American Mensa Guide To Casino Gambling: Winning Ways
Only the top two percent of scorers on a standardized intelligence test qualify for membership in American Mensa, Ltd.; on the other hand, casino gambling involves games of chance with a built-in return for the establishment. Once a machine that issues randomly sequenced numbers is plugged in, does a genius have a better chance than you? "The indisputable reason for following basic strategy," the author writes, "is that the mathematicians and the computers have proven it's the right way to go." Mathematical theories, however, are commonly destroyed in the real gambler's world, where fate and intuition reign and, for example, the chances that dice will come up "snake eyes" three times (a 1/10,000 shot) does not improve with the player's intelligence. The book's attitude toward card counting also shows a brainy overconfidence, since all counting is based on the pretense that the counter will "know" when the deck is rich. When gambling, who really cares that out of every thousand dollars wagered the casino's percentage is X? A real-world gambling equation is igorance equals bliss. Libraries needing a new basic text would be better served by Basil Nestor's The Unofficial Guide to Casino Gambling (LJ 8/99).-Marty Soven, Woodside, NYCopyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.