Mathematics
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Can You Win?: Real Odds for Casino Gambling, Sports Betting and Lotteries
We all dream of hitting the big one, but what are the odds? You can learn them from Mike Orkin. Orkin gives us the facts about gambling: how to calculate the odds of winning any particular bet, and what the best bets really are.Read more
£13.30 -
Crickonomics: The Anatomy of Modern Cricket: Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Sports Book Awards 2023
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES SPORTS BOOK AWARDS 2023 – CRICKET BOOK OF THE YEAR.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE CRICKET SOCIETY AND MCC BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2023.
SELECTED AS ONE OF WATERSTONES BEST SPORT BOOKS OF 2022.
A CRICKETER BOOK OF THE YEAR.‘Superb’ Matthew Syed, The Times
‘Fascinating’ The Observer
‘Crickonomics is packed with sufficient statistical analysis to have the most ardent cricket geek purring with pleasure’ Mail on Sunday
‘An insightful, Hawk-Eye-like analysis of the numbers behind cricket’ Financial Times
An engaging tour of the modern game from an award-winning journalist and the economist who co-authored the bestselling Soccernomics.
Why does England rely on private schools for their batters – but not their bowlers? How did demographics shape India’s rise? Why have women often been the game’s great innovators? Why does South Africa struggle to produce Black Test batters? And how does the weather impact who wins?
Crickonomics explores all of this and much more – including how Jayasuriya and Gilchrist transformed Test batting but T20 didn’t; English cricket’s great missed opportunity to have a league structure like football; why batters are paid more than bowlers; how Afghanistan is transforming German cricket; what the rest of the world can learn from New Zealand and even the Barmy Army’s importance to Test cricket.
This incisive book will entertain and surprise all cricket lovers. It might even change how you watch the game.
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£9.50£11.40 -
Expected Goals: The story of how data conquered football and changed the game forever
Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2022
Football has always measured success by what you win, but only in the last twenty years have clubs started to think about how you win. Data has now suffused almost every aspect of how football is played, coached, scouted and consumed. But it’s not the algorithms or new metrics that have made this change, it’s the people behind them.
This is the story of modern football’s great data revolution and the group of curious, entrepreneurial personalities who zealously believed in its potential to transform the game. Central to this cast is Chris Anderson, an academic with no experience in football, who saw data as an opportunity to fundamentally change a sport that did not think it could be changed. His aim: to infiltrate the strange, insular world of professional football by establishing a club whose entire DNA could be built around data.
Expected Goals charts his remarkable journey into the heart of the modern game and reveals how clubs across the world, from Liverpool to Leipzig and Brentford to Bayern Munich, began to see how data could help them unearth new players, define radical tactics and plot their path to glory.
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£7.30£9.50 -
Gambling 102: The Best Strategies for All Casino Games
Plenty of gambling books explain how to play the games; that’s Gambling 101. Gambling 102 takes you to the next stage, where you’re playing in the best way with the least amount of effort. Within these pages, gambling’s “Wizard of Odds” provides proven strategies for all the casino games—from baccarat to video poker and craps to Ultimate Texas Hold ’Em—in terms that are easy to understand and implement.
Nineteen quick chapters (some as brief as two or three pages) cut right to the heart of each game. They give you, first, an assessment of the odds you face, then the basic strategies you need to lower them as much as possible.
When should I raise in Three Card Poker? How will reduced “juice” affect my sports-betting results? And, of course, what are the good slot machines to play and how do I pick the best blackjack game? Everything you need to play the games as well as they can be played is at your fingertips.
Gambling 102—now in its revised and updated second edition—is the product of years of mathematical analysis, computer modeling, and actual casino play. If you believe in luck or hunches, you probably need another book. But if you believe that mathematics provides the best way to approach games of chance, then Gambling 102 is the book for you.
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£13.00 -
Probability and Computing: Randomization and Probabilistic Techniques in Algorithms and Data Analysis
Greatly expanded, this new edition requires only an elementary background in discrete mathematics and offers a comprehensive introduction to the role of randomization and probabilistic techniques in modern computer science. Newly added chapters and sections cover topics including normal distributions, sample complexity, VC dimension, Rademacher complexity, power laws and related distributions, cuckoo hashing, and the Lovasz Local Lemma. Material relevant to machine learning and big data analysis enables students to learn modern techniques and applications. Among the many new exercises and examples are programming-related exercises that provide students with excellent training in solving relevant problems. This book provides an indispensable teaching tool to accompany a one- or two-semester course for advanced undergraduate students in computer science and applied mathematics.Read more
£39.70£45.60 -
Probability Guide to Gambling: The Mathematics of Dice, Slots, Roulette, Baccarat, Blackjack, Poker, Lottery and Sport Bets
Over the past two decades, gamblers have begun taking mathematics into account more seriously than ever before. While probability theory is the only rigorous theory modeling the uncertainty, even though in idealized conditions, numerical probabilities are viewed not only as mere mathematical information, but also as a decision-making criterion, especially in gambling. This book presents the mathematics underlying the major games of chance and provides a precise account of the odds associated with all gaming events. It begins by explaining in simple terms the meaning of the concept of probability for the layman and goes on to become an enlightening journey through the mathematics of chance, randomness and risk. It then continues with the basics of discrete probability (definitions, properties, theorems and calculus formulas), combinatorics and counting arguments for those interested in the supporting mathematics. These mathematic sections may be skipped by readers who do not have a minimal background in mathematics; these readers can skip directly to the “Guide to Numerical Results” to pick the odds and recommendations they need for the desired gaming situation. Doing so is possible due to the organization of that chapter, in which the results are listed at the end of each section, mostly in the form of tables. The chapter titled “The Mathematics of Games of Chance” presents these games not only as a good application field for probability theory, but also in terms of human actions where probability-based strategies can be tried to achieve favorable results. Through suggestive examples, the reader can see what are the experiments, events and probability fields in games of chance and how probability calculus works there. The main portion of this work is a collection of probability results for each type of game. Each game’s section is packed with formulas and tables. Each section also contains a description of the game, a classification of the gaming events and the applicable probability calculations. The primary goal of this work is to allow the reader to quickly find the odds for a specific gaming situation, in order to improve his or her betting/gaming decisions. Every type of gaming event is tabulated in a logical, consistent and comprehensive manner. The complete methodology and complete or partial calculations are shown to teach players how to calculate probability for any situation, for every stage of the game for any game. Here, readers can find the real odds, returned by precise mathematical formulas and not by partial simulations that most software uses. Collections of odds are presented, as well as strategic recommendations based on those odds, where necessary, for each type of gaming situation. The book contains much new and original material that has not been published previously and provides great coverage of probabilities for the following games of chance: Dice, Slots, Roulette, Baccarat, Blackjack, Texas Hold’em Poker, Lottery and Sport Bets. Most of games of chance are predisposed to probability-based decisions. This is why the approach is not an exclusively statistical one (like many other titles published on this subject), but analytical: every gaming event is taken as an individual applied probability problem to solve. A special chapter defines the probability-based strategy and mathematically shows why such strategy is theoretically optimal.Read more
£25.70£30.40 -
The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Football is Wrong
Discover football’s astonishing hidden rules in The Numbers Game by Chris Anderson and David Sally
*Fully updated with a new World Cup chapter*
Football has always been a numbers game: 4-4-2, the big number 9 and 3 points for a win. But what if up until now we’ve been focusing on the wrong numbers? What if the numbers that really matter, the ones that hold the key to winning matches, are actually 2.66, 53.4, 50/50, and 0 > 1? What if managers only make a 15% difference? What if Chelsea should have bought Darren Bent?
In this incisive, myth-busting book, Chris Anderson, former goalkeeper turned football statistics guru, and David Sally, former baseball pitcher turned behavioural economist, show that every shred of knowledge we can gather can help us to love football and understand it even more. You’ll discover why stopping a goal is more valuable than scoring one, why corners should be taken short, and why it is better to improve your worst player than to buy a superstar.
You’ll never play, or watch, a game of football in quite the same way again.
The Numbers Game is essential reading for football fans everywhere and will also appeal to readers who loved Moneyball and Freakonomics.
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£9.60£10.40
