Book review: Beating the Odds

John McPherson. Beating the Odds: The Complete Dictionary of Gambling and Games of Chance. Docklands, Victoria: Geoff Slattery Publishing, 2007. 708 pp.

This is a very handy and very comprehensive dictionary of gambling. It is expansive rather than focused, with entries covering games including all of the traditional casino favorites as well as backgammon, mah jong, bridge, and board games. McPherson goes far back into history, providing definitions of Roman gambling terms, as well as vocabulary for now-extinct games like faro. So this is more than just a dictionary of current usage–it’s a historic reference that’s sure to come in handy for many researchers.

There is a great deal of information in particular presented on horse racing, running the gamut from the usual to the strange. Thanks to McPherson, I now know that if you divide a horse’s weight by 18, you get the volume of blood in its body. I don’t know what I’ll do with that bit of knowledge, but it’s good to know. McPherson includes definitions for words dealing with the sport of racing and the traditions and rituals of the sport itself, so this is a good all-around guide.

Other subjects are treated equally well. The mah jong terms are a particular highlight. Another is the inclusion of fantasy sports. While, like backgammon, this isn’t usually treated as a gambling game, it is a game of sorts subject to chance, so it merits inclusion here.

As is to be expected in a work with the sheer mass of Beating the Odds, there are some entries that are not exactly wrong, but are not entirely correct, either. Legendary blackjack expect Arnold Snyder, for example, is identified as “Arthur Snyder.” The entry on “The Strip” is a bit shaky, too; it repeats the famous untruth that the Flamingo was the first casino on the Strip, and even says that Bugsy Siegel opened it in 1846. It’s possible the Mormon mission might have stuck around for a bit longer in the late 1850s if they’d have had the Candlelight Room open for their dining pleasure, but I think that’s just a disconcerting typo.

These are minor points, and don’t detract much from the usefulness of the dictionary. I’d strongly recommend this for the library of any gambling enthusiast or researcher, with the caveat that for greater specificity about some of the terms (particularly in the US) you might want to consult sources a bit closer to the action.