Further Reading

GENERAL GAMBLING INFORMATION, INCLUDING HOW GAMES ARE PLAYED

Scarne, John. Scarne’s Complete Guide to Gambling. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961.

This book is out of print but can be found used online. It contains almost everything you would want to know about gambling from an intelligent point of view. Scarne was a distinguished gambling expert, very well respected by both gambling insiders and academics. Much of the material is out of date, but it still gives a feel of what gambling was like before it became legal all over America. With a terrific sense of the mathematics behind each game, Scarne’s book prosaically explains the math clearly without much symbol fuss.

BACKGROUND HISTORY

Schwartz, David. Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling. New York: Gotham, 2006.

This is a magnificent book, written by a historian at the University of Nevada’s Center for Gaming Research. Schwartz is a masterful writer with a thorough knowledge of gambling in Western Europe as well as the United States. The book is as entertaining as it is thorough with plenty of anecdotes and useful facts. A very readable book with a broad scope that extends from ancient history to Internet gambling.

THE HISTORY OF OLD GAMES

Cotton, Charles. The Compleat Gamester, Or Instructions How to Play at All Manner of Usual and Most Genteel Games. Barre, MA: Imprint Society, 1970.

This charming little book was first published in 1674. The Imprint Society has done an admirable service by making it available once again. It was the favorite book on games in the seventeenth century. It describes thirty-eight different games from billiards to basset as well as the countenances and spirits of the gamesters themselves.

THE MATHEMATICS

Bernoulli, Jacob. The Art of Conjecturing. Trans. Edith Dudley Sylla. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

First published in 1713, this book was the first comprehensive book on the theory of probability. Thanks to the expert translating and editing of Edith Dudley Sylla, this book contains readable accounts of the early mathematics of permutations and combinations. It also contains a readable account—annotated by Bernoulli himself—of Huygens’s Treatise on Reckoning in Games of Chance, which introduces dice odds and average values.

Packel, Edward. The Mathematics of Games and Gambling. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America, 2006.

This is an exceptionally easy-to-read introduction to probability, expectation, and game theory that includes brief analyses of many games across the skill/luck spectrum from roulette to poker. It’s a small book with no prerequisites beyond high school algebra. I confidently recommend this book to anyone who wishes to read with remarkable ease about the odds and expectations of individual games of chance.