By The Numbers

Harry is showing some signs of mathematical awareness. This morning he proposed a "negative win" bet on Euro2008 - he would wager minus £100 on Croatia.

Whilst not a fully-formed idea, this showed some appreciation of the concepts of laying bets (as opposed to backing) and/or of odds-on events or of "The Field" as a betting principle. Of course, since he wanted to do this bet at even money he simultaneously showed an interest in +EV situations and of course a lack of concrete knowledge of betting mechanics.

By later modifying his bet-proposal to -£35 he showed that he understood the concept of bankroll management.

He also sought information on who was the weakest remaining team and enquired about who had already qualified - thereby indicating an understanding of the importance of good research.

Last week, when Harry was banned from playing on his PC or XBOX we played card games - he beat me in first-to-100 at contract whist and also at "finders keepers" which was a more elaborate version of "pairs". That game was in a book of card games for children which was good in that it contained a lot of games I had not come across before, but it did suffer from poor elucidation of the rules. In particular, it appeared that some of the games had not been well-trialled for "what if ..." situations.

The Monopoly rules, I think, are a good example of what a solid set of game rules should be - they clearly cover all plausible game-play situations with clear and sesnsible outcomes.

Anyway, in the case of finders-keepers, when we reached a game-state not contemplated by the book, we invented a new game to play out from there, which is often more fun than the original game.