The Gamblers

In the fictional town of Roulettenberg, Germany, a Russian tutor to the children of a seemingly wealthy general is enticed to play roulette at the local casino. First playing for others (including his beloved Polina Alexandrovna), he soon gets a taste for the experience himself, which can lead in only one direction. Dostoevsky wrote this story based at least partially on personal experience. After his second marriage (and the successful publication of Crime and Punishment) he and his wife took a honeymoon in Baden-Baden, where Dostoevsky lost large quantities of money at the roulette table. To get his financial situation back to normal he then set up a wager with his publisher: they’d have the right to publish his work for free for nine years if he couldn’t deliver this novel by November 1866. He succeeded in this, and was able to move on to writing The Idiot. The Gambler has been translated to screen and radio, and was even turned into an opera by Prokofiev. This edition is the 1915 translation by C. J. Hogarth.

Presents an illustrated history of gamblers and gambling in the Old West.

"Oil," writes Ruth Sheldon Knowles, "is the most hazardous, expensive, heartbreaking gambling game in the world." And, as this book dramatically proves, the men who have been the gamblers of the American oil business have been some of the most colorful and fantastic personalities in our history. The Greatest Gamblers is the story of our remarkable oilmen and the vast industry they have created-from its simple beginnings in 1859 at Titusville, Pennsylvania, to the big-business oil operations of today. Here are the wildcatters, the prospectors, the scientists, the hunch players (Mrs. Knowles points out that independent oilmen have discovered more than three-fourths of America's oil fields). Here you will meet "unlucky" Dad Joiner, whose fortunes changed only in his seventies when a worthless ten-acre tract of Texas wasteland proved the key to one of America's two biggest oil fields; and H. 1. Hunt, who parlayed an oil lease he won at a poker game into an oil business that made him one of the richest men in the United States. Harry Sinclair ... Tom Slick … Mike Benedum … Everette DeGolyer … Charles Canfield … Edward Doheny — the pages of this book are crowded with the stories of such men, their tough boom towns, their dogged persistence and wild successes, and the brutal competition they faced. But The Greatest Gambler is also the story of a prospectors' rush that has become an organized industry. An absorbing portion of the book tells how the industry has found new uses for petroleum and its by products, and how this sometimes involved as much heartbreak as prospecting. There were the ships that exploded when oilmen first tried to market petroleum as marine fuel, the locomotive roundhouse that blew up when they first tried to convert railroads to oil. Mrs. Knowles discusses knowledgeably the present predicament of the petroleum industry and what is necessary to find and develop America's remaining great oil and gas resources. The Greatest Gamblers is a lively and authoritative account of what is probably the most fascinating and adventurous business of all.

Gambling is risky business, especially for recreational gamers. All casino poker rooms are populated 24/7 by serious players capable of emptying the pockets of any less experienced guests. While predators and crooks are a minority, they are there; these types seek out the uninitiated and rarely fail to deplete their bankrolls. Even a few dealers are out to make an easy buck, but the house and fellow players tend to keep that minority in line. Still, the poker room is a better bet than the house games, at which even professionals become losers over the long haul. All the author learned over thirty years of visiting casinos a couple of times a week is told in The Gamblers.

Kandinsky's life is at rock-bottom. He's a gambler in debt to a vicious loan-shark and he's going nowhere fast. Then, by chance, he overhears a conversation and realises he has a way out of his mess. He decides to hijack a robbery of seven hundred and fifty grand's worth of drug money. He thinks it's going to be easy - a sure thing. But when your partners are even bigger losers than you are, and the owner of the money is a sadistic drug-dealer who's prepared to kill everybody in his way, nothing's ever easy. And when the people you've stolen from want a piece of you too, the only thing that's sure is there's going to be blood. And lots of it. The Gamblers is a dark, fast-moving and violent odyssey through the Bristol underworld - the kind of place where every smile hides a betrayal and the hand of friendship usually carries a gun. The Gamblers is a vicious British noir in the tradition of Derek Raymond and Ted Lewis.

Britain's foremost writer on crime turns to the disappearance of Lord Lucan. The basis of the upcoming ITV drama, Lucan, starring Rory Kinnear and Christopher Eccleston For over thirty years, John Pearson has provided us with literary exposures of some of the most enigmatic people and underground organisations of our modern world. The Gamblers follows the fortunes of five men at the centre of the ultra-fashionable Clermont Set: the Clermont Club's eccentric founder John Aspinall; Dominic Elwes, who was to betray the Set's code of silence; the socialite owner of Annabel's, Mark Birley; the womanising, multi millionaire James Goldsmith; and the infamous Lord 'Lucky' Lucan. At the heart of the Set lay a belief that risk-takers are the people who make civilisation tick.Cruel, heartless and snobbish, they gambled with their fortunes and kept a stiff upper lip when they lost.This and a loyalty to each other that transcended everything else enabled them to rise above crises such as the long affair between Birley's wife and James Goldsmith, and the facial mutilation of the Birley's son by one of Aspinall's tigers.Pearson revels in the charisma, charm and wit of these dastardly but debonair millionaires, and reveals how their code led to one of the great unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century.

Yet these chapters of an eventful personal history, remarkable though they may appear, nevertheless form an unusual story — a combination of circumstances which will be found startling and curious, idyllic and tragic. Reader, I would confess all, if I dared, but each of us has a skeleton in the cupboard, both you and I, for alas! I am no exception to the general rule prevailing among women. If compelled by a natural instinct to suppress one single fact, I may add that it has little or nothing to do with the circumstances here related. It concerns only myself, and no woman cares to supply food for gossips at her own expense...FROM THE BOOKS.