Top Highlights

• Understanding and dealing correctly with the trade-off between risk and return is a fundamental, but poorly understood, challenge faced by all gamblers and investors.
• In the abstract, life is a mixture of chance and choice. Chance can be thought of as the cards you are dealt in life. Choice is how you play them. I chose to investigate blackjack. As a result, chance offered me a new set of unexpected opportunities.
• This plan, of betting only at a level at which I was emotionally comfortable and not advancing until I was ready, enabled me to play my system with a calm and disciplined accuracy. This lesson from the blackjack tables would prove invaluable throughout my investment lifetime as the stakes grew ever larger.
• Mathematically, interruptions didn’t matter, because my lifetime of playing was just one long series of hands, and chopping it into sessions and playing them at various times and in various casinos should not affect my edge, nor the long-run amount I could expect to win. This principle applies in both gambling and investing.
• A trait that showed up at about this time was my tendency not to accept anything I was told until I had checked it for myself.