Barney Vinson has been a Las Vegan for nearly 50 years. He attended dealer’s school, then broke in at the Pioneer downtown before moving across the street to the Mint. From there, he migrated to the Landmark, then finally hit the big time at the Dunes (as a crap dealer) and Caesars (as a gaming instructor).
Barney became an acclaimed gambling author when he wrote the classic Las Vegas Behind the Tables in the late 1980s, which provided an insider look at casino gambling that, at the time, was something the industry hadn’t seen; the book’s style and tone were also notable for being light, engaging, and humorous – half-affectionate and half-jaundiced.
Huntington Press editor Deke Castleman remembers arriving in Las Vegas in 1987 to write about the city for the first edition of his Nevada Handbook, making a beeline for the Gambler’s Book Club, and buying Behind the Tables. He says, "It was the first book I read about Vegas. I read it in one night and was stunned by the back-scenes depth and breadth of it. There was also the author photo, Barney standing on the roof of the Dunes, wearing a slick pit-boss suit, surveying his Vegas domain. For the next few days, I wandered through the casinos in despair, wondering how I’d ever match wits with such a writer."
In the mid-’90s we published Barney’s Casino Secrets which was a catch-all instructional book for all of the games. It was a good one, filled with strong how-to information delivered with Barney’s trademark wit and humor. That book is out of print now, but not because the gambling information didn’t stand up. The book was also part travel guide, with descriptions of the main casinos on the Strip. But it was published in the middle of the big boom and we found it going out of date faster than we could reprint it.
When Barney came to us with The Vegas Kid, we were in the middle of our first adventure in publishing gambling novels. His fiction was a natural for us – like his other books, it was funny, easy to read, and positively sparkled with a Vegas-insider’s viewpoint. We’re known for publishing the world’s best books on gambling strategies, which doesn’t exactly resonate with fiction readers, but the fiction we’ve published has almost always had a legitimate gambling or Vegas tie-in of some sort, and that holds true here.
The first two chapters of the book have been available for reading for years. For the Sunday Sample excerpt, we added Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6, accounting for nearly 50 pages of the 196-page book. So you can now read 25% of the novel, and if you like and want to finish it, you can order it as an e-book from Kindle, Nook, and iTunes for $2.99; the paperback is also for sale at ShopLVA.com for $2.99 (plus shipping).
And by the way, we also dug up some old copies of Casino Secrets and have made them available for $2 plus reduced $3 shipping. The descriptions of how to play blackjack, craps, roulette, and several other games, infused with bits of strategy that were vetted and augmented by Anthony Curtis, are so good that we expect we’ll weave them into another book or a web presence at some point.
