is a non-fiction book about gambling by American author
Thomas A. Bass. The book was initially published in April 1985 by
Houghton Mifflin
The asterisk ( ), from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , ''asteriskos'', "little star", is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star.
Computer scientists and mathematicians often voc ...
.
Overview
The book focuses on a group of
University of California, Santa Cruz
The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of ...
, physics graduate students (known as the
Eudaemons
The Eudaemons were a small group headed by graduate physics students J. Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard at the University of California Santa Cruz in the late 1970s. The group's immediate objective was to find a way to beat roulette using a conc ...
) who in the late 1970s and early 1980s designed and employed miniaturized computers, hidden in specially modified platform soled shoes, to help predict the outcome of casino
roulette games. The players knew, presumably from the earlier work of Shannon and Thorp, that by capturing the state of the ball and wheel and taking into account peculiarities of the particular wheels being played they could increase their odds of selecting a winning number to gain a 44 percent advantage over the casinos.
[''The Eudaemonic Pie'', page 59. Authors Guild backprint edition, 2000.]
British edition
A British edition was published under the title ''The Newtonian Casino''.
Sequel
The major players in ''The Eudaemonic Pie'' are also featured in a sequel by the same author, ''The Predictors'', about their subsequent careers in the world of finance.
See also
Similarly themed books include:
*''
Bringing Down the House'' (2002)
*''
Busting Vegas
''Busting Vegas'' (stylized as ''Busting Vega$'') is a 2005 book by Ben Mezrich about a group of MIT card counters and blackjack players commonly known as the MIT Blackjack Team. The subtitle of the original, hardcover edition was ''The MIT ...
'' (2005)
*''
Straight Flush
In poker, players form sets of five playing cards, called ''hands'', according to the rules of the game. Each hand has a rank, which is compared against the ranks of other hands participating in the showdown to decide who wins the pot. In high ...
'' (2013)
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Eudaemonic Pie
Non-fiction books about gambling