[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx8uYIfUvh4?rel=0]

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.

The author is a CS professor at SUNY, Stony Brook. This book recounts his experience of building a mathematical system to bet on the play outcomes of what is considered the fastest ball game in the world, “Jai alai”. In the English vernacular this is sometimes spelled as it sounds,that is, “hi-li”. The book recounts the history of the game and how it made to US from Spain and France. However the focus of the book is on using mathematical modeling and computers to analyze the game and design a betting system.

The book broadly deals with two strategies, “mean reversion” and “momentum”.These strategies cover six chapters of the book, out of which four of them are on mean reversion and two of them are on momentum strategies. Besides these six chapter, there is one chapter on backtesting strategies and there is another on risk management. Given the importance of backtesting in any strategy, the first chapter starts off with some of the pitfalls of backtesting.

Jai alai – the fastest sport in the world [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo4L83VQjPM?rel=0]