This is a book of gambling concepts, rules, ideas, systems and strategies to help you be a more frequent winner in the casino.
There are many “systems” that you can purchase that give you one or two strategies, and they virtually all guarantee that by following their strategies you will win fortunes.
Life, math and casino gambling just doesn't work this way. Think about it. If there were even a single system that guaranteed winning, two things would happen almost at once. Gamblers would find out about it, then casinos would change the game to ensure that it was no longer a viable winning solution. Even a perfect system would not work for long.
It happened once in the game of blackjack a couple of decades ago. Edward O. Thorpe wrote a book on counting cards at the table (“Beat the Dealer”). It only took off a few percentage points from the casinos' edge, enough to barely give the player the advantage, if every card was counted and every hand was played perfectly. You also had to basically bet almost nothing when the deck was against you, and bet huge when the deck was on your side, a sure signal to the casino that a card counter was in their midst. However, he won money. He quit his job and won money. Finally he went back to work because of all of the hassle he received from the casinos for winning.
Casinos were terrified. They thought that they were months from going bankrupt. They changed the rules, excluded card counters, did everything they could do to change the odds back to their favor. After a short while, they stopped worrying.
They realized several things. They realized that most people that played blackjack never read the book. They realized that most people are lazy and among those that read the book, very few followed the teachings. They realized that of those that followed it, very few could play the game perfectly enough to push the odds to their favor. And they realized that even if the odds were slightly in their favor, the players did not have the bankroll to see them through the inevitable roller coaster of the normal ups and downs of the game.
That is where we stand with this book. There are no gambling systems or secrets in here that will win you fortunes, because there are no such things. And, like “Beat the Dealer”, this book will not help you by only reading it. It will do you no good if you are lazy, and just want to go to the casino for a good time. You must put the time into learning everything you can in this book, at least about playing in a casino in general, and about the game you are interested in, and then have the discipline to use this information whenever you visit a casino. Neither will this guarantee you from losses. What it can to is improve your chances of winning.
This Book and Gambling
Gambling. Exciting, romantic and fun, in movies at least. The good guys are always good at whatever game they play, and the women flock around them. They always make it look so easy. And it is! Beyond a shadow of a doubt, gambling is about the simplest thing there is to do with your money. You don't need any secret skills or special training, studies or advanced degrees. Anyone can step up to a table, toss their money down, and wait for the decision. The tough part is winning. Actually, that's not quite true either. Winning is easy as well, and you can do it much of the time. The tough part is winning more frequently than expected, and walking away with your winnings, enough to offset your losses that will inevitably occur. The tough part is keeping your losses to a minimum, while allowing your wins to go as high as they can, not limiting them.
The idea of this book is to boil down a portion of the huge amount of literature in the gambling world to its bare basics, to present the basic ideas, systems and strategies in a brief format. In fact, in looking over the format, I decided that, as compressed as it was, it was not compressed enough. I shrunk it to even a smaller level, the base system cheat sheets as Appendix II. After reading and re-reading this book, becoming very familiar with the concepts, and with the games themselves, you should be able to only take a copy of the 4 or 5 pages of systems for a game with you on a trip to the casino, rather than this entire bulky book, and still be able to remind yourself of different systems to play on a game.
Will any of these systems make you rich? No. Perhaps, if you carefully follow the appropriate system at the appropriate time, and use a money management strategy in order to preserve your bankroll and take advantage of potential trends, you will be able to regularly walk away from the Casino with a profit.