Start Bank: $198,00
Made a profit of $16,65 yesterday on another record-breaking stake of $161,99 over
41 bets in the horseracing place markets.
The edge now stands at 11,42% after 633 bets, total staked: $1 844,46, total profit: $210,65 after 29 betting days.
Projected date for buying Florida dream home is now Oct. 25, 2011
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John Kelly understood compounding perfectly
On June 7, 1955, American television debuted a new quiz show called The $64,000 Question. The show was a sensation. It captured as much as 85 percent of the viewing audience and led to dozens of copycat shows. Kelly heard about a peculiar scam in the news. Some viewers of The $64,000 Question were placing bets on which contestants would win. The show was produced in New York and aired live on the East Coast. It was delayed three hours on the West Coast. According to the news story, one West Coast gambler learned the winners by phone and placed his bets before the West Coast airing.
Thinking about this convinced Kelly that a gambler with "inside information" could use some of Shannon's equations to achieve the highest possible return on his capital. Shannon was intrigued by this application and urged Kelly to publish his finding. Kelly's article appeared (under the opaque title "A New Interpretation of Information Rate") in a 1956 issue of the Bell System Technical Journal.
Kelly wryly presented his idea as a system for betting on fixed horse races. A "gambler with a private wire" gets advance word of the races' outcomes. The natural impulse is to bet everything you've got on the horse that's supposed to win. But when the gambler adopts this policy, he is sure to lose everything on the first bum tip. Alternatively, the gambler could play it safe and bet a minimal amount on each tip. This squanders the considerable advantage the inside tips supply.
In Kelly's analysis, the smart gambler should be interested in "compound return" on capital. He showed that the same math Shannon used in his theory of noisy communications channels applies to the gambler. The gambler's optimal policy is to maximize the expected logarithm of wealth. Though an aggressive policy, this offers important downside protection. Since log(0) is negative infinity, the ideal Kelly gambler never accepts even a small risk of losing everything.
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