 Luca Pacioli considered such a problem in his 1494 textbook "Summa de arithmetica, geometrica, proportioni et proportionalità".His method was to divide the stakes in proportion to the number of rounds won by each player, and the number of rounds needed to win did not enter his calculations at all.In the mid-16th century Niccolò Tartaglia noticed that Pacioli's method leads to counterintuitive results if the game is interrupted when only one round has been played.