I’ve been playing card games since childhood, and have had a parallel interest in the mathematics behind the games for nearly as long. While I didn’t visit Las Vegas in person until 2000, the stories of how that city was built around the gaming industry quickly came to fascinate me. Digging into the details of the people who have made that city what it is and have come to make their way in the desert has been a fascinating sidelight that has enhanced my recent work writing books on gambling mathematics.
This book stands out from the rest on my list because it’s about a gambler, not a casino executive.
Barry Meadow set out to play blackjack in every casino in Nevada one fall. Blackjack Autumn chronicles his travels and adventures across every corner of the state: the good, the bad, and the ugly. He tells the tales of a card counter experiencing wide variation in casino amenities and game protection strategies, interspersed with some provocative thoughts on life in general.
This is more than a book about blackjack; it’s a series of personal adventures that I frequently reread to this day.
What is it like to take two months off from your life and travel alone throughout Nevada, playing blackjack in every casino in the state?
Barry Meadow did just that. Leaving behind his business, his fiancée, and his son, he set out with a suitcase, a tape recorder, and $8,000 on the trip of a lifetime. He had no idea what he would find. All he knew was that every day would be an adventure and every joint would be a risk.
Meadow ran into cowboys and Indians, suffered the Stardust curse, split tens in Winnemucca and learned more about…
I’ve been playing card games since childhood, and have had a parallel interest in the mathematics behind the games for nearly as long. While I didn’t visit Las Vegas in person until 2000, the stories of how that city was built around the gaming industry quickly came to fascinate me. Digging into the details of the people who have made that city what it is and have come to make their way in the desert has been a fascinating sidelight that has enhanced my recent work writing books on gambling mathematics.
Many people, including Bill Bennett from Forgotten Man, played big parts in the building, opening, and subsequent operation of the Luxor Casino in Las Vegas. They tell their stories in Super Casino.
I am a big fan of logistics in general, and found the details of what goes into the Las Vegas casino industry in the 1990s (just before I started visiting Las Vegas and writing about gambling mathematics) to be a fascinating look behind the scenes.
Las Vegas was a mob town built on restlessness and hunger, on glitter, greed, and the firm belief that anyone can get lucky once. But in the last decade Las Vegas has had its own change of fortune, transforming itself from a gambler's fun house to one of the country's top family vacation spots. Now Pete Earley--the investigative journalist and award-winning author who stormed Leavenworth in The Hot House--takes us inside today's colossal theme casinos, in a fascinating look at the life, death, and fantastic rebirth of the Las Vegas Strip.
I love a romance where the hero has his viewpoint changed by the woman he falls in love with. He might become a better family man, or transform his politics, or change his priorities, but it all cases loving her alters him. Additionally, I love a heroine who is exceptional in a distinct way but overlooked or dismissed by others. They can be bluestockings or spinsters, reformers or quiet and shy, but they’re all steadfast and they all derive strength from the hero’s support. In short, the love they find together makes them better people.
I loved this book because Penelope is supposed to be a means to an end, but she ends up being Bourne's everything.
Bourne wants revenge. He believes that his happiness lies in recovering the land that he foolishly lost in a card game. Penelope proves to him that regaining his legacy is not enough. She helps him rediscover the man he would have become if he hadn’t lost everything that mattered to him.
When he lets himself love her, he chooses to abandon his quest for revenge so he can be worthy. Bourne is an absolute sweetheart by the end and is completely devoted to his wife.
A decade ago, the Marquess of Bourne was cast from society with nothing but his title. Now a partner in London's most exclusive gaming hell, the cold, ruthless Bourne will do whatever it takes to regain his inheritance—including marrying perfect, proper Lady Penelope Marbury.
A broken engagement and years of disappointing courtships have left Penelope with little interest in a quiet, comfortable marriage, and a longing for something more. How lucky that her new husband has access to an unexplored world of pleasures.
As an only child of a working mother, I spent a lot of Saturday afternoons with John Wayne. I graduated to movie nights at the theater with Clint Eastwood. My hero-worshipping crush on tough guys combined with my passion for romance novels and my fascination with the history of the American West made me the perfect candidate to write gritty, romantic westerns. My very first book, written over 30 years ago, was a western.
Sexy, lazy, drawling, dangerous, womanizing, gambling gunslinger. Who can resist that? Add in a secret baby, a lost love, and the end to an epic western series.
Sure, I wrote 3 of the books in this 6 book set, but when I read Cash, I bawled. I lived with the Rock Creek Six for long enough that they felt like family and if you read about them, they’ll feel like family to you as well.
Sexy, dangerous, haunted-by-their-pasts family. But family.
If you liked the Magnificent Seven, you’ll love the Rock Creek Six!
Six elite Confederate soldiers band together after the War Between the States, hiring out their guns to protect lawless towns. Violence is all they know, until they make their way to Rock Creek, Texas.
Rock Creek is the only place gunslinger Daniel Cash dares to call home, even though he’s surrounded by constant and annoying reminders that the others have moved on. His friends have made lives and families for themselves, they’ve finally left the war behind. He never will.
I was a mailman when I became obsessed with card counting at blackjack. Not having enough money to play at a pro level, I decided to sell a mathematical formula I’d devised for evaluating games and systems. I offered it for sale through gambling newsletters at $100. I immediately had big sales because no one had ever seen a method for estimating card counters’ win rates. I got letters from college math professors asking me how I’d come up with the math. So, I started my own blackjack newsletter where I published my discoveries. I was inducted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame in 2002 and soon had big investors funding my play.
Really fun true stories about six gambling legends. Titanic Thompson never entered an official PGA event, yet made more money playing golf than most of the top pros in his era, often by beating the famous pros at their own game. Minnesota Fats never won a major pool tournament, but made so much money traveling from city to city to hustle the local pool sharks he became a legend in the Midwest pool halls. Johnny Moss cut his gambling teeth in illegal poker games in Texas and Oklahoma, then went on to win the first two World Series of Poker championships in 1970 and 1971, winning nine WSOP bracelets in total, his last one in 1988 at the age of 81, making him the oldest WSOP bracelet winner ever.
In this classic book, Jon Bradshaw singled out from the world of full-time gamblers six men who consistently win - the men who year after year, deal after deal and proposition after proposition come away with their pockets filled and their sense of infallibility intact.
Bradshaw follows three legendary poker players - Johnny Moss, Pug Pearson, and Titanic Thompson; tennis player Bobby Riggs; pool player Minnesota Fats and backgammon player Tim Holland. His evocation of ambience and his dramatic description of the games themselves are fascinating but Bradshaw also deftly probes their minds and hearts as he attempts to define…
Early in my career, I attended a writer’s conference in southern Louisiana. During a discussion of the best-selling Louisiana-based novels of Vermont-born author Francis Parkinson Keyes, a local historian said with great ire, “That woman came down here and picked our brains for her books!” As a follower of my state’s incredible past, I immediately saw the attraction. Since then, I’ve written more than 65 historical and contemporary novels, most set in New Orleans and broader Louisiana. Hours have been spent at the famed Historic New Orleans Collection, talking to people and walking the streets of the French Quarter—and, of course, collecting a library of famous Louisiana histories.
It was in Asbury’s social history of the French Quarter that I first read about the deadly yet intriguing fencing masters of old New Orleans that swagger through my own series.
I was also fascinated by the richly painted French and Spanish culture from the colonial period, the daily life among the French Creole elite in the city, the unique courting and marriage customs, male and female amusements, education, religious observances, and much more.
In addition, the book is famous, or infamous, for its gritty details of the city's underworld at that time, from cutthroat barrel houses and gambling dens to the names of famous madams and the locations of their brothels in the red-light district known as Storyville.
Home to the notorious "Blue Book," which listed the names and addresses of every prostitute living in the city, New Orleans's infamous red-light district gained a reputation as one of the most raucous in the world. But the New Orleans underworld consisted of much more than the local bordellos. It was also well known as the early gambling capital of the United States, and sported one of the most violent records of street crime in the country. In The French Quarter, Herbert Asbury, author of The Gangs of New York, chronicles this rather immense underbelly of "The Big Easy." From…
I’ve been playing card games since childhood, and have had a parallel interest in the mathematics behind the games for nearly as long. While I didn’t visit Las Vegas in person until 2000, the stories of how that city was built around the gaming industry quickly came to fascinate me. Digging into the details of the people who have made that city what it is and have come to make their way in the desert has been a fascinating sidelight that has enhanced my recent work writing books on gambling mathematics.
Grandissimo is a biography of Jay Sarno, the entrepreneur who built Caesars Palace and Circus Circus on the Las Vegas Strip and then lost his empire.
It is fascinating to see read about how Caesars Palace started with humble beginnings before rising to its current prominent place of the Strip. The book’s title is taken from Sarno’s last great obsession: a new Las Vegas mega-resort that was never built, and the story of how that project never happened is just as interesting as the tales of how the other casino resorts succeeded.
Jay Sarno built two path-breaking Las Vegas casinos, Caesars Palace (1966) and Circus Circus (1968), and planned but did not build a third, the Grandissimo, which would have started the mega-resort era a decade before Steve Wynn built The Mirage. As mobsters and accountants battled for the soul of the last American frontier town, Las Vegas had endless possibilities—if you didn’t mind high stakes and stiff odds. Sarno invented the modern Las Vegas casino, but he was part of a dying breed—a back-pocket entrepreneur who’d parlayed a jones for action and a few Teamster loans into a life as a…
I’m the co-author of The Divorce Seekers, an intimate glimpse into life on Nevada’s most exclusive divorce ranch, the Flying M E. From 1947-1949, my late husband, William L. “Bill” McGee, was the dude wrangler on the Flying M E, twenty miles south of Reno. We spent four years gathering photos (many from former guests on the ranch or their offspring) and conducting interviews. My book is the only book on the subject written from the perspective of a former divorce ranch wrangler. I’ve become passionate about this subject and, thanks to my work on this book, am now regarded as an “expert” on the Nevada divorce ranch era.
As with all of the books in the Images of America series, this book, written by 30-year veteran journalist Guy Clifton, is beautifully illustrated with informative and generous captions. Mr. Clifton’s love for his city and the people who live there is evident. He has met most of the people he writes about, many who allowed him to use images never before published.
Reno has always been a small town where big things happen. Long before it adopted the slogan "The Biggest Little City in the World," Reno was visited by presidents, the nation's elite, and those drawn to the city's wide-open, live-and-let live attitude. "The Fight of the Century," between heavyweight boxers Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries brought Reno worldwide attention in 1910, and the legalization of gambling and liberalization of divorce laws in 1931 made the city a national destination. At the same time, Reno never lost its small-town feel, with generations of families and scores of familiar faces building long-standing…
I was a mailman when I became obsessed with card counting at blackjack. Not having enough money to play at a pro level, I decided to sell a mathematical formula I’d devised for evaluating games and systems. I offered it for sale through gambling newsletters at $100. I immediately had big sales because no one had ever seen a method for estimating card counters’ win rates. I got letters from college math professors asking me how I’d come up with the math. So, I started my own blackjack newsletter where I published my discoveries. I was inducted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame in 2002 and soon had big investors funding my play.
The author, a former casino executive, exposes the industry’s “comp system,” through which casinos give away more than a billion dollars in “complimentaries” every year, as an enticement to get people to gamble. Although the book appears to be aimed at amateur gamblers looking for casino freebies (room, food, booze, show tickets, etc.), the information in this book has been devoured by professional gamblers at the highest levels because it reveals the inner workings of how players are evaluated and rated, with tips on how to look like you’re betting more than you are, how to look like you’re losing when you’re winning, and basically how to look dumb when you’re smart. I personally made a lot of money from the information in this book.
Win every time you gamble? Is that possible? It is if you play for comps.
Every year, U.S. casinos give away more than a billion dollars worth of amenities to customers in return for their gambling action. These giveaways, known as “comps” (short for complimentaries), range from parking and drinks to gourmet meals and airfare. Are you getting your share? From nickel slot players to $500 a hand blackjack high rollers, Comp City has shown tens of thousands of gamblers how to get free casino vacations.
Since the first publication of Comp City, author Max Rubin has been teaching gamblers…
Economics isn't really a good starting point for financial market analysis for the simple reason that its models are wildly inaccurate. As behaviorial economists like Daniel Kahneman have been showing, irrationality and the inability to measure risk properly are a very big component of the investment and trading decisions. But statistical risk management is also sloppy when applied to human behavior because people are not objects that reliably behave the same way under similar circumstances. So when you read an economist about markets or an engineer about risk management, you're missing a lot of the story. In the end, technical analysis is fascinating because how and why humans behave is an enduring mystery.
The subtitle is The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System that Beat the Casinos and Wall Street. This book is an easy-to-read narrative of the intersection of the grimy underbelly of betting--with high-minded math. It reminds you that trading is not conducted in a clean little bubble. Technical analysis can give you an edge, but trading is still engaging in battle with opposing forces; strategy and tactics can count as much as building an elegant technical system.
Your opponent on the trading battlefield will try to trick you, like a general in real warfare. He may keep selling and selling after you have bought, triggering a sell signal in your trading system. He is hunting for your sell signal. The mechanical response is to sell—your system says sell, and you should follow your system. To exit a position when the market goes against you is named a stop,…
In 1956, two Bell Labs scientists discovered the scientific formula for getting rich. One was mathematician Claude Shannon, neurotic father of our digital age, whose genius is ranked with Einstein's. The other was John L. Kelly Jr., a Texas-born, gun-toting physicist. Together they applied the science of information theory—the basis of computers and the Internet—to the problem of making as much money as possible, as fast as possible.
Shannon and MIT mathematician Edward O. Thorp took the "Kelly formula" to Las Vegas. It worked. They realized that there was even more money to be made in the stock market. Thorp…
