Born in
Austin, Texas, Carson held an
MS in Quantitative Business Methods from
LSU, an MS in Industrial Engineering and Management Science from
Northwestern and an
ABD in Criminal Justice from Sam Houston State University. He taught in the business schools of LSU, Loyola University (Chicago), University of Illinois (Chicago Circle), and Sam Houston State University. He often took a contrarian view of strategic decision making. His writings emphasized that the loose versus tight conditions of a game are a strong driving force in evaluating a situation. In intermediate betting rounds in loose games, he opined it is often more valuable to play a good draw strongly than to do so with the current best hand, while in tighter games the opposite is often the case. His books and recent gambling related writings have been on poker, although he wrote on horse
handicapping in the 1980s. He also wrote on a wide range of non-gambling topics ranging from human resource topics to commercial snail farming. Carson wrote about gambling for
CardPlayer,
Poker Digest,
American Turf Monthly,
Racing Star Weekly, and websites Pokerpages.com, Pokermagazine.com, Pokerhands.com, and Gaminglinks.com. He was also a prolific blogger and blogged about poker, mathematics as it relates to poker, and culture and politics. Carson lived in
Wichita, Kansas. He died at his home on March 4, 2014, of
vascular and
renal disease. ==References==