I first encountered Bill Ziemba’s name when I was reading the William Poundstone book about Kelly betting (“Fortune’s Formula”) where the author included repeated citations to work by Thorp and Ziemba. I knew who the Thorp was in “Thorp and Ziemba” - it was Ed Thorp. But I didn’t know who Ziemba was, so I started reading.
It turns out that Bill had worked on a crazy number of gambling related ideas in his time as an academic.
He’d written one of the early influential books about advantage play in horse racing - Beat the Racetrack.
He also spent time consulting for various gambling syndicates - actually Bill said that he’d worked for six billionaires in his career.
He and his academic colleagues also had a small lottery group where they looked for plus EV opportunities in Canada’s lottery system.
Bill had also consulted for Canadian provincial lotteries.
He ran a small fund that was based on some of the research that he did.
He also edited the book on Kelly betting with Thorp.
He also owned race horses! Actually, he would sometimes email me with highlights if one of his horses had won a race.
One of the things I remember from talking to Bill is that he had a very good sense of what his abilities were, and also the abilities he didn’t have. He said that the billionaires he had worked for had unusual ability to focus on a single problem and to keep working on it. Whereas Bill knew that his mind was more apt to wander into some new problem.
Bill passed away in 2022.
I am going to start taking the archive episodes out of the podcast feed and posting them so that they will only reside here on Substack.
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