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Bob the Gambler.
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Growing up in a strait-laced Southern family, I was always fascinated with casinos. In my twenties on a summer hiatus from teaching in North Carolina, I drove to California and became a dealer at Caesars in Lake Tahoe. My mother highly disapproved of my working in a casino, "a place so bad it has 'sin' in the middle." Eventually, I returned east to take a hi-tech job in Boston. I also began working on my MFA in writing at Emerson. My characters were breathed into life from my years in the gambling industry. You learn a lot about the human personality when you watch thousands of people from behind the felt of a blackjack table.
This is a book made from a screenplay that tells the story from behind the felt. As a croupier you can always tell if an author knows their stuff. Stepping behind the table as a dealer Jack Manfred a rejected author becomes enmeshed in his new job. He intends to write a novel about this fascinating world of casinos. As a writer myself I can relate to his need to tell his story. London dealers are considered the gold standard in the casino world. Their intense training thins the herd. I know because my husband learned to deal at an upscale London casino just like Jack. Ray also went to The Grecian Grill an all-night Greek restaurant in the West End after his shift. That touch of authenticity gave Croupier my stamp of approval.
You have to make a choice in life. Be a gambler or a croupier. Then live with your decision come what may. It's all numbers, the croupier thought. A spin of the wheel. A turn of a card. The time of your life. The date of your birth. The year of your death. In the Book of Numbers the Lord said: "Thou shalt count thy steps." A wave of elation came over him. He was hooked again. Watching people lose. His existence was forming an interesting pattern of betrayals. Sometimes he was unsure whether he was the betrayer or the…
Growing up in a strait-laced Southern family, I was always fascinated with casinos. In my twenties on a summer hiatus from teaching in North Carolina, I drove to California and became a dealer at Caesars in Lake Tahoe. My mother highly disapproved of my working in a casino, "a place so bad it has 'sin' in the middle." Eventually, I returned east to take a hi-tech job in Boston. I also began working on my MFA in writing at Emerson. My characters were breathed into life from my years in the gambling industry. You learn a lot about the human personality when you watch thousands of people from behind the felt of a blackjack table.
As a blackjack dealer I have watched compulsive gamblers for most of my career. I have always said, “It’s hard to walk away from a winning streak, even harder to leave the table when you’re on a losing one.” A familiar tale that sums up the life of Brian Malony. He became hooked on the glitz and glamour of Caesars in Atlantic City. Most people will play until they lose all their money. Brian did that and then embezzled more money from his employer a major Canadian bank. A must-read story that tracks the progression of his addiction.
This is the story of Brian Molony who embezzled over $10 million from his employers to feed his insatiable appetite for gambling. The book investigates how an assistant manager could write scores of fraudulent loans and not be detected, how he could function competantly on one level when on another level he was completely out of control. To his customers he was decisive and helpful. To his friends he was a quiet, drily humorous man who enjoyed watching sport on TV. To his girlfriends he was shy but engaging. But none of them knew about the man who bet $5000…
Growing up in a strait-laced Southern family, I was always fascinated with casinos. In my twenties on a summer hiatus from teaching in North Carolina, I drove to California and became a dealer at Caesars in Lake Tahoe. My mother highly disapproved of my working in a casino, "a place so bad it has 'sin' in the middle." Eventually, I returned east to take a hi-tech job in Boston. I also began working on my MFA in writing at Emerson. My characters were breathed into life from my years in the gambling industry. You learn a lot about the human personality when you watch thousands of people from behind the felt of a blackjack table.
Standing behind the table, blackjack dealers are always on the lookout for card counters, find one and they are booted out. Can a team from M.I.T. really break the casino? Card counting is all in the math and as he and his fellow team members hit Vegas they learn how to bet on the count. I think this book really shines when he goes behind the scenes to explore the deceptions the team went through to try to deceive the casino. Well, they can for a while and it’s fun to follow them on their rise and fall.
The #1 national bestseller, now a major motion picture, 21—the amazing inside story about a gambling ring of M.I.T. students who beat the system in Vegas—and lived to tell how.
Robin Hood meets the Rat Pack when the best and the brightest of M.I.T.’s math students and engineers take up blackjack under the guidance of an eccentric mastermind. Their small blackjack club develops from an experiment in counting cards on M.I.T.’s campus into a ring of card savants with a system for playing large and winning big. In less than two years they take some of the world’s most sophisticated…
Growing up in a strait-laced Southern family, I was always fascinated with casinos. In my twenties on a summer hiatus from teaching in North Carolina, I drove to California and became a dealer at Caesars in Lake Tahoe. My mother highly disapproved of my working in a casino, "a place so bad it has 'sin' in the middle." Eventually, I returned east to take a hi-tech job in Boston. I also began working on my MFA in writing at Emerson. My characters were breathed into life from my years in the gambling industry. You learn a lot about the human personality when you watch thousands of people from behind the felt of a blackjack table.
How does a girl go from working in a Thai restaurant to running a sports gambling operation in Costa Rica? All roads lead through Las Vegas, where Beth meets Dink a math genius. Sports bettors love to hang out in casinos it’s like a contact high. He hires her and she trains in the Vegas casinos. She not only becomes enthralled with the eccentric Dink and the colorful cast of characters that surround him but she shares their stories with you. It was the early days of Internet gambling, a free for all or so they thought. It is great to view the industry through the observant eyes of Beth whose colorful descriptions bring the characters to life.
“Beth Raymer’s crackling, hilarious memoir ricochets through the gambling underworld in Las Vegas, and is peopled with all manner of lovable wack-jobs, none of whom is quite as wacky—or lovable—as Raymer herself.”—Marie Claire
Beth Raymer waited tables at a dive in Las Vegas until a customer sent her to see Dink, of Dink Inc., one of the town’s biggest professional sports gamblers. Dink needed a right-hand man—someone who would show up on time, who had a head for numbers, and who didn’t steal. Beth got the job.
Lay the Favorite is the story of Beth’s years in the high-stakes, high-anxiety…
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…
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’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.
No list of Las Vegas entrepreneurs is complete without Bob Stupak, the marketing mastermind who successfully sold many tourists on a visit to Vegas World, a small casino at the far northern end of the Las Vegas Strip.
The self-described maverick challenged the more established Las Vegas casinos throughout his career, culminating in the building of the Stratosphere Tower which now anchors the Las Vegas skyline. His story mingling success and failure is skillfully told here by a titan of Nevada journalism.
Of all the modern Las Vegas casino operators, none had more flair than Bob Stupak. The self-proclaimed "Polish Maverick" rose from humble origins as the son of a Pittsburgh boss gambler to head one of the largest privately owned casinos in Las Vegas, the infamous Vegas World. Stupak parlayed a small slot joint into a $100 million-a-year gambling operation by manipulating the local and national media with outrageous stunts and promotions. His headline-grabbing handiwork is now the stuff of Las Vegas legend.
Remember Vegas World's VIP Vacation? Stupak's cleverly worded advertisements flooded millions of mailboxes around the country and appeared…
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 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 four areas of a Las Vegas casino where you’d be likely to find the most professional gamblers would be the poker room, the blackjack pits, the race and sports book, and the video poker machines. Bob Dancer is one of the most successful video poker pros ever. He’s written numerous books on the subject, has put together highly-profitable video poker teams, and is widely recognized as the game’s top expert. This is his story about how he came to Las Vegas with $6,000 and within six years had won $1 million from playing video poker. Video poker is one of the most overlooked areas of professional gambling and one of the most accessible to players starting with a small bankroll.
Bob Dancer is the best known video poker player and writer in the world. In just six years, after coming to Las Vegas with a $6,000 bankroll, Dancer won more than $1 million playing beatable machines. Million Dollar Video Poker recounts the events of those six years, with stories about his meteoric ups and downs, and lessons for players of all skill levels. Video poker is one of those rare casino games that can be beaten by a talented and informed player, and Dancer explains how it’s done. Never before has a top video poker professional shared so many of…
For as long as I can remember, it has been of the utmost importance to find meaning in life—both for myself and for everyone else. I have spent much of my time in the past few years pushing for continued discourse in the fields of philosophy and psychology. I have studied at various educational institutions in these fields, and have thus used that knowledge to discuss topics relating to such on my podcast, Think More, which can be found on Spotify. I founded an online journal titled Modern Rebellion in the hopes of assisting contemporary artists and intellectuals with getting their work out there into the public eye.
Bukowski had a unique perspective on the world, and anyone who has read his work would most definitely agree. This book, which is a collection of some of Bukowski’s greatest pieces in my opinion, has a way of resonating with you on a personal level. Whether it be gaining a newfound perspective on the animals that scurry around our yards, or of a gambler wasting away in a casino on a Monday afternoon, Bukowski has a knack for bringing up the world’s problems in a way that is both depressing and humorous at the same time, while also giving peeks at his wit and charm as well.
Charles Bukowski examines cats and his childhood in You Get So Alone at Times, a book of poetry that reveals his tender side. He delves into his youth to analyze its repercussions.
