Gambling makes for brilliant fiction and even better non-fiction. Every hand has stakes, every player has a secret and every casino has a back office. These are the books we recommend to friends who want a grown-up read with a little danger in it.
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming (1953)
The first James Bond novel is built around a single game. Bond is sent to a casino in the fictional French seaside town of Royale-les-Eaux to bankrupt Le Chiffre, a villain who has lost money that is not his and hopes to win it back at the baccarat table. Fleming spends whole chapters on the game itself, a high-stakes version of baccarat called chemin de fer, and the tension comes from the cards as much as the violence. Fleming is often said to have drawn on a wartime evening in a casino at Estoril, in neutral Portugal, though the details of that story vary in the telling.
Read it if: you only know the films. The novel is shorter, colder and more vulnerable than the screen Bond.
Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich (2003)
The story of a team of MIT students who used card counting and teamwork to win large sums at blackjack in Las Vegas in the 1990s. It reads like a heist thriller and was adapted as the 2008 film 21. Be aware that Mezrich dramatised events and combined characters, and some of those involved have disputed parts of the account. Treat it as a gripping story inspired by real events rather than a strict history.
Read it if: you have ever wondered whether you can really beat the house. The book explains the basic idea of card counting clearly, and also why casinos watch for it.
Molly's Game by Molly Bloom (2014)
A memoir by a former competitive skier who ended up running exclusive high-stakes poker games for celebrities and financiers in Los Angeles and New York, until federal investigators came knocking. Aaron Sorkin adapted it into a 2017 film. It is a fascinating look at the business side of private games, money and power.
The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova (2020)
Konnikova, a psychologist and writer, decided to learn poker from scratch to study how people make decisions under uncertainty. With the champion Erik Seidel as her mentor she went from barely knowing the rules to winning a major tournament title at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure in 2018, a win worth more than $80,000. The book is part memoir, part psychology lesson, and one of the best explanations of skill versus luck we have read.
Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke (2018)
Annie Duke was a professional poker player before she became a decision-making consultant. Her central idea is simple and very useful for parents: judge a decision by how good it was with the information you had, not by how it turned out. A good decision can have a bad result and vice versa. Poker players call mixing the two up "resulting". Once you notice it, you see it everywhere, from career choices to which school to pick.
Book club cheat sheet
- Best thriller
- Casino Royale
- Best true story
- The Biggest Bluff
- Best for an argument
- Bringing Down the House
- Best for life lessons
- Thinking in Bets
- Best behind-the-scenes
- Molly's Game
Turn the book club into a game night
Gambling books are perfect for a themed evening. Discuss the book first, then deal a few hands. If you are reading Casino Royale, try a simple game of baccarat; for the poker books, Texas hold'em with a small buy-in or chips only. Our guide to hosting a grown-ups' poker night at home covers rules and snacks. Prefer the real thing? See our plan for a parents' night out in Las Vegas, the setting of half these stories.
For more grown-up reading without the casino, try our review of And Then There Were None, whose author wrote an entire murder mystery around a bridge game.