The Unique Way to Make Money at the Racetrack

Ed Gambera

There are so many things to say about this book that I can honestly say I have no idea where to start. That it was published at all is somewhat amazing to me. Hillsdale is either a name cooked up for a self-publishing deal or a vanity press of the lowest sort, as it's obvious no proofreading was done at all on the manuscript, where at least three or four grammatical errors can be found on each page, and lapses in sentence structure occur almost constantly. Forget about more subtle things like paragraph construction. Amusingly, one can tell where the author invested the text with extra emotion by watching the increase in number of grammatical errors and decrease in coherence. For example, in a passage where Gambera is talking about Andrew Beyer, you can see him getting really het up:

"Most of the top handicappers have written more than one book, and it amazes me, how this elite group keeps praising each other, as to how successful their books are, and as a reader of most of them, I could never win following their methods, because of the technicality and the difficulty to understand what they were preaching.... The readers should also understand, that Beyer and most of the top handicappers, that have published, are usually making money from their royalties, their salaries as writers for newspapers, and from their seminars, and 900 numbers, and not by playing at the racetrack."

I triple-checked that to make sure I had all the commas in the right places. If you were laughing by the time you finished that except, welcome to the club.

Worse, if you can get past the grammatical mess that is this book, Gambera heartily embraces the one mistake that will drive a player to bankruptcy faster than any other: the idea of a horse being due. (If you have the intestinal fortitude to pick this book up, should you come across it, read the section on "missing odd" horses-- yes, that's "missing odd," not "missing odds"-- and do exactly the opposite if you want to preserve a red cent that's in your pocket.)

There might well be some useful information here during those times when Gambera isn't trying to be soon (as in "a fool and his money are soon parted"), but this book was such a painful experience I can't bring myself to try any of it out. Gambera finishes the book with a postscript:

"P:S: I do not intend to write another book so I hope that this one is a winner."

Thank you. We could ask for no less. Half a star because I, for some reason, finished it.