{"id":5062,"date":"2017-02-03T10:31:19","date_gmt":"2017-02-03T18:31:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamblingwithanedge.com\/?p=5062"},"modified":"2017-02-03T17:47:55","modified_gmt":"2017-02-04T01:47:55","slug":"sydney-phillips-come-play-blackjack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/gambling-with-an-edge\/sydney-phillips-come-play-blackjack\/","title":{"rendered":"Sydney Phillips, Come Play Blackjack!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sydney Phillips, a 7th-grader at St. Theresa’s private Catholic school in New Jersey, wanted to play on the boys basketball team after the girls team was discontinued. After the school said no, Sydney’s dad sued. So the school just expelled Sydney, and her sister, too, via a snotty letter<\/a>! Unfair! Am I the only one whose blood is boiling right now? Sydney, if you need a summer job in six years, look us up!<\/p>\n

Why the school didn’t just let her play, or at least try out, is a mystery. If she fails the tryout, the school’s “problem” is solved. If she makes it, then the school’s team is better, and the school can use NJ interscholastic rules as its defense (“Our interpretation of state law is that Sydney is allowed to play on the boys team, because the school discontinued the girls team.” Done!)<\/p>\n

There would be so much excitement and good will generated if Sydney were on that team. Is there a single American who wasn’t rooting for Mo’ne Davis to take the Taney Dragons all the way to a Little League World Championship? Her outing to pitch on August 20, 2014, brought a higher ESPN viewership than any Little League game ever. Everyone knows that at that age, there are many girls skilled enough to play with the boys, and even if they weren’t skilled enough, who cares? If St. Theresa’s had a national powerhouse basketball team for middle-schoolers, that’s news to me. Sports at that level is for fitness, pedagogical purposes, and fun. Let the kids play!<\/p>\n

Women in sports is a hot-button topic for me. At the University of Chicago, we organized a co-ed recreational roller-hockey team that had several women on our roster, and our opponents were mostly all-male. We fielded an all-male lineup in an NHL-sponsored Summer Breakout tournament, and ended up competing against an all-female team called Chicks with Sticks, which was being heralded as the women’s national champions<\/a> at that time. That game drew a huge crowd\u2014all of them rooting against us! It wasn’t even discussed among our players\u2014we were playing to win, period. We planned to play the Chicks like any other team between us and the trophy. (I’ll answer to comments if you want to know how that story ended.)<\/p>\n

It’s a bit of a mystery to me why women are so under-represented in sports-like fields where the physical differences should not be determinative\u2014poker\/blackjack, chess, billiards, bowling. Garry Kasparov made waves at Harvard when he said that women did not have the temperament for chess, and predicted that a computer would become the world champion before a woman. While his prediction has basically been validated, the underlying reasons are still debated. I’ve always held the opinion that it’s just a numbers game. Societal norms discourage women from going into many of these fields (computer programming, too), so we don’t see many women among the top-ranked players.<\/p>\n

There are not many women in blackjack. There are so few female APs that I used to consider it a major red-flag when any female tried to purchase my book, Exhibit CAA. It might be the case that every single female order was an attempt to mask the purchase for someone else. One order came in with “MGM Surveillance Department” at the bottom of the email, but what was really suspicious is that the email was from a female. She got so irritated about our unwillingness to fill her order that she started calling on the phone every day!<\/p>\n

That said, one major appeal of the AP “job” is that it really is a meritocracy, and I’m sure that in terms of the technical aspects of beating the games, there would be no measurable difference based on gender, race, sexual orientation\/identity, religion, age, or any other political or demographic factor. There are three sufficient (and probably necessary) traits to succeed: integrity, interest, work ethic. That’s it. And the last two are correlated. People tend to work hard when they have an interest. “If you like your job, you’ll never work a day in your life!”<\/p>\n

An interesting theory is whether we can take the question (and perhaps the liberal agenda) a step further: is it actually an advantage<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0to be female, or black? (Read the next post, please.)<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"youtube\"<\/a>\"instagram\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sydney Phillips, a 7th-grader at St. Theresa’s private Catholic school in New Jersey, wanted to play on the boys basketball team after the girls team was discontinued. After the school said no, Sydney’s dad sued. So the school just expelled Sydney, and her sister, too, via a snotty letter! Unfair! Am I the only one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[217,15],"tags":[1385,1386,1383,1381,1380,1384,1382],"yoast_head":"\nSydney Phillips, Come Play Blackjack! - Gambling With An Edge<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/gambling-with-an-edge\/sydney-phillips-come-play-blackjack\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sydney Phillips, Come Play Blackjack! - Gambling With An Edge\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sydney Phillips, a 7th-grader at St. Theresa’s private Catholic school in New Jersey, wanted to play on the boys basketball team after the girls team was discontinued. 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