Gambling Memoir

As Wall Street swooned and boomed through the last decade, our livelihoods have—now more than ever—come to rely upon the good sense and risk appetites of a few standout investors. And amidst the BlackRocks, Vanguards, and Berkshire Hathaways stands arguably the most iconoclastic of them all: SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son. In this “meticulously researched, balance, thoroughly readable” (Booklist, starred review) biography, we go behind the scenes of the world’s most monied halls of power in New York, Tokyo, Silicon Valley, Saudi Arabia, and beyond.

(This is a re-release of "Born to Lose: Memoirs of a Compulsive Gambler" that was published by Hazelden Publishing on March 3, 2005. Reviews for that book on Amazon can be viewed at: https://www.amazon.com/Born-Lose-Memoirs-Compulsive-Gambler/dp/1592851533/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1530771861&sr=8-1&keywords=born+to+lose%3A+memoirs+of+a+compulsive+gambler.) "My history of gambling really began before I was born." So opens Born to Lose, Bill Lee's self-told story of gambling addiction, set in San Francisco's Chinatown and steeped in a culture where it is not unheard of for gamblers (Lee's ...

In the late 1980s, a spectacular three-year-old female racehorse named Winning Colors was being groomed for success under her famous Hollywood trainer D. Wayne Lukas and the billionaire owner of the San Diego Chargers pro-football team Eugene Klein. Meanwhile, three fun-loving gamblers Miami Paul, Dino Mateo, and Big Bernie believed that Winning Colors could be the unlikely female winner of the 1988 Kentucky Derby.

Japan’s Masayoshi Son has made and lost several fortunes, investing or controlling assets worth $1trn in the past two decades through his media-tech giant, SoftBank. He bankrolled Alibaba, China’s internet colossus, before the world had heard about it; plotted with Steve Jobs to turn the iPhone into a wonder product; and financed hundreds of tech start-ups, fuelling the biggest boom Silicon Valley has ever seen. This book takes you on Masa’s wild ride, from his birthplace in a Korean slum in post-war Japan to the modern-day temples of power.

Sit back, relax, and let me take you for a ride around Las Vegas. Let me share with you some of my most unforgettable cab fares in 20 years of driving a taxicab. Each chapter is based on a true story except for one. How about these stories? My fight with a porno star, a woman who’d been slipped a roofie, a carnival man, a nymphomaniac, Italian Mafia wannabees, a warrant for my arrest, a juggler, a wedding, a hit and run, a spitter, a transsexual, a shooting, a stabbing, a Mafia job offer, a robbery, a gigolo, a happy ending, nicknames and famous names, a murder, brothel runs, a ...

As a string of high-profile jewel thefts went unsolved during the Swinging Sixties, the press dubbed the elusive thief the King of Diamonds. Like Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, the King was so bold that he tip-toed into the homes of millionaires while they were home, hiding in their closets and daring to smoke while they were sleeping. Rena Pederson, then a young reporter with UPI, started following the elusive thief while she managed the night desk. With gymnastic skill, he climbed trees and crawled across rooftops to take jewels from heiresses, oil kings, corporate CEOs.

Gambling, Gambling, Gone is a young problem gambler's true story of denial, acceptance, and a lifelong trial to quit gambling for good. An eye opening novel focused around the hidden dangers of gambling.

Beth Raymer arrived in Las Vegas in 2001, hoping to land a job as a cocktail waitress at one of the big casinos. In the meantime, she lived in a $17-a-night motel with her dog, Otis, and waited tables at a low-rent Thai restaurant. One day, one of her regular customers told her about a job she thought Beth would be perfect for and sent her to see Dink, of Dink Inc. Dink was a professional sports gambler—one of the biggest in Vegas. He was looking for a right-hand man—someone who would show up on time, who had a head for numbers, and who didn’t steal. She got the job.

Gentleman Jack Newton: Confessions of a Crossroad Gambler" is an autobiography by Jack Newton, a legendary high-stakes gambler, narrated by 7-time WSOP bracelet winner and Poker Hall of Famer Daniel Negreanu. Jack recounts his life on the road from the Depression era through the 1970s, detailing his adventures in card games across America. The book offers a glimpse into the world of "crossroad gamblers," where both skill and cunning were used to win

An ex-Wall Street trader improved on Moneyball’s famed sabermetrics to place bets that would beat the Vegas odds on Major League Baseball games - with a 41 percent return in his first year. Trading Bases explains how he did it. After the fall of Lehman Brothers, Joe Peta was out of a job. He found a new one but lost that, too, when an ambulance mowed him down. In search of a way to cheer himself up while he recuperated, Peta started watching baseball again. That’s when inspiration hit: Why not apply his outstanding risk-analysis skills to improve on sabermetrics, the method made famous by Moneyball?

Whale Hunt in the Desert divulges the unbridled lengths to which casinos go to bag the world's biggest gamblers - the whales. This definitive exposé reveals the shrouded world of ultra-high rollers and the Faustian pacts they forge with their hosts, the casino representatives whose job it is to part them from their fortunes. Private jets, penthouses, personal chefs, show-up money, rebates on losses, and the most beautiful women on Earth - nothing is too excessive.

In the spring of 2000, Harper's magazine sent James McManus to Las Vegas to cover the World Series of Poker. But when McManus sets foot in town, the lure of the tables is too strong: he proceeds to risk his entire Harper's advance in a long-shot attempt to play in the tournament himself. Only with actual table experience (he tells his skeptical wife) can he capture the hair-raising subtleties of poker that determines the world champion.

In the midst of the Go-Go '90s, the culture of greed infused the MIT campus. A small blackjack club sprang up, dedicated to counting cards and beating the house at major casinos around the country. The Club grew slowly at first, but by the late 1990s, the right people had come up with the right system to take some of the world's most sophisticated casinos for all they were worth.

In The Smart Money, Michael Konik takes listeners behind the veil of secrecy shrouding the most successful sports gambling operation in America, to its innermost sanctum. He reveals how they, and he, got rich by beating the Vegas lines and, ultimately, the multi-million-dollar offshore betting circuit. He details the perks and perils of a lifestyle in which staking inordinate sums of money on the outcome of a game, sometimes as much as $1 million on a single event, is a normal part of doing business.

The story of a young girl's entrapment in gambling addiction. The true advert for problem gambling and how it controlled her every movement, her every thought and almost took her life. How the guilt and shame that go hand-in-hand with addiction stopped her from reaching out for help for eight years as she didn't feel it was okay for a young female to be a problem gambler. How she believed it was a male dominated problem, and how eventually, she did find the tools that enabled her to become free of her addiction.

In this book, the life of Jennifer Jasmine Nguyen unfolds like a deck of cards, each chapter revealing a new facet of her colorful and controversial career. Her story is a testament to the power of humor, wit, and sheer audacity in the face of the ever-spinning roulette wheel of life.

In June 2007, the FBI informed the NBA that one of its referees, Tim Donaghy, was the subject of a probe into illegal gambling. Within months, the public knew the broad outlines of a scheme involving Donaghy betting on games he officiated with a coconspirator, longtime Donaghy acquaintance and professional gambler Jimmy "Baba" Battista. They were joined in the scandal by a mutual childhood friend, Tommy Martino. By November 2008, each man had pleaded guilty to charges relating to the conspiracy and was in federal prison.

Based on the book Stung by Gary Stephen Ross, Owning Mahowny is the true-life account of one man's gambling addiction and one of history's biggest banking scandals.

Nothing had worked. Not threats or negotiations, not shutting down the betting parlors or opium dens, not throwing Chinese offenders into prison. Not even executing them. The New York DA was running out of ideas, and more people were dying every day as the weapons of choice evolved from hatchets to automatic weapons and even bombs. Welcome to New York City's Chinatown in 1925.

Most of us think of bowling as a "sport" in quotation marks, and bowling alleys are places with disco balls, matching shirts, and funny shoes. But in the 1960s, New York City was the center of "action bowling", a form of high-stakes gambling in which bowlers - often teenagers - faced off for thousands of dollars every night. When money like that is changing hands, you can bet the pressure is on (and the balls are rigged), and losses come with dire consequences.