cover image Easy Money: Inside the Gambler's Mind

Easy Money: Inside the Gambler's Mind

David Spanier. Trafalgar Square Publishing, $29.95 (209pp) ISBN 978-0-436-47888-8

Easy Money is easy reading. Not only is Spanier (Total Poker) a smooth stylist, but he brings his book to life by concentrating on the human side of gambling rather than the theoretical. He discusses Freud's analysis of the compulsive gambler, yet his emphasis is on individuals: a mathematician who devised a way to beat the house advantage at blackjack; a London man-about-town who ran games for the upper class; the cleric who founded the British Gamblers Anonymous; the physician who established a ``gamblers' hospital'' in Brecksville, Ohio. Spanier considers the motivations of gamesters, stressing the physical sensations they experience, the percentages and chances, heuristic principles, the differences in European and American gambling, and the criminal element in U.S. gaming. But, however well done, this British import is overpriced. (July)