Having survived the games at the Starside Hotel, Kaiji is invited to join another game for a chance at even more cash! But while the previous game was physically challenging, this game, E-Card, is socially twisted. At its core it is a card game similar to rock-paper-scissors, but like the cards played - slave, citizen, emperor - the power balance is not in the favor of the challenger.

The most complete guide ever to taking up poker and winning Comprehensive and easy to follow, The Mammoth Book of Poker enables even those new to the game to begin and win at home, in casinos, in tournaments and online. Written by leading card games author Paul Mendelson, and packed with top tips, this invaluable new guide helps you understand your chances, appreciate the percentages, and master the odds that your hand improves. All aspects of poker are covered, including: Online poker Texas Hold 'Em, Omaha, Seven-Card Stud, Hi/Lo Split and all other variants No-Limit/Limit Killer online play Casino play Advanced strategies Tournament play and listings With over 500 pages, The Mammoth Book of Poker gives all you need to know to get started and win from the outset.

How Women Can Crack The Seemingly Closed Brotherhood Of Poker; Men do it. Boys do it. Even brothers and cousins and fathers do it. But for many women, it remains a mystery, a closed brotherhood of codes. Much has been written about poker, but this is the first book that focuses on the needs of women. This is a book for women, by women, who want to claim their seat at the poker table - and win The information in Playing With The Big Boys comes in an easy-to-follow, lively and practical presentation. Everything from the origins and basics of the game, to the variations, to strategies, and to the ways women can participate in tournaments is included. Readers will be led through the chapters by 'Laura, ' the card shark heroine: How did Laura get started? How did she become her local winner? What advice can she give to other women for their home games or for possible casino ventures? And how can women contend with husbands, boyfriends, Big Boys - and take their money Beyond the fundamentals of 5 and 7 card stud, blackjack, draw games, and Texas hold 'em, the authors investigate the unusual variants such as Chicago, Indian Poker, baseball, lowball, hi-lo, and Anaconda. hold them, and when to fold them. Bluffing gets its own separate treatment, as does the age old problem of how to manage a losing streak - or a winning streak

"Secrets of Sit'n'gos" is the ULTIMATE GUIDE to one of the most popular forms of poker. Sit'n'go tournaments are single table events usually starting with nine or ten players and paying prizes for the top three finishers. ALL serious poker websites and casinos offer Sit'n'gos - a fun and profitable way to get started in poker without having to risk a lot of money or make many difficult decisions. This book will teach you everything you need to know whether you are a beginner or an experienced poker player, including: * how to go from being a novice to a winner using basic all-in or fold strategies * how to apply more advanced Sit'n'go concepts such as ICM to become an expert player * how to use computer programs effectively in making critical decisions * how to play optimally when heads-up (one-on-one) with high blinds * how to buiild a $200 bankroll to $100,000 in one year purely in Sit'n'go events Phil Shaw will guide you through the early, middle and late stages of play, with clear explanations of the strategies required for success at each.

'Kit Fielding's debut is a triumph. A story told with brutal honesty, underpinned by humour, love, hope and the inestimable power of friendship.' RUTH HOGAN, author of The Keeper of Lost Things In every pub in every town unspoken stories lie beneath the surface. Each week, six women meet at The Bluebell Inn. They form an unlikely and occasionally triumphant ladies darts team. They banter and jibe, they laugh. But their hidden stories of love and loss are what, in the end, will bind them. There is Mary, full of it but cradling her dark secret; Lena - young and bold, she has made her choice; the cat woman who must return to the place of her birth before it's too late. There's Maggie, still laying out the place for her husband; and Pegs, the dark-eyed girl from the travellers' site bringing her strangeness and first love. And Katy: unappreciated. Open to an offer. They know little of each other's lives. But here they gather and weave a delicate and sustaining connection that maybe they can rely on as the crossroads on their individual paths threaten to overwhelm. With humanity and insight, Kit Fielding reveals the great love that lies at the heart of female friendship. Raw, funny and devastating, all of life can be found at the Bluebell.

Gambling in Papua New Guinea, despite being completely absent prior to the Colonial era, has come to supersede storytelling as the region's main nighttime activity. Money Games is an ethnographic monograph which reveals the contemporary importance of gambling in urban Papua New Guinea. Rich ethnographic detail is coupled with cross-cultural comparison which span the globe. This anthropological study of everyday economics in Melanesia thereby intersects with theories of money, value, play, informal economy, social change and leadership.

He played in casinos around the world with a plan to make himself richer than anyone could possibly imagine -- but it would nearly cost him his life.

Semyon Dukach was known as the Darling of Las Vegas. A legend at age twenty-one, this cocky hotshot was the biggest high roller to appear in Sin City in decades, a mathematical genius with a system the casinos had never seen before and couldn't stop -- a system that has never been revealed until now; that has nothing to do with card counting, wasn't illegal, and was more powerful than anything that had been tried before.

Las Vegas. Atlantic City. Aruba. Barcelona. London. And the jewel of the gambling crown -- Monte Carlo.

Dukach and his fellow MIT students hit them all and made millions. They came in hard, with stacks of cash; big, seemingly insane bets; women hanging on their arms; and fake identities. Although they were taking classes and studying for exams during the week, over the weekends they stormed the blackjack tables only to be harassed, banned from casinos, threatened at gunpoint, and beaten in Vegas's notorious back rooms.

The stakes were high, the dangers very real, but the players were up to the challenges, consequences be damned. There was Semyon Dukach himself, bored with school and broke; Victor Cassius, the slick, brilliant MIT grad student who galvanized the team; Owen Keller, with stunning ability but a dark past that would catch up to him; and Allie Simpson, bright, clever, and a feast for the eyes.

In the classroom, they were geeks. On the casino floor, they were unstoppable.

Busting Vega$ is Dukach's unbelievably true story; a riveting account of monumental greed, excess, hubris, sex, love, violence, fear, and statistics that is high-stakes entertainment at its best.

Dice, Cards, Wheels A Different History of French Culture Thomas M. Kavanagh "With his connoisseur's knowledge (and manifest love) of the rules, and ruses, of games and the culture that they shape, Kavanagh makes a convincing case that gambling ought to be considered not a moral failing or individual pathology but a conspicuous, and uncommonly revelatory, practice that sets the social scene that it dramatizes."--"Journal of Modern History" Gambling has been a practice central to many cultures throughout history. In "Dice, Cards, Wheels," Thomas M. Kavanagh scrutinizes the changing face of the gambler in France over a period of eight centuries, using gambling and its representations in literature as a lens through which to observe French culture. Kavanagh argues that the way people gamble tells us something otherwise unrecognized about the values, conflicts, and cultures that define a period or class. To gamble is to enter a world traced out by the rules and protocols of the game the gambler plays. That world may be an alternative to the established order, but the shape and structure of the game reveal indirectly hidden tensions, fears, and prohibitions. Drawing on literature from the Middle Ages to the present, Kavanagh reconstructs the figure of the gambler and his evolving personae. He examines, among other examples, Bodel's dicing in a twelfth-century tavern for the conversion of the Muslim world; Pascal's post-Reformation redefinition of salvation as the gambler's prize; the aristocratic libertine's celebration of the bluff; and Balzac's, Barbey d'Aurevilly's, and Bourget's nineteenth-century revisions of the gambler. "Dice, Cards, Wheels" embraces the tremendous breadth of French history and emerges as a broad-ranging study of the different forms of gambling, from the dice games of the Middle Ages to the digital slot machines of the twenty-first century, and what those games tell us about French culture and history. Thomas M. Kavanagh is Professor of French at Yale University. Among his previous books is "Esthetics of the Moment: Literature and Art in the French Enlightenment." Critical Authors & Issues 2005 264 pages 6 x 9 2 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-3860-0 Cloth $59.95s 39.00 ISBN 978-0-8122-0245-8 Ebook $55s 36.00 World Rights Literature, Cultural Studies Short copy: Kavanagh argues that the history of gambling as a cultural practice provides new and important insights into how French culture has responded to the challenge of understanding what identity, responsibility, and freedom can mean in a world ruled largely by chance.

People have been gambling, in one form or another, for as long as history itself. Why? Money, entertainment, escape and a desire to win are all traditional explanations. Arguably, however, these are secondary considerations to a higher order purpose: a craving for control. Gambling offers a means of gaining authority over the unknown, granting us a sense of control over uncertainty. Almost always that sense is illusory - gambling, including betting and investing, is essentially random - yet for many it is nonetheless profoundly rewarding. This book attempts to explore the reasons why. Along the way, it examines: The science of probability and uncertainty Why gambling is often condemned The difference between expectation and utility The irrationality of human beings Evolutionary perspectives on gambling Luck and skill Market efficiency and the wisdom of crowds Why winners take all Cheating Why the process matters more than the outcome

In 1956 two Bell Labs scientists discovered the scientific formula for getting rich. One was mathematician Claude Shannon, neurotic father of our digital age, whose genius is ranked with Einstein's. The other was John L. Kelly Jr., a Texas-born, gun-toting physicist. Together they applied the science of information theory--the basis of computers and the Internet--to the problem of making as much money as possible, as fast as possible.
Shannon and MIT mathematician Edward O. Thorp took the "Kelly formula" to Las Vegas. It worked. They realized that there was even more money to be made in the stock market. Thorp used the Kelly system with his phenomenonally successful hedge fund, Princeton-Newport Partners. Shannon became a successful investor, too, topping even Warren Buffett's rate of return. "Fortune's Formula "traces how the Kelly formula sparked controversy" "even as it made fortunes at racetracks, casinos, and trading" "desks. It reveals the dark side of this alluring scheme, which is" "founded on exploiting an insider's edge.
""
Shannon believed it was possible for a smart investor to beat" "the market--and "Fortune's Formula "will convince you that he was right.

Twenty-four million people wager nearly $3 billion on college basketball pools each year, but few are aware that winning strategies have been developed by researchers at Harvard, Yale, and other universities over the past two decades. Bad advice from media sources and even our own psychological inclinations are often a bigger obstacle to winning than our pool opponents. Profit opportunities are missed and most brackets submitted to pools don't have a breakeven chance to win money before the tournament begins. Improving Your NCAA (R) Bracket with Statistics is both an easy-to-use tip sheet to improve your winning odds and an intellectual history of how statistical reasoning has been applied to the bracket pool using standard and innovative methods. It covers bracket improvement methods ranging from those that require only the information in the seeded bracket to sophisticated estimation techniques available via online simulations. Included are: Prominently displayed bracket improvement tips based on the published research A history of the origins of the bracket pool A history of bracket improvement methods and their results in play Historical sketches and background information on the mathematical and statistical methods that have been used in bracket analysis A source list of good bracket pool advice available each year that seeks to be comprehensive Warnings about common bad advice that will hurt your chances Tom Adams' work presenting bracket improvement methods has been featured in the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and SmartMoney magazine.

There is a growing concern about the rise of gambling in many countries. With the expansion of online gambling opportunities and the relaxation of restrictions on gambling around the world, the industry has increased their investment in marketing activities. The use of diverse and highly visible promotional reminders has been identified as an important influence on problem gambling. Gambling critics, activists and some media campaigns have called for tighter controls over gambling advertising and some national governments have begun to review their legislation and regulatory practices. Gambling Advertising: Nature, Effects and Regulation examines these issues and reviews empirical research about the role of advertising and other forms of marketing in the encouragement of gambling behaviour. However, despite the accumulation of research evidence about the nature and effects of gambling advertising and promotion over the first two decades of the 21st century, there are still gaps in our knowledge. In its attempts to clarify the effectiveness of specific restrictions on the location, amount and nature of gambling advertising, this book will aid university teachers and researchers working in fields such as advertising and marketing, business, communications and media, leisure, and advertising and gambling regulation.

In every pub in every town unspoken stories lie beneath the surface.

Each week, six women meet at The Bluebell Inn. They form an unlikely and occasionally triumphant ladies darts team. They banter and jibe, they laugh. But their hidden stories of love and loss are what, in the end, will bind them.

There is Mary, full of it but cradling her dark secret; Lena - young and bold, she has made her choice; the cat woman who must return to the place of her birth before it's too late. There's Maggie, still laying out the place for her husband; and Pegs, the dark-eyed girl from the travellers' site bringing her strangeness and first love. And Katy: unappreciated. Open to an offer.

They know little of each other's lives. But here they gather and weave a delicate and sustaining connection that maybe they can rely on as the crossroads on their individual paths threaten to overwhelm.

With humanity and insight, Kit Fielding reveals the great love that lies at the heart of female friendship.

Raw, funny and devastating, all of life can be found at the Bluebell.

This book contains 900 ready-made 6/49 Lotto Distribution Wheeling SystemsTM arranged in three catalogs of 300 systems each. The systems chosen for this book are the first part of a global project that is meant to be a comprehensive, abbreviated Lotto wheeling net of systems covering all statistically important values and giving the player the very best chances of winning. Like the enchanted fish of the fairy tale, this book grants three wishes to the Lotto players: 1. To include more numbers in the abbreviated wheeling system, 2. To pay for the least number of combinations, 3. To have the best guarantees of winning the top prizes. The whole philosophy is reasonable, logical, and simple, and no extra knowledge is needed to understand its values. When choosing Distribution Wheeling SystemsT, the player tries to choose a distribution of numbers that will match the pattern of the winning numbers. Since there are very few statistically important distribution patterns, the player's job is simple and easy. And when the chosen distribution pattern matches the winning distribution pattern, the system guarantees that the player will win top prize. Even if the winning distribution pattern is partially matched, the system reaps the most winnings possible, given the player's hits and the misses.