Gambling Facts and Fictions: The Anti-Gambling Handbook to Get Yourself to Stop Gambling, Quit Gambling or Never Start Gambling [Paperback]

Where do I begin with this book. It is a rant against all forms of what the author considers "gambling." (Actually, the author admits that putting money into the stock market is gambling, but somehow that's o.k. sometimes.) I concentrated on the parts of the book that dealt with horse racing and the stock market, about which I know something. To begin, the author sounds like a person who has an addictive perstonality. He has been involved in all forms of "gambling" and has failed at all of them (except one form of stock market "gambling"). Because he is a genius and has failed, no one can succeed. He warns you that you cannot trust yourself to enter a racetrack or casino because you have no self-control and will have "adrenalin rushes." In my opinion,such a person should not enter a racetrack, casino, start a business, or have any supervisory control over others. Such an emotion-crazed person could not make rational decisions and, I suspect, their personal lives are messed up as well. With regard to casinos, the author states: "Do not believe it when parents tell you that they enjoy going to the casino." Again, the author is God and he knows that no parents enjoy going to the casino. That's a lie. I know parents, single people, all kinds of people who enjoy going to the casino. Although I don't play casino games, I recently met a couple at one who had traveled 150 miles to go to a casino they had never visited, although there was one within a few miles of their home. With regard to horse racing, the author makes outrageous statements: "Gambling which involves handicapping is betting on random numbers. Gambling long enough results in losing money, credit, and assets. A common illusion of handicappers is believing that somehow they really did handicap the winner. But all they actually did was choose a random number and it happened to win. Nonsense! Random numbers? If so, longshots would win as often as favorites, which is not the case. In fact, favorites in the betting win more often than any other horse, followed by the second choice, third choice, and so on. Maybe the author bet on random numbers, but the vast majority of handicappers don't. The author says there is a 20% takeout by the track that prohibits you from winning. There are only a few tracks with such a high takeout on Win, Place, and Show betting. What you see on the totalizator board is what you get after the takeout. If you can hit 30% of your bets at a an average mutuel of $7.00, you are earning 5 cents of the dollar, period! As to losing all of your money, credit, and assets, the vast majority of racegoers I've knownhave been going for yearsand I know no one who fits into this category. The author takes cheap shots whenever he can. He speaks of "paying for overpriced, oftentimes poorly cooked food and watered-down beverages. I have been to racetracks all over this country and have found none of this to be true. If you do want to find the above, try going to your local professional baseball, football, or basketball emporium. And if it's football, you have to worry about getting into fist fights with drunken opposing team fans or having them urinate on the hood of your car (an incident I read about in my local paper). The author even goes as far as to talk of the cars in racetrack parking lots as "old, dented, or shabby." Really? I don't know what track the author has gone to, but I haven't noticed what he describes. The most ridiculous of the author's quotes is the following: Try watching a horse race live or on TV without betting on it. It is actually boring." Again, nonsense. Easy Goer and Sunday Silence in the Preakness and countless other races run every day are quite exciting, certainly not boring. My guess is that the author has no aesthetic sense about the beauty of the equine athlete known as the thoroughbred. Which bring us to a key point about anything you do in life. Dear reader, do something in life that you enjoy, whatever that is. Study, study, study. If you then fail, try something else that you enjoy. The author of this book obviously didn't enjoy racing, didn't care about the people involved in the game, and was only interested in the money. If you do not enjoy what you are doing, you will fail. The author speaks of the inconsistent performance of horses (we know that businesses never have a day when they don't make money, right?) and does some bizarre mathematics to show that a 1% change in the condition of a horse will result in a change in performance of 7 lengths. The two factors simply aren't related. If this were true, horses like Zenyatta and Cigar could not win 15 or 17 races in a row, which they normally won by less than 4 lengths. With regard to the stock market, he recommends use of the old Price/Earnings ratio system. I wonder how the author's stocks did in the most recent recession, when all stocks went underwater, people can now not retire, maybe forever. By the way, Bernard Meltzer and former Vice=President John Connelly went bankrupt with real estate investments. Were they "gambling?" In closing, I am reminded of the following quote from Ambrose Bierce: "Those involved in the gambling known as business, look with austere disfavor upon the business of gambling."

All teenagers should read this book before gambling. Parents should have their kids read this book to explain the dangers of gambling in all forms. I'm going to tell all my family and friends about this book as it sheds light on what is a prevalent evil in our society.

I have to say that this book is very accurate in terms of how destructive gambling is on people lives whether it be at the casinos, horse track, stock market. I have seen first hand bankruptcy, debt, destitution, depression, irritation, rationalizing the problem among family members, friends, and from personal experience. Most people won't admit to how much they lose because of ego and embarrassment.

Although I would have preferred a more mathematical approach to analyzing why you can't win at gambling, Stephen Katz prefers to use a verbal-only approach to hammer in anti-gambling mantras into the readers' heads, and I would say it helps reinforce positive messages. I was one of those reasonably "intelligent gamblers" that used to go to casinos to try to win money. I was surprised to read that Katz had the same idea that I had: that the only sensible thing to play in a casino is to make max bets to win a progressive jackpot for millions, then to quit forever and retire. However, he reminds us all that the odds of winning such a jackpot are so low that it is not worth your time trying for something that may only happen once in many thousands of lifetimes. Katz debunks urban legends such as Blackjack card-counting and things such as making a living off of Texas Hold'em poker. Unfortunately the masses (educated or not) have been brainwashed by advertising of poker on TV such as the WSOP so they believe that many people can realistically make a living off of poker, but the house and dealers will take all of the money from all of the players through rakes and tips over time. It is true that rare players can consistently fleece weaker players, but at the highest levels of poker competition you can be sure that all of the players are more or less maxed-out on skill (in this very low-skill game with high variance), which means if they play long enough, the house will take everything eventually anyway. There will be no weak players at any betting level where you can make a living. The world is just full of people who cannot come to grips with simple mathematical realities: 1) one cannot win at a game with <50% player odds and a betting cap, and 2) any game where bettors pass money around to each other via a pot while the house takes a cut every pot also cannot be won.

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