Games : Gambling

Handicapping the Wall Street Way: Picking Xtra Winners at the Track goes beyond conventional handicapping and offers the author's unique handicapping theory based on nearly 20 years of security and market analysis experience. Starting with the basic premise that pricing or odds inefficiencies offer spectacular opportunities, the author draws parallels between the stock market and pari-mutuel betting pool and explains how to target and exploit these inefficiencies. The author provides psychological profiles of horseplayers as well as an exercise to help the reader determine his or her betting profile. Carefully crafted betting strategies are discussed in an easy-to-follow format for each type of player profile. Short on fluff, Handicapping the Wall Street Way: Picking Xtra Winners at the Track provides a money-management technique to help make a day at the track a profitable one. more...

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Price: $13.00

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...

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Price: $12.00

In his wry and funny memoir, Edward Ugel tells the story of America's addiction to the lottery from an astonishing angle. At age twenty–six, Ed found himself broke, knee–deep in gambling debt, and moving back into his parents' basement. It all changed, however, when he serendipitously landed a job as a salesman for The Firm – a company that offered up–front cash to lottery winners in exchange for their prize money, often paid in agonizingly small annual payments, some lasting up to twenty–five years. For the better part of the ensuing decade, Ed spent his time closing deals with lottery winners, making a lucrative and legitimate – if sometimes not–so–nice – living by taking advantage of their weaknesses... weaknesses he knew all too well. Ed met hundreds of lottery winners and saw up–close the often hilarious, sometime sad outcome when great wealth is dropped on ordinary people. Once lottery winners realized their "dream–come–true" multimillion jackpots were not all that they were cracked up to be, Ed would knock on their door, offering them the cash they wanted–and often desperately need. This cash sometimes came at a high price, but winners were rarely in a position to walk the other way. As Ed learned, few of them had the financial savvy to keep up with the lottery–winner lifestyle. In fact, some just wanted their old lives back. A charmingly neurotic gambler, Ed traveled deep into the heart of the country where he discovered the American Dream looks a lot like a day at the casino. And Ed knows casinos. In fact, his own taste for gambling gave him a unique insight into lottery winners: he intimately understood their mindset, making it that much easier to relate to them. And like lottery winners, Ed struggled to find balance in his own life as his increasing success earned him a bigger and bigger salary. Even as he relished his accomplishments, he grappled with th more...

Price: $11.99