6 Best Gambling Story Books To Read in 2021

This book is an incredible read. The characters are so well developed that I felt like they were people I knew; from the stable boy to Mark’s friends and girlfriends, all of them had a story worth telling! Beyond just being entertaining though it also provided some insider knowledge on horse racing-the horses themselves have personalities too! Overall this was not only insightful but very engaging as well.

This book really teaches you about how a gambler approaches the casino tables and how a philosophy of risk ends up leading to more success—and more loss. It’s very interesting to see how the gambling stories can be wrapped around the life of a celebrity in a way that’s both fun, entertaining, and sobering.

This book is in my opinion one of the most underrated books on Las Vegas Gambling and Casino History. Steve Fischer compiled this book together from years of hanging around all of the now historic Las Vegas Casinos, and hearing the tales first hand from the people that were there. His passion in life was Las Vegas history, and through his memorabilia collection and the stories told in When The Mob Ran Vegas he paints an intimate picture of the glory days of gambling in the mob era.

“Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions” is the true story of a professor and his students who decided to devise a count-carding strategy that would allow them to take the casino house to the cleaners, and they did. The M.I.T. Blackjack Team has won some $10 million out of devising a clever “spotting” strategy that allowed them to predict when the decks were “ready” and cards could be counted. So far as gambling books go, this is one of our favorites as it provides scientific evidence mixed with anecdotes. Author Ben Mezrich has stayed true to the authentic story, without embellishing it other than for the purposes of the occasional quip. If you want to get the inside-out of how math mavericks managed to beat the house and left it smarting for years, this is the book for you!

“The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win” is a book that explores the psyche of a gambler, and specifically poker players. Author and psychologist Maria Konnikova is a keen insight into how she not only used psychology to describe human behavior but also to predict it. Konnikova didn’t just write an account of what it is to be a poker player, the specific gambling game she focused on but also proved that achieving a deeper understanding is quite possible. She went on to win over $311,000, but this number is increasing by the month, as she continues to sit at live poker tables and one-up opponents. At the same time, she continues to work as a psychologist, research, and writer. Poker is just one of those hobbies she keeps on the side. For a deeply-compelling book of how one woman went from a complete poker-novice to one of the most feared women in the game, we recommend “The Biggest Bluff.”

The Bell’s Telephone Company is known for many things. It successfully captured Einstein’s award-winning hypothesis that light can produce electricity, creating the first silicon solar panels all the way back in the 1950s. Today, its successor AT&T is mostly associated with slow bandwidth. Nevertheless, in 1956, Bell Labs scientists Claude Shannon and John L. Kelly Jr. decided to get rich as fast as they could. They started digging into gambling, stock investing, information theory and created the “Kelly criterion,” or as you may know it, the “Fortune’s Formula.” Shannon and Kelly tested the theories in everything they could lay their hands on, from Las Vegas blackjack and roulette to Wall Street. Every time, they would end up willing. The investment strategy would later be picked up by Warren Buffet himself. Whether you bet on sports or gamble on casino games, the Fortune’s Formula is surely one of the best games about gambling you can read today.