(FORTUNE Magazine) – ASK MR. STATISTICS

Dear Betmeister: I write as a New York sport well known in certain circles as a Knickerbocker loyalist and Madison Square Garden regular who recently showed up instead at Broadway's Belasco theater and all because he had overconfidently told the little woman she would get taken to see Hamlet if the Knicks did not beat the Indiana Pacers in the NBA playoffs, which they obviously would have done except for that unfortunate bounce the ball took off the back rim after Patrick Ewing's lunge for the basket with time running out. So I not only lost a bundle on my team but also had to sit there sulkily in the theater while everybody around us was palpitating over Ralph Fiennes doing his big star turn while looking to the undersigned like a scraggly hippie.

Furthermore, I had trouble following the only bettable action in the play, which comes during the duel scene in the final minutes. I gather that Claudius is putting up a bundle of his own on Hamlet and getting some kind of odds because his man is rated below Laertes in foilsmanship. But what exactly is the bet? What does Hamlet mean when he says to Horatio that he will "win at the odds"? And what does the whole deal tell us about the respective talents of the two foilsters? The main clue to what's going on is in the line where Osric, the foppish courtier, tells Hamlet that Claudius "hath laid, that in a dozen passes . he shall not exceed you three hits; he hath laid on 12 for nine." I cannot find a bookie or English major able to tell me what that means wagerwise.

GARDEN GAMER

Dear Basket Case: The usual interpretation of the bet is that in backing Hamlet, the king was getting an old-fashioned point spread. According to A.W. Verity in the highly authoritative 1961 Cambridge University Press edition of Hamlet, the deal is that there will be 12 "passes," or bouts, each ending with the first "hit," and that if Laertes is to win his bet with the king, his total hits must exceed Hamlet'sby more than three -- e.g., a score of 8-4. Meaning that Claudius basically had Hamlet plus three points, and the melancholy Dane really would "win at the odds" if he held Laertes to an advantage of two or less -- e.g., 7-5.

The hard part is figuring out what the deuce Osric was talking about in that reference to the King's laying on "12 for nine." Here Mr. Statistics has turned for guidance to old buddy ProfNet -- the network of academic experts ever ready to offer high-quality expertise in many different disciplines to journalists feeling out of their depth. (The network is run by Dan Forbush, operating out of his home in Stony Brook, New York.) Within a few hours of getting our query onto the e-mail astral plane, we were besieged by Shakespearean scholars who, unfortunately, do not agree among themselves on the pith and purpose of Osric's mysterious language. Several of them observed that Samuel Johnson, who brought out his own edition of Shakespeare a couple of centuries ago, found the passage mysterious and irritating. Anyhow, after reading over the experts' assorted opinions, we are inclined to go with several of them who cite the Riverside Shakespeare judgment that the passage is "not satisfactorily explained" and left one thinking it may be ignored.

Turning to the respective talents of the two duelists, and leaving aside such plot thickeners as poisoned rapiers, we now reach the one area in which Mr. Statistics has a contribution to make to bardian belles-lettres. A three-point spread in a 12-round match is a huge advantage, and if it took three points to equalize matters -- i.e., to ensure that each duelist had an equal chance -- then Hamlet was way overmatched going in. Based on a computer simulation of 100,000 12-point matches between opponents of equal ability, one can state that the guy giving three points could expect to win only 19% of the time. The three-point handicap for Hamlet makes sense only on the assumption that without it, he would win only 38% of the individual bouts. His game needs work.

STILL ANOTHER GREAT LEAP FORWARD

Reporter Matt Forney visited the biggest race Beijing has held in 50 years .

[Horses coming out of the starting gate]

Forney: And they're off. But before these horses pass the 5,000 screaming fans . they charge past a huge yellow sign on the infield. It reads: "Adhere strictly to the government's total ban on betting."

[Gamblers at track speaking Chinese]

Forney: These are not computerized betting machines, they're printing "prediction vouchers." At 80 cents each, you can buy as many as you want. Predict the right horse, and the payoff can be thousands of dollars, depending on the odds...

Race Track Fan [through interpreter]: You could say it's...gambling, but no one here says that. It's only a guessing game...

Another Race Track Fan [through interpreter]: This is liberation. Liberating our thoughts...I could never do this before.

--Transcript of news report on National Public Radio's Morning Edition.

THE WINDING ROAD TO THE FIRST AMENDMENT

It is true, as widely reported, that the recent Supreme Court decision in Rubin v. Coors was a victory for commercial free speech. But it represents only a wary, wobbly step in the right direction and still leaves the Supremes a long way from where they ought to be. On our analysis, the Court took only a baby step this time because the regulations it was ruling on were so patently dopey that they could be set aside without reconsidering any basic principles.

The point at issue was whether beer companies like Coors have a First Amendment right to state the suds' alcohol content on the label. The U.S. Treasury, whose Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) has long banned any such statements on beer bottles, was defending the ban by raising the specter of "strength wars": If brewers were free to list the alcohol content, then they might try to compete by selling increasingly potent products. But the logic of this argument was impossible to square with some other facts on the table. For openers, BATF required alcohol-content statements on wine and liquor. In addition, the brewers who were not being allowed to put the alcohol content on their labels were permitted by BATF to advertise beer strengths (except where the ads contravened state laws).

So, faced with this logically rickety structure, the Court took the easy road and said, unanimously, that BATF had no hope of accomplishing its stated purpose -- prevention of strength wars -- and was therefore being pointlessly "intrusive" on Coors's First Amendment rights. But the opinion made it clear that a well-drawn regulation could have been approved. It conceded that in principle the government has a right to censor Coors. Why? Because it "has a significant interest in protecting the health...of its citizens by preventing brewers from competing on the basis of alcohol strength, which could lead to greater alcoholism..."

The Court has been all over the lot on commercial free speech, holding at times (the 1940s) that there was no such thing, then later (the 1970s) coming tantalizingly close to where it ought to be: squarely defending the right of companies to make truthful statements about legal products. This is the position held by many scholars, including Burt Neuborne, professor of law at New York University Law School and formerly (1982-86) national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. One senses that their endless serpentine meanderings on commercial speech will eventually bring the Supremes to this position too. But they sure are taking their time.

MORE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

As evidenced by several recent entries in this space, your servant has been brooding a lot about two subjects: (1) the so-called law of unintended consequences, according to which nothing ever happens as planned by politicians, and (2) persistent vast confusion enveloping the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), whose operational meaning remains murky five years after enactment. Both subjects got addressed in separate entries a fortnight ago. Regrettably, however, their author failed to point up a certain interesting connection between the two subjects. With the help of Nexis, this nexus will now be elaborated.

A major goal of ADA was of course to create job opportunities for the disabled, and the news stories in mid-1990 showed Washington's political elite fulsomely flogging this theme. In an emotional signing ceremony on the White House lawn that July, President Bush said the country was spending $200 billion a year to support the disabled, when they really needed only the opportunity, now beckoning, to "move proudly into the economic mainstream of American life." Tom Harkin of Iowa, a principal sponsor of the legislation in the Senate, also kept saying that the main point of this "20th-Century Emancipation Proclamation" was to move the disabled out of the world of dependency and into the world of productive work. Senator Bob Dole had a few muttered reservations about the cost of the law to business but still felt ADA would open up "magnificent new opportunities...in the area of employment."

This brings us to a nettlesome detail: Job opportunities for the disabled show no signs of gaining under ADA -- and some signs of declining. A respected research firm called Vocational Econometrics Inc., based in Louisville and specializing in analysis of Census Bureau data, reported a few months ago that between 1991 and 1993 the proportion of disabled men in the work force dropped from 34% to 30.2%; in the same period, nondisabled men slightly increased their participation rates (to 82%). Anthony Gamboa, who did the survey, was widely quoted as being astonished at the result, uncertain what to make of it, and wondering if it meant that some employers were increasingly resisting disabled workers.

Why might employers be more resistant in a period when hiring decisions that discriminate against the disabled are illegal and can trigger complaints by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission? Plausible-seeming answer: It is hard to prove that a nonhiring decision is discriminatory, and only 11% of EEOC's complaints under ADA have involved initial failure to hire. The big guns have been trained on companies that have hired disabled workers and later concluded they did not work out -- a category covering 50% of EEOC suits under the act. Another 25% were directed at companies that had also hired disabled workers and then were sued for not making "reasonable accommodations" to their needs. Given EEOC's inability to clarify the meaning of that phrase and quite a few others, it is easy to see why ADA may be leading litigation-shy employers to avoid disabled workers.

And easy to believe that one's favorite law has snuck up on Washington yet again. F