Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [11]
He became circumspect, almost academic in his approach to gambling. He studied various newly published pamphlets detailing theories of probability. Study in this field had long preoccupied scientists: Gerolamo Cardano had studied the science of dice throwing at Padua University in the sixteenth century and had worked out that the reason it was easier to throw a nine than a ten with two dice was a matter of probability (1 in 9 for nine: 1 in 12 for ten). Galileo had also, reluctantly, tackled similar problems for his employer, and a century later new ground had been broken in France when mathematician Pascal was able to explain to his friend the Chevalier de Mère that to have a marginally better than even chance of throwing a double six with two dice he would need to allow twenty-five throws. One of the first books on the subject was published anonymously in 1662 at a French monastery patronized by Pascal. La logique ou l’art de penser contained four chapters on probability and was widely translated and disseminated throughout Europe. The Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli, whose Art of Conjecturing, a pioneering study of combinations and analysis of profit expectations from various games of chance, would be published posthumously in 1713, had also visited London at around this time, and Law may have known about Bernoulli’s research.
Law’s formidable mathematical talents made it easy for him to absorb the “science” of chance, and he began to try out his new skill at the gaming salon. Over games of dice and cards he taught himself to calculate, often at incredible speed, the odds on a certain sequence of numbers being rolled at dice or a certain card appearing in the deck. “No man understood calculation and numbers better than he; he was the first man in England that was at the pains to find out why seven to four or ten was two to one at hazard, seven to eight six to five, and so on in all the other chances of the dice, which he bringing to demonstration, was received amongst the most eminent gamesters, and grew a noted man that way,” recalled Gray, an acquaintance and Law’s earliest biographer. The approach rapidly paid off, and Law’s luck turned. He ceased to be the stereotypical compulsive gambler, addicted to the frisson of gain but invariably losing. He had mastered the art of risk in much the same way a statistician is able to calculate odds. Betting became a serious business.
Nevertheless, even a master of odds cannot be guaranteed to win as much as Law seemed to do, without cheating or drawing on some other advantage. Law’s friends and contemporaries invariably describe him as a gambler, and either suspected him of card sharping or were simply amazed by his luck. How did he manage it? With hindsight, most biographers now feel that Law’s wins were not a result of luck but of wiliness. His large gains were made when he was able to adopt the role of banker—where the odds were stacked heavily in his favor—rather than gambler. Most of the time when not playing banker he was presumably canny enough not to bet excessively. He is also known to have invented his own gambling games—where again he could ensure the odds were stacked in his favor.
Showpiece routines for the rich reaped hefty rewards, but they were not demanding enough to satisfy him for long. Law’s study of probability reawakened his natural mathematical talent, and the urge to use it drew him to one of the new obsessions of the age: the science of economics.
At the time London was poised on the brink of economic and financial revolution. A flurry of publications had recently appeared penned by writers such as Sir William Petty, Nicholas Barbon, and Hugh Chamberlen, who had debated monetary theory, commodities, and currencies. There were two strands to the emerging material: some writers concentrated on ways of assisting mercantile trade, usually for their own profit; others blended the role of the state