Greatest Ever Gambling Books
gambling.com’s obsession with lists continues unabated as we run down the best gambling reads of all time.
Bringing Down The House
Ben Mezrich (Arrow)
In 1993, shy, geeky, amiable MIT grad Kevin Lewis, 20 years old and feeling aimless, was invited to join the MIT Blackjack Team, a group of card counters organized by a former maths instructor, who claimed, “Blackjack is beatable.”
They strapped thousands of dollars to their bodies with Velcro to get the cash onto planes, used false names, and were always on the lookout for Las Vegas personnel who would sometimes personally escort them out of the casinos.
In his first non-fiction foray, novelist Mezrich, telling the tale primarily from Kevin’s point of view, manages to milk that threat for a degree of suspense. Even though the threat of physical violence is minimal (most of the casinos’ heavy retributions dealt out to ‘cheats’ died out in the 70s), the palpable tension is always kept high. A superb true-life thriller.
The story will get the Hollywood treatment in the upcoming ‘21’ starring Kevin Spacey, Lawrence Fishburne and Kate Bosworth.
Ben Mezrich “Writing the book was the most amazing experience - I travelled with the MIT blackjack team for 6 months, learned how to card count, and watched them in action. There’s nothing quite like watching a college kid bet $110,000 on a single hand of blackjack.
After writing the book, I have a new appreciation for how completely evil casinos are - the lengths they go to to get people to gamble, the amount of time and money they spend going after the few kids who can actually beat the house. There’s nothing illegal about card counting, but the casinos come after you like you’ve committed the worst crime imaginable. To them, a player winning is a crime. Still, I love Vegas, and there’s nothing better than a weekend at the Hard Rock with my friends!”
The Man Behind the Shades: The Rise and Fall of Stuey ‘The Kid’ Ungar, Poker’s Greatest Player
Nolan Dalla & Peter Alson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
“He could recount in excruciating detail thousands of hands he had played, but he couldn’t even turn on the gas stove. Rather than wash his own hair, a few times a week, Stuey went to the Dunes, where a hairstylist washed it for him.”
The story of possibly one of the most naturally-gifted card players who ever lived and one of the biggest gamblers. Stu Ungar was the best gin rummy player in America, and once the competition had dried up, he switched his attention to poker, heading to Vegas and winning the World Series 3 times (including back-to-back victories in 1980 and 1981). But various forms of addiction took their toll and he died, penniless, a year after his 3rd win in 1997. An incisive, sad, exhilarating read.
Nolan Dalla“Stuey embodied virtually all human qualities - good and bad - all wrapped up in a 5’ 2” dynamite of a personality. He was everything on an exaggerated scale, and possessed traits almost incomprehensible to normal people. Whatever he did, Stuey did it bigger, faster, better, and more destructively than anyone else. He won more, lost more, loved more, laughed more, and suffered more pain than anyone I have ever known. I do not expect we will ever see his match again.”
Big Deal
Anthony Holden (Abacus)
The British author, journalist, royal biographer, oh, and poker player Anthony Holden’s now legendary 1990 offering saw him take a year off to pursue his love of poker.
From the relative safety of his ‘Tuesday Night Game’ Holden ventured out into the wide world of poker and catalogued the results. He spent days and nights in the poker paradise of Las Vegas, in Malta and Morocco, even aboard ships, mingling with the legendary greats, sharpening his game, perfecting his repartee, and learning a great deal about himself in the process.
Responsible for launching the poker lives of many an aspiring player, Big Deal is warm and funny in equal measures. The long-awaited sequel Bigger Deal is out now.
Anthony Holden “Wherever I go, from 1990 to this very week, people come up to me and say they took up poker after reading Big Deal. Some even moved to Vegas. Most say they’re doing okay; some, who I haven’t met, no doubt have gone bust and disappeared. As I was writing it, I had no idea that the book would, for better or worse, alter so many lives.”
Take Me to the River
Peter Alson (Atria Books)
A second entry for the talented Mr Alson. He followed up his co-authored biography of Stu Ungar (see above) with this delightful travelogue. Take Me to the River is a World Series story with a difference, as Peter Alson, an ‘overeducated underachiever’ by admission, hatches a bold plan to raise the funds for his wedding to his long-time girlfriend by entering the 2005 World Series of Poker at the ripe age of 50. The novel is a first person narrative of a man’s quest to ‘grow up’, whilst competing with over 5,000 players for a piece of the $56 million prize pool. The story is both light-hearted and heavy going in its tale of what it means to be caught in the tailwind of one the fastest growing sports in the US (no, the WORLD), along the way delivering the lessons that poker has to teach us about probability and luck, good and bad fortune, patience, perseverance and ultimately, commitment. Alson’s book has been described as “landing somewhere between Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” - not a bad place to end up. And did Alson end up with enough for a fairytale wedding? You’ll just have to read the book.
The Professor, the Banker and the Suicide King
Michael Craig (Little, Brown & Co)
Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Howard Lederer and Jennifer Harman, some of the best professional poker players in the world, found themselves at the mercy of a stranger in 2001, as a self-made billionaire called Andy Beal strolled into the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas and challenged them to $1 million heads-up matches in the richest poker game of them all. As the games evolved and the millions stacked up, Beal learned how he could manipulate his opponents out of their comfort zone – to put everything they had on the line.
As it says on the sleeve, Michael Craig’s book explores ‘the iron-nerved mind and pathological psyche of the professional gambler’, willing to walk the high wire where mere millimetres separate untold wealth from absolute ruin.
Michael Craig “While writing ‘Suicide King..’, the most interesting thing I learned was that, to be the best, it’s not enough simply to be highly skilled. The world’s best professional gamblers have a willingness to take risks - call it “intentional recklessness” or “giving action to get action” or whatever - that separate them from the rest of the world, even poker players of equivalent skill. “Too much gamble” is the ultimate compliment in this world. Through this book, I was very lucky to meet remarkable people like Ted Forrest, Howard Lederer, Jennifer Harman, Barry Greenstein and the like. I’m still friendly with all of them, and good friends with several.”
The Man With The $100,000 Breasts & Other Gambling Stories
Michael Konik (Broadway)
Responsible for bringing the crazy life of Brian Zembic to a wider audience (see interview on p.66), Michael Konik’s nifty little book gathers some of the best stories of wild gamblers, poker players, cheats and outrageous wins (and losses). Kicking off with Canadian gambler Zembic who got breast implants put in for a bet, the book understandably struggles to keep up the momentum thereafter but there are plenty of worthy tales: the greatest cheat in history; the high roller who won $17 million in Vegas; and the story of the sports bettor who lost over $2 million on a single football game – and simply shrugged it off.
Michael Konik “Writing the book was like momentarily entering a surreal parallel universe, where all the lessons we’re taught about civic responsibility and proper behaviour have been conveniently discarded.”
Among the many crucial concepts I learned was that no matter how shapely the breast, it’s not quite as much fun to fondle when it has razor stubble on it.”
The World’s Greatest Gambling Scams
Richard Marcus (Undercover Publishing)
Richard Marcus’ book does pretty much what it says on the tin - highlighting some of the most ingenious and elaborate casino scams ever pulled off. There are James Bond-style gadgets, mini computers and a disappearing dye solution for marking cards that can only be seen through a special contact lens, which also doubles as a radio transmitter to track villains back to their secret underground lair, guarded by sharks with lasers on their...oh that’s Bond isn’t it?
Well, the dye bit was true, and the contact lens, and there are more thoroughly absorbing tales charting scams from their planning stages to implementation, plus all of the characters involved and what made them tick. Marcus also investigates the less high-tech routes such as ‘Bet and Run’, a variation of the ‘knock and run’ pastime in the UK, where children knock on someone’s front door, and run off down the street. Same applies in Vegas; bets are placed - if you’ve lost, run.
Richard Marcus “It was a lot of fun. Much of the time I felt as if I were participating in the scams that I was writing about, I mean the ones that had nothing to do with me. I discovered that there were other great scammers out there besides myself. I learned a great deal about casino scams using electronic gadgetry, everything from remote control devices to computers and cell phones. And besides that, I read about great feats of good ol’ human ingenuity.”
The Biggest Game in Town
Al Alvarez (Bloomsbury)
Al Alvarez is regarded as the father of contemporary poker literature, and his classic The Biggest Game In Town, more than represents fair testimony to that. Since its first publication in 1983, the book has become a cult classic. Alvarez delves into the murky and compelling world of high-stakes poker in Las Vegas, where ‘the next best thing to playing and winning is playing and losing’. The book captures the character and peculiar rites of the professional poker players who descend on the WSOP through a collection of stories, written from interviews with people who at that time were the biggest names in the game. A classic in the poker literary canon.
Al Alvarez “Originally the book was formed of 2 long magazine articles. My agent pitched the idea to the editor of the New Yorker who loved the idea of this crazy English poet going to cover the World Series of Poker. I was poker crazy and was dying to go to Las Vegas as I’d never been. In those days of course no-one knew about the WSOP and I was definitely a curiosity to the Las Vegas players [like Doyle Brunson, Puggy Pearson and Bobby Baldwin], many of whom I met. I think they adopted me.
I considered it an advantage that I was this strange little Englishman coming over to write about the World Series. I could have been from Mars for all they cared. I consider The Biggest Game in Town a book about people, not poker and, not wanting to sound pretentious, I was trying to make a work of literature.”
Positively Fifth Street: Murderers Cheetahs and Binion’s World Series of Poker
James McManus (Picador USA)
It’s the 2000 World Series of Poker, and Harper’s Magazine sends James McManus to Las Vegas to cover the event, explore the boom in female players and investigate the murder of tournament host Ted Binion. However, things go a bit sideways almost as soon as McManus puts sole to floor, as he decides to chance his entire Harper’s advance to buy into the tournament in an attempt to experience first-hand, what it actually takes to become a world champion poker player.
The book is both a lighthearted and hard-hitting account of a writer who achieved what no other in his profession had done before: make the final table of the World Series main event. Anthony Holden, author of Big Deal described the event as ‘the equivalent of NASA sending a poet to the Moon’. Just about sums it up really.
Fast Company: How Six Master Gamblers Defy the Odds - and Always Win
Jon Bradshaw (High Stakes)
This near-forgotten book sees Bradshaw profiling six men with something in common - they are all hustlers, gamblers who make a living by their wits. The range here is great, including the tennis player Bobby Riggs and backgammon great Tim Holland, as well as more “traditional” gamblers Minnesota Fats (pool), Puggy Pearson and Johnny Moss (poker), and Titanic Thompson (the legendary prop bet man). But that was what these men were best at - they all exceeded at almost every game they undertook, golf being an extremely common one for each.
The late Bradshaw was a gifted writer. His style makes this book difficult to put down; the subject makes it nigh impossible. It’s a group of incredibly poignant, expertly delivered portraits of some of the most colourful professional hustlers of the 20th Century.
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Posted by Gambling – 13 Sep 2007, 6:51 PM
Some great gambling books here, especially the worlds greatest gambling scams. Great stuff.