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krpalmerDropping in to the nearest branch of the city library to renew my card, I looked around afterwards for books with which to put that card to use. After a few moments, one volume in the display of “new books” caught my eye. Lucky Devils by Kit Chellel was subtitled “The True Story of Three Rebel Gamblers Who Beat the Odds and Changed the Game.” While the conviction I’d just lose money and risk addiction keeps me far from that subject myself, in this case I suppose I was willing to take a chance on “vicarious thrills.”
It’s briefly mentioned early on that the three men whose stories are traced wound up with varying fortunes, but just who wound up where is left to the reading. They all started off “card-counting” as the 1970s faded into the 1980s, keeping track of the cards dealt in blackjack to predict what could come next. One part of being an “advantage player,” as the people in the book name themselves, is building up winnings over time while taking advantage of weaknesses in the house’s game it hasn’t yet noticed itself.
Knowing roulette was also involved had me thinking of an older book I’d first seen a capsule review of in one of the last issues of Creative Computing about a group trying to build a computer small enough to fit in a shoe that could predict where a roulette ball would land. While it hadn’t been impressed with The Eudaemonic Pie, when I’d spotted an ebook version in one of my library’s electronic lending services a number of years later I’d checked it out. It did turn out none of the three men the newer book features had been involved with the group in the older book (and one of them winds up not even needing “wearable technology” to get pretty good at predicting roulette), but that group does get alluded to at one point, with The Eudaemonic Pie mentioned in the endnotes. So far as Creative Computing went, there was also an earlier reference in Lucky Devils to Ken Uston, who’d contributed to the magazine after too much success card counting.
It’s one thing to talk about “winning more money than ‘the house’ intends you to,” but I’m afraid I did get to thinking that money comes from less successful gamblers in the first place, and wondering with how many games being an advantage player might be taken as “denying even limited winnings to those just hoping for a bit of excitement and luck.” Of course, that’s far from summing up the whole subject either.
It’s briefly mentioned early on that the three men whose stories are traced wound up with varying fortunes, but just who wound up where is left to the reading. They all started off “card-counting” as the 1970s faded into the 1980s, keeping track of the cards dealt in blackjack to predict what could come next. One part of being an “advantage player,” as the people in the book name themselves, is building up winnings over time while taking advantage of weaknesses in the house’s game it hasn’t yet noticed itself.
Knowing roulette was also involved had me thinking of an older book I’d first seen a capsule review of in one of the last issues of Creative Computing about a group trying to build a computer small enough to fit in a shoe that could predict where a roulette ball would land. While it hadn’t been impressed with The Eudaemonic Pie, when I’d spotted an ebook version in one of my library’s electronic lending services a number of years later I’d checked it out. It did turn out none of the three men the newer book features had been involved with the group in the older book (and one of them winds up not even needing “wearable technology” to get pretty good at predicting roulette), but that group does get alluded to at one point, with The Eudaemonic Pie mentioned in the endnotes. So far as Creative Computing went, there was also an earlier reference in Lucky Devils to Ken Uston, who’d contributed to the magazine after too much success card counting.
It’s one thing to talk about “winning more money than ‘the house’ intends you to,” but I’m afraid I did get to thinking that money comes from less successful gamblers in the first place, and wondering with how many games being an advantage player might be taken as “denying even limited winnings to those just hoping for a bit of excitement and luck.” Of course, that’s far from summing up the whole subject either.