ADVANTAGE PLAYER

In gambling, what separates addiction from professionalism, and legality from criminality?

Fiore walked both lines for much of her career as a professional gambler, mainly playing blackjack in casinos around the world. An advantage player learns how to exploit weaknesses in the games that casinos offer, enabling her to improve her odds of taking home more cash than the house expects to give up. The best-known form of this gambling “with an edge” is card counting, which requires an ability to do math in the head. Fiore relied on another tack: Some blackjack dealers are sloppier than others at hiding the hole card. “The hole card is meant to be hidden until the players have all acted on their hands,” she explains, “but as a hole-card reader, I can see the dealer’s card before it’s turned over. And when I know what their hole card is, the house no longer has an edge—I do.” For this reason, casinos are always on their guard against advantage players—“APs”—and, although neither card counting nor hole-card reading is illegal, cops in casino towns take the house’s side when the house turns on the heat. Fiore got into and out of trouble with casino security and the law numerous times; her name is even on a Supreme Court decision, Walden v. Fiore, that she lost and that, as she writes, "instantly became a staple in a law student’s first-year study of civil procedure. It’s cited thousands of times a year in lawsuits dealing with personal jurisdiction." There’s a lot of shop talk in this memoir that gamblers, at least, will find interesting. There’s also a very human story of a woman who grew up poor, had a chronic mental illness and a gambling-addicted mother, and who found comfort in casinos and got good at beating them at their own game.

Morally challenging personal history.