Don’t Gamble with Your Future. Nearly two-thirds of the adult population in the United States gambled in the past year. For some, this represented a casual bet or a whimsical wager on winning the lottery. But for a significant and growing portion of the population, gambling isn’t recreation–it’s life. Many believe that Christians are unlikely to become enslaved by gambling. Yet research indicates that Christians are drawn to gambling at the same rate as others. In Turning the Tables on Gambling, you’ll explore the answers to questions such as: • What is my risk of becoming addicted to gambling? • Is playing the lottery or making a casual wager harmless? • At what point does gambling become destructive? • If gambling is a problem for me or someone I know, what can I do? With solid insight, personal anecdotes, and practical help, Dr. Gregory Jantz describes why people of all ages and backgrounds are lured into gambling and how freedom form this destructive behavior can be found. INCLUDES GAMBLING PERSONALITY QUESTIONNAIRE!
In Burning the Tables in Las Vegas, Ian Andersen, author of the classic Turning the Tables on Las Vegas and one of the most successful high-stakes blackjack players of all time, shares his personal program for success at blackjack, poker, and life. This second edition contains three important new chapters: one on the use of the surrender option at blackjack as a camouflage technique, one on green-chip play for medium rollers; and one on understanding casino psychology. The "Crazy Surrender" chapter expands Andersen's Ultimate Gambit and adds another dimension to his technique of using elements of mathematics and psychology to remain below the casino radar. This new edition also contains a Foreword by blackjack legend Stanford Wong.
This romp through the wilds of Las Vegas features a nice girl, a slimy entertainment executive, a really bad magician, and more laughs and excitement than can be found anywhere on the strip.
This book provides an overview of the state of the art in research on and treatment of gambling disorder. As a behavioral addiction, gambling disorder is of increasing relevance to the field of mental health. Research conducted in the last decade has yielded valuable new insights into the characteristics and etiology of gambling disorder, as well as effective treatment strategies. The different chapters of this book present detailed information on the general concept of addiction as applied to gambling, the clinical characteristics, epidemiology and comorbidities of gambling disorder, as well as typical cognitive distortions found in patients with gambling disorder. In addition, the book includes chapters discussing animal models and the genetic and neurobiological underpinnings of the disorder. Further, it is examining treatment options including pharmacological and psychological intervention methods, as well as innovative new treatment approaches. The book also discusses relevant similarities to and differences with substance-related disorders and other behavioral addictions. Lastly, it examines gambling behavior from a cultural perspective, considers possible prevention strategies and outlines future perspectives in the field.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. Gambling is both a multi-billion-dollar international industry and a ubiquitous social and cultural phenomenon. It is also undergoing significant change, with new products and technologies, regulatory models, changing public attitudes and the sheer scale of the gambling enterprise necessitating innovative and mixed methodologies that are flexible, responsive and ‘agile’. This book seeks to demonstrate that researchers should look beyond the existing disciplinary territory and the dominant paradigm of ‘problem gambling’ in order to follow those changes across territorial, political, technical, regulatory and conceptual boundaries. The book draws on cutting-edge qualitative work in disciplines including geography, organisational studies, sociology, East Asian studies and anthropology to explore the production and consumption of risk, risky places, risk technologies, the gambling industry and connections between gambling and other kinds of speculation such as financial derivatives. In doing so it addresses some of the most important issues in contemporary social science, including: the challenges of studying deterritorialised social phenomena; globalising technologies and local markets; regulation as it operates across local, regional and international scales; and the rise of games, virtual worlds and social media.
Gambling captures as nothing else the drama of the "long eighteenth century" between the age of religious wars and the age of revolutions. The society that was confronted with games of chance pursued as commercial ventures also came to grips with unprecedented social mobility, floated by new wealth from new sources created fortunes from trade in sugar, cotton, ivory, silk, tea, or enslaved human beings. Likewise, play for money was prominent in the public imagination as money itself, deployed through an ever expanding and ever more sophisticated range of mechanisms, increasingly invaded public awareness, as when prospective spouses in period fiction were rated in terms of annual income as if they were municipal bonds. Similarly, the archetypal figure of the gambler captured the imagination of the public in fiction, media, and politics. At the same time, new interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics - encouraged and bankrolled by those in power - fostered a new and unprecedented appreciation for mathematical probability and its applications, opening the possibility that games of chance might be pursued as a profitable commercial venture. The Gambling Century focuses like no previous work on those who enabled, facilitated, and profited from gambling, as well as on efforts to regulate or outlaw it. Using extensive archival material as well as printed sources, it follows its subjects from the Court to the coffeehouse, to private clubs and "at homes" in townhouses, all of which prefigure that quintessentially modern gambling space, the casino.
A New York Times bestseller • A New York Times Notable Book “The tale of how Konnikova followed a story about poker players and wound up becoming a story herself will have you riveted, first as you learn about her big winnings, and then as she conveys the lessons she learned both about human nature and herself.” —The Washington Post It's true that Maria Konnikova had never actually played poker before and didn't even know the rules when she approached Erik Seidel, Poker Hall of Fame inductee and winner of tens of millions of dollars in earnings, and convinced him to be her mentor. But she knew her man: a famously thoughtful and broad-minded player, he was intrigued by her pitch that she wasn't interested in making money so much as learning about life. She had faced a stretch of personal bad luck, and her reflections on the role of chance had led her to a giant of game theory, who pointed her to poker as the ultimate master class in learning to distinguish between what can be controlled and what can't. And she certainly brought something to the table, including a Ph.D. in psychology and an acclaimed and growing body of work on human behavior and how to hack it. So Seidel was in, and soon she was down the rabbit hole with him, into the wild, fiercely competitive, overwhelmingly masculine world of high-stakes Texas Hold'em, their initial end point the following year's World Series of Poker. But then something extraordinary happened. Under Seidel's guidance, Konnikova did have many epiphanies about life that derived from her new pursuit, including how to better read, not just her opponents but far more importantly herself; how to identify what tilted her into an emotional state that got in the way of good decisions; and how to get to a place where she could accept luck for what it was, and what it wasn't. But she also began to win. And win. In a little over a year, she began making earnest money from tournaments, ultimately totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. She won a major title, got a sponsor, and got used to being on television, and to headlines like "How one writer's book deal turned her into a professional poker player." She even learned to like Las Vegas. But in the end, Maria Konnikova is a writer and student of human behavior, and ultimately the point was to render her incredible journey into a container for its invaluable lessons. The biggest bluff of all, she learned, is that skill is enough. Bad cards will come our way, but keeping our focus on how we play them and not on the outcome will keep us moving through many a dark patch, until the luck once again breaks our way.
Dedicated research on other systems and personal experimentation has turned a handful of notes into a comprehensive collection of potentially winning strategies. First and foremost, it is important to understanding that there is no winning system that can beat the mathematical odds that the casino has against a player. However, this book teaches you strategies to follow while in the casino, giving you a large amount of information to help you walk out a winner. These tips can benefit players of all experience levels. You will learn to think how the casino thinks, and avoid the traps they set for every player. Inside you will find the general rules for each of the main games, tips on how to approach a table, what to say to the dealers, how to handle your money, and especially a broad range of specific strategies, or "systems" for each of the games covered. This book makes the game and strategy information easy to understand and follow, as well as fun and enjoyable to read, with a bit of irreverant humor sprinkled throughout.
