Books about Gambler from Amazon.com

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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 casinos for more than three million dollars. But their success also brings with it the formidable ire of casino owners and launches them into the seedy underworld of corporate Vegas with its private investigators and other violent heavies.

Filled with tense action, high stakes, and incredibly close calls, Bringing Down the House is a nail-biting read that chronicles a real-life Ocean's Eleven. It's one story that Vegas does not want you to read..
Price: $2.06 [Notify me when price goes down.]

He played in casinos around the world with a plan to make himself richer than anyone could possibly imagine -- but it would nearly cost him his life.

Semyon Dukach was known as the Darling of Las Vegas. A legend at age twenty-one, this cocky hotshot was the biggest high roller to appear in Sin City in decades, a mathematical genius with a system the casinos had never seen before and couldn't stop -- a system that has never been revealed until now; that has nothing to do with card counting, wasn't illegal, and was more powerful than anything that had been tried before.

Las Vegas. Atlantic City. Aruba. Barcelona. London. And the jewel of the gambling crown -- Monte Carlo.

Dukach and his fellow MIT students hit them all and made millions. They came in hard, with stacks of cash; big, seemingly insane bets; women hanging on their arms; and fake identities. Although they were taking classes and studying for exams during the week, over the weekends they stormed the blackjack tables only to be harassed, banned from casinos, threatened at gunpoint, and beaten in Vegas's notorious back rooms.

The stakes were high, the dangers very real, but the players were up to the challenges, consequences be damned. There was Semyon Dukach himself, bored with school and broke; Victor Cassius, the slick, brilliant MIT grad student who galvanized the team; Owen Keller, with stunning ability but a dark past that would catch up to him; and Allie Simpson, bright, clever, and a feast for the eyes.

In the classroom, they were geeks. On the casino floor, they were unstoppable.

Busting Vega$ is Dukach's unbelievably true story; a riveting account of monumental greed, excess, hubris, sex, love, violence, fear, and statistics that is high-stakes entertainment at its best.

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Price: $4.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A gloriously written memoir of growing up in a family of hard- core gamblers-Martha Frankel thought the gambling gene had passed her by, until she found herself addicted to online poker and knee-deep in debt.

Most weekends when Martha Frankel was a kid, her mother had a mah-jongg game going in the kitchen with her girlfriends while their husbands were in the living room playing poker. Once Frankel reached adulthood, however, while her cousins were making their way in the world as bookies and drug dealers, gambling didn't much factor into her life.

In the tradition of Five-Finger Discount by Helene Stapinski and Dry by Augusten Burroughs, Hats & Eyeglasses traces Frankel's love affair with poker. It was a passion that bit her in her mid-forties and remained harmless enough when she stuck to real cards. But everything changed one evening in 1998 in Atlantic City, when Frankel overheard one dealer bemoan the fact that his tips that evening were going to be small what with the meager crowd assembled. Another dealer mentioned that everyone must be playing online-"Why leave the house when you can play in your pajamas?" the dealer said. Why indeed? thought Frankel, who couldn't wait to get back to her computer. The next morning she took a deep breath, typed in her credit card number, and entered the world of online gambling. It was the beginning of what one of her uncles called "hats and eyeglasses," a term used to describe those times when you're losing so bad you're drowning (so all one can see is the poker player's hat and eyeglasses floating on the surface of the water). By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Hats & Eyeglasses is a tale of passion, addiction-and those times in life when we almost lose our shirt..
Price: $2.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Renowned storyteller Gaelen Foley unfurls the seductive tale of the rakish Lord Alec Knight, who never looked for love–until it was right in front of him. . . .

Lord Alec Knight, the most daring and handsome rogue in all of London, is a smooth-talking aristocrat with an abundance of high-society lady admirers. With his irresistible wit, lucky hand at the gaming tables, and enticing charisma, he can have any woman he wants. But when the only girl he would have considered marrying ties the knot with someone else, Alec realizes he doesn’t want to be with just any lady–he wants to find the love of his life.

The boldly spirited, beautiful Miss Becky Ward takes his life by storm after he rescues her from peril. Alec soon learns that she is on the run from her cousin, the murderous Prince Mikhail Kurkov. Becky has uncovered a menacing secret about the prince–now nothing will stop him from hunting her down. In the midst of danger, Alec and Becky find themselves deeply drawn to each other. After the two spend an all-consuming night of sin, Becky’s knight in shining armor vows on his honor to protect her until the end. But before long, Alec is protecting her with more than honor–and it seems the once untamed rake of London just may have found what he has been searching for all along . . . true love..
Price: $3.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"One wild read" (Rick Reilly, Sports Illustrated) about a unique city trying to find itself--and about three gamblers who win, lose, and risk everything during the college basketball season.

One gambler is a manic former cokehead with an Ivy League degree. The second is a college dropout trying to make a living at the only thing he enjoyed at school--gambling. The third, one of Vegas's most respected bookmakers, is perilously close to burning out. The Odds follows the lives of these three professional gamblers through a college basketball season in a one-of-a-kind city struggling to reconcile its lawless past with its family-friendly makeover. With a wiseguy attitude and a faultless eye and ear for the sights and sounds of Vegas and its denizens, Chad Millman has created a portrait that the Wall Street Journal called "fascinating... often screamingly funny." The Las Vegas Review-Journal had just one word for the book: "Superb.".
Price: $4.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Al King is a rock-and-roll superstar who is everything his groupies want him to be. Dallas is a beauty queen whose sky-high ambition stems from a sordid and secret past. Together, they're on a wild ride from London to New York, from Hollywood to Rio, and the steaming jungles of the Amazon--where their most outrageous dreams and most terrifying nightmares are about to come true..
Price: $3.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have given us the definitive version of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s strikingly original short novels, The Double and The Gambler

The Double is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare–foreshadowing Kafka and Sartre–in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelganger, a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and colleagues. The Gambler is a stunning psychological portrait of a young man's exhilarating and destructive addiction to gambling, a compulsion that Dostoevsky–who once gambled away his young wife's wedding ring–knew intimately from his own experience. In chronicling the disastrous love affairs and gambling adventures of Alexei Ivanovich, Dostoevsky explores the irresistible temptation to look into the abyss of ultimate risk that he believed was an essential part of the Russian national character..
Price: $8.81 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Though the Aubreys’ lives have long been clouded by their father’s genius for instability, surely his new editorial appointment in London will turn things around. Seen through the merciless, loving eyes of young Rose, one of four siblings, Rebecca West’s 1957 novel is a vital, witty, and devastating family portrait -- a brilliant re-imagining of her own volatile childhood. Remarkable for its evocation of the Edwardian age, The Fountain Overflows is every bit as penetrating as West’s great work of nonfiction Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and has a dash of the supernatural thrown in for good measure..
Price: $4.49 [Notify me when price goes down.]

From a brilliant new talent comes a riveting novel of chance, fate, and numbers, and one man's strange journey past the boundaries of the possible

David Caine inhabits a world of obsession, rich rewards, and rapid, destructive downfalls. A compulsive gambler and brilliant mathematician prone to crippling epileptic seizures, he possesses the uncanny ability to calculate odds of any hand in the blink of an eye. But one night at an underground poker club, Caine makes a costly mi scalculation, sending his life spinning out of control. Desperate, he agrees to test an experimental drug with unnerving side effects: inexplicable visions of the past, present, and future. Unsure whether he's perceiving an alternate reality or suffering a psychotic breakdown, Caine embarks on a journey that stretches beyond the possible into the world of the improbable. Gradually, he discovers the extent of his astonishing new ability -- but powerful, shadowy forces know Caine's secret. Now Caine must fight for his survival -- and his sanity . . .

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Price: $1.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]