Games : Gambling

Is this a great country or what? You can bet on the turn of the card, a roll of the dice—but also the NFL, the NCAA, and which Olson twin marries first. We bet $80 million a year, the amount growing wildly as more and more people gain access to this huge American wheel of fortune. No longer quarantined in Las Vegas, gambling has become as local as our neighborhood cineplex. It's no wonder that we spend more money gambling than we do on movies, music, sports, video games, and theme parks combined! If there's not a casino around the corner, there's one on your laptop computer. In Jackpot Nation , acclaimed Sports Illustrated writer Richard Hoffer takes us on a headlong tour, alternately horrifying and hilarious, across our landscape of luck, discovering just how ridiculously determined we are to gamble. Whether he's trying to win a side of bacon in a Minnesota bar, hustling a paper sack filled with $100,000 cash across Las Vegas parking lots, poring over expansion plans with a tribal chief in California, or visiting a retired bus salesman with a poor understanding of three-game parlays in his New York prison cell, Hoffer finds a national inclination—a cultural predisposition, even—to take a chance. Hoffer shows us how Americans—adventurers at heart—have embraced this ability to take recreational risks with a surprising gusto. But as he pokes into this country's far corners, traveling coast to coast with odds as his copilot, he uncovers more than just the playful exercise of that age-old fantasy—something for nothing. He discovers that the very institutions that used to regulate this workout are now its biggest cheerleaders. Whereas government, religion, and business once restricted our ability to gamble, making it taboo even, they have now taken ownership of the pastime. Yesterday's numbers racket is today's state lottery; yesterday's mobbed-up casino is now part of a Fortune 500 company. It's one thing to recognize the house edge, more...

Price: $19.95

Like a secret society, poker has its own language and customs -- its own governing logic and rules of etiquette that the uninitiated may find intimidating. It's a game of skill, and playing well depends on more than just a good hand or the ability to hide emotion. The first step toward developing a style of play worthy of the greats is learning to think like a poker player. In a game where there are no absolutes, mastering the basics is only the beginning -- being able to pull off the strategy and theatrics is the difference between legendary wins and epic failure. more...

Price: $17.99

An award-winning historian offers a provocative alternative history of America that traces how luck, chance, and gambling have shaped, indeed defined, our national character Hailed by The New York Review of Books as "one of cultural history's masters of linking popular moods and ideas with arts, philosophies, industries, and commodities," prizewinning historian Jackson Lears has now written the most important, most wide-ranging, and most original book of his career. In Something for Nothing, Lears documents how America's culture of control is inextricably entwined with its culture of chance. Conventional wisdom has it that the Protestant ethic of hard work and self-control is what made America great, but a deep, seldom acknowledged reverence for luck runs through our history as well. Americans have embraced the seductive whims of chance, from African fortune-telling to Puritan folk superstitions right up to the current resurgence of casinos and lotteries. Drawing on a vast body of research, Lears ranges through the entire sweep of American history as he uncovers the hidden influence of risk taking, conjuring, soothsaying, and sheer dumb luck on our culture, politics, social lives, and economy. Written with impressive clarity and authority, Something for Nothing will be compared to Louis Menand's bestselling The Metaphysical Club and Ann Douglas's Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. This is cultural history at its best—challenging, eye opening, deeply learned, and as surprising as it is illuminating. more...

Price: $16.00

In 2001, a stranger from Texas entered the high-stakes poker room in the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas. A self-made billionaire, he challenged some of poker's greatest players to a series of heads-up matches. By the end, there was more than $20 million on the table. For the first time ever, here is the detailed, true account of the legendary Big Game that shocked the poker world. Putting you railside to observe the pulse-pounding action, it takes you inside the iron-nerved mind of the professional gambler. Filled with vivid characters, sensational tales, and riveting human drama, this is a unique, suspenseful journey into the world of people who live on the razor's edge of fortune-where incredible wealth or utter ruin turn on the flip of a card. more...

Price: $10.99

The world of betting is being transformed by internet betting exchanges, and there’s none bigger than Betfair, the world’s leading online betting exchange. Winning on Betfair For Dummies is the definitive insider’s guide, giving you a full picture of the way Betfair works, explaining the terms, lingo and jargon, and letting you in on insider knowledge and know-how. more...

Price: $9.99