The Gambling Times Guide to Winning Systems

The Editors of Gambling Times

With all those mentions of Gambling Times in the author, title, and subject, you'd think this book had something to do with Gambling Times, wouldn't you? Actually, it's the story of a young boy named Skippy and his pet parakeet Lunch...

oh, wait, that was another book.

There is a certain subgenre of nonfiction writing that I believe is taught in marketing classes. At least, the erudite version of it is taught in marketing classes. I think the vulgar version is learned from reading the same kind of material and copying its style. That style, to the best of my knowledge, is called "writing to sell." That's all it's about-- selling. No information necessary, you just string together a number of buzzwords designed to sell products. I've seen whole magazines, and worse yet a whole book or two, written in this particular style. I rather expect it from ad copy (though I don't understand how any thinking, rational human being cannot recognize it for what it is and ignore what it's saying automatically), but i don't expect it inside the product being sold. Unfortunately The Gambling Times Guide to Winning Systems, vol. I, is the second book I've picked up in the past week like that, and frankly, it's annoying as hell.

If you can get past the bulleted bold items, the exclamation points, the mini-pep-talks, and the other assorted merde cluttering up the pages, you're introduced to a crash course on various gambling systems. If you keep in the front of your mind, very firmly, that no game with a built-in house advantage can ever be beaten in the long run, there's some interesting statistical theory to be found between the lines. You'll find articles on Thoroughbred and Harness Racing, Blackjack (the first three listed are those where a player can, in fact, get a decided advantage over the house, and are thus the most important pieces of the book), Roulette, Craps, Basketball Betting, and even (for the love of all that's moly) a Keno system. As a casual (at best) casino player, usually when I find myself in Windsor, Ontario, I focused on the horse racing bits. (I did bung up a little program to test the roulette system, which horseplayers will recognize as a due-column progressive system. In horseracing, it's the worst possible gamble. In a game with fixed odds, I thought it might be intriguing. It is, if you're getting even money, but on a roulette table you're getting slightly less. I've been modifying the system's parameters to see if I can get to ten thousand spins without tapping out, hasn't happened yet.)

Quite simply, the sections on playing the ponies won't give you anything you haven't seen before in better-written publications. You should have already read the fundamentals: Ainslie, Quinn, Quirin, Beyer, Cramer, Brohamer, Meadow, and a handful of others. If you haven't, this is not the place for you to start learning about handicapping.

Amusing. Will it make you a mint overnight? Of course not.