The following is a post by John Mayer on his website.
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FREEDOM OF SPEECH VS. BLACKJACK MYTH OR IN DEFENSE OF O&A
From the book "Blackjack Bluebook II" by Fred Renzey:
"Most
serious blackjack players object to the order of the cards being
changed only when things are going well. And if they're losing, then
they in fact want to change the cards around so as to break the dealer's "hot streak". This suggests that if you're winning, then the following cards in the shoe are stacked in your favor, and shouldn't be tampered with. But in reality, all it means is that the previous cards in the shoe were stacked in your favor.
An enlightening study on just this kind of "streakiness" was reported on in Stanford Wong's highly recommended book, Professional Blackjack.
In that experiment, 20 million computer hands were run, recording the
win/lose results for the player immediately following two consecutive
wins, two consecutive losses and every possible two hand combination of
wins, losses and ties. The results?
VIRTUALLY NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ANY OF THEM!
The
player was no more likely to win his next hand just after having won
two in a row, than immediately after losing two in a row. So then, what
is there to be preserved in the order of the cards? In that regard,
every next hand is a brand new ball game."
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John here.
In the case of Opie and Anthony, and yes, even
Don Imus, they were hired and respected for their ability to stare the
dealer in the eye and hit on their 16 against an ace. When they drew a
five, they were revered for their gambling acumen. But when they
busted, as anyone in the ongoing gamble of speaking freely (now
semantically different than "free speech") does from time to time, they
were asked to hand in their player's cards and escorted to their
vehicles.
I
believe that free speech protects not what has already been spoken, but
what has yet to be said. Sure, once a sentence is constructed, the
words can be determined to be either winning or losing, as are the
cards in the discard pile. Except instead of obeying a static rule,
society is left to sift through the played cards and argue what should
beat the dealer, when we should have hit and stood, and just what the
hell we were doing that night in Vegas in the first place.
It seems to me that in this gamble, we should change either the odds or the payout.
Please feel free to leave your comments in the link not offered below.
POSTED BY JOHN MAYER AT 10:35 PM FROM NEW YORK, NY
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Dang that kid is smart.
Upon reflection this is what I think:
Adlai Stevenson once said newspapers separate the wheat from the chaff...and then print the chaff.
Doesn't it seem like all this stuff probably started because in the
absence of "real news" our media networks default back to celebrity
melodrama? Not that there isnt real news out there, (haven't seen too
much coverage of what's going on in Darfur on the networks) our news media just seems to think we are really interested in this stuff.
Like most of America
I had no idea who Imus was before all this started, and even though I
have XM I've only listened to about 5 minutes of Opie and Anthony, and
I had forgotten who they were too.
The way I see it, the
lazy journalists (if you want to call them that) that work for the
cable news networks were just looking for an easy story. Some obscure
"national syndicated" shock jock makes a woefully uncool bomb of a joke
about the Rutgers women's basketball team, Al
Sharpton gets involved and all of a sudden we've got a media frenzy.
Imus gets fired, followed by a few other uberconservatives that I've
never heard of. Then Opie and Anthony get suspended. I guess it's just
the p.r. market correction: sacrifice a few token liberals to the gods
of celebrity consumption to balance out the slaying of the
conservatives. Meanwhile there are people with real problems out there
that aren't "newsworthy".
Freedom of speech protects you from the government; it doesn't guarantee your job security in the private sector.
Do I feel sorry for any of these guys? ....No way. They've bankrolled
some serious dough doing what they do. Heck, getting fired will
probably turn out to be a great career move. Book deals, interviews,
speaking engagements, nah, these guy's will be just fine.
Frankly, I'm surprised we are still talking about this stuff.
What is disturbing to me about all this is the size of the audiences out there that keep these guys on the air and in business.
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