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By Peter Ruchman
We tend to get a lot of manuscripts submitted to us on a regular basis at Gamblerıs Book Shop. They come from a large variety of sources on most of the topics you might find in our retail store and catalog. A good many of the current and prospective authors are aware that we are carrying on a tradition started by John Luckman, one of our two co-founders, along with his wife Edna.
John and Edna began the enterprise known as Gamblerıs Book Club from their kitchen in 1964 and started a literary garden in the world of gambling. It has proven fruitful and bloomed ever since. John specialized in assisting regular folks who thought they had something to say. He spent countless hours discussing ideas, poring over the carefully written words expressing the thoughts of hundreds of gamblers and hopeful writers helping them arrange sentences and clarify ideas into a comprehensible form for publication.
A fair portion of the literature of gambling you see on the shelves today owes a large debt to this man. Please keep in mind that there were a total of eight books in print on gambling when he and Edna started GBC. A lot has changed since John passed away in 1987 but Howard Schwartz and I carry on that tradition to this day, feeling it is our responsibility to do so. Itıs simply part of the tradition around here.
The reason I bring this up is that I received a call on a recent Monday from an author who self-published his own blackjack book. He lives in the Atlantic City area and billed himself as a blackjack professional whose book is stickered with a medallion noting a win rate of 78%. He advised me that he was visiting Las Vegas at the end of the week and wanted to drop by to discuss his book. We set up a meeting and he express mailed the book to me so I would have a chance to evaluate it before we met.
This brought to mind another author, a woman who self-published a blackjack dealerıs training manual. This is a three-volume set into which she put an awful lot of work as a result of living in an area of the Midwest lacking sufficient training schools or courses for people who desiring to break into the casino trade. Very interested in pursuing this activity and perceiving a vacuum, she plunged in and spent hours researching the various aspects of learning to deal casino bj. Her three books were designed as a home-study course allowing the person who followed her program to march into a casino with confidence and apply for a position as an uncertified but knowledgeable trainee. The result is called A Professional Dealerıs Training Curriculum, by Brenda Shaw.
The parallel with our mail-order dealer and the AC gentleman was that if either of them had taken the time to call BEFORE publishing their books, a first for each one, they would have brought a much better product to the market. Let me state that I donıt have to agree with an authorıs point-of-view and I certainly donıt believe in censorship. I do look for clarity, well-thought out concepts, attention to mathematics and probability theory, well-written sentences, a good presentation and a realistic pricing structure. Howard is an absolute nut for finding typos and getting basic information correct. Heıs right on.
We had one author who wanted us to sell his already self-published book on finding a job in Las Vegas and he had misspelled Caesars Palace, Fremont Street as well as other crucial typos damaging his bookıs credibility. Howard found more than fifty errors and as a result we chose not to include the book in our selections. We did agree to carry the blackjack dealerıs course after trying to get the author to understand that $175 was probably asking too much and her books had little chance of selling in that range. She did lower her sights a bit.
The Atlantic City author presented a different problem entirely. As you might understand, I have a problem with those in the gambling world who profess to win at absurdly high percentages (please see my columns of March 12 and 19). As one who has been around gambling and gamblers for more than 30 years, I feel I have a fairly good feel for the realities of the gambling universe. No one wins all of the time without cheating. No one wins almost all of the time unless your name is Bellagio, Hilton, or MGM. That little demon we call "House edge" is the guilty culprit. Almost all gambling strategies are devoted to skirting the little beast. We know that luck isnıt reliable so there must be a thought process that will let one depart a casino with bankroll intact if not compounded.
The AC author put together a blackjack book which is undernourished. It is suffering from yet another case of the, "I wish they had asked before leaping in," syndrome. Books are committed to print for different reasons and as the author told me when we met, this one was written because his girlfriend just put together a website and she needed an item to sell. To my mind, that is not a sufficient reason to write a 30-page book on blackjack. When you subtract the Title page, the Table of Contents, the Acknowledgments in front; the Basic Strategy Chart in the middle, duplicated by the Basic Strategy Card at the end; and the Glossary ("Blackjack Jargon"), and Personal Winning Diary, and self-serving order form in the back of this large print book, you are reduced to 15 pages of information. The retail price for this tome is $11.95, bringing the price of each page to 79.6 cents per page. When you add tax and/or shipping and handling the reality is close to $1.00 or more per page. This must be the best blackjack book ever written!
The problem is that it isnıt. Four-and one-half of the fifteen pages are devoted to explaining Basic Strategy, a subject which I believe has been covered at great length in the past more than once, leaving ten and one-half pages with friendly advice on money management, bankroll, trends, and discipline, which form the core of what the author terms his "5 Rules."
Two thoughts here: Before you write a book, it helps to familiarize yourself with the existing market. Much of the blackjack world is quite savvy and even novice players will compare your book to others already on the shelf. The two books I criticized in recent reviews at least share the results of their authorsı labors and donıt appear thrown together simply to market a product. They are filled with honest opinions, laborious research and some density. I might disagree with methods and conclusions reached but they do make a case for themselves. In this book, there is nothing that hasnıt been said many times previously in much better, well-thought out discussions of blackjack strategy. I am purposely omitting the title and author as I have chosen not to carry the book for the reasons I stated. Some books didnıt need to be written. In this case the author confessed he really did need a product-- for his girlfriend. That and the resulting effort donıt present a sufficient reason for GBC to sell it. File this one under the heading "Do your homework!"
The second thought is that when discussing win percentages, it is easy to mislead honest inquiries. If you go to a red chip or $5 table and leave as soon as you win anything (not a bad suggestion for some), then that will bring your win rate way up. If you play for short periods of time once a week or a couple of times a month, that also affects percentage (I know a guy who is 100% on his NBA bets this year. He has bet one game to date.) A great deal of the concentration on win rate is utter garbage as far as Iım concerned. More time and effort spent on meaningful tasks like improving strategies, bankroll control and understanding of rules and procedural distinctions (double after split, dealer hits soft 17, deck penetration) will ultimately mean more in the long run than bragging rights. Think about it.
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Peter Ruchman has been published in a number of casino and gaming publications. He is the author of "After the Goldrush," a three-volume definitive history of gambling in Las Vegas, and is regularly featured on HBO, ESPN and the Discovery Channel.
