{"id":123932,"date":"2022-09-26T16:12:01","date_gmt":"2022-09-26T23:12:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/gambling-with-an-edge\/?page_id=123932"},"modified":"2024-01-25T13:03:45","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T21:03:45","slug":"review-of-repeat-until-rich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/blog\/review-of-repeat-until-rich\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of Repeat Until Rich"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Repeat Until Rich<\/em> by Josh Axelrad (reviewed)<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

by Arnold Snyder<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Josh Axelrad\u2019s Repeat Until Rich: A Professional Card Counter\u2019s Chronicle of the Blackjack War<\/em> is an engrossing read by a former player on a notorious high-stakes team whose five-year blackjack career ended more or less when he found himself barred from just about every casino in the country. The stories have the ring of truth, especially for anyone who\u2019s ever played at high stakes. His descriptions of the trials and travails of the traveling card counter\u2019s life are often hilarious (if you\u2019re a fan of black humor) and his cast of characters\u2014from his teammates to the casino personnel to the cops he had to deal with\u2014makes for one of the all-time great real-life adventure stories in print.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a beautifully written memoir, an easy read because there\u2019s lots of dialogue, but you\u2019ll find yourself reading it slowly to savor the scenes he creates. It covers Josh\u2019s entire career as a professional blackjack player, from his initial introduction and training to his days of high stakes shuffle tracking and his ultimate \u201cdownfall\u201d as a compulsive gambler. I admire his writing skills. Here he is describing a trip to Harrah\u2019s in East Chicago:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2014and a ghetto like I\u2019ve never seen, and I mean I\u2019ve seen some. You have to drive over this quarry. The earth\u2019s been hacked apart. The bridge goes right over the pit. It looks like some kind of an autopsy down there. You can feel the pain<\/em> of the cliffs<\/em>, you share in the agony, but that\u2019s how you get to Indiana. And then, along the lake, it\u2019s industrial wasteland, towers belching smoke, massive cylindrical units holding God knows what noxious shit, and in the middle of this\u2014the casinos!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sure to bring fond memories to anyone who\u2019s ever played at Harrah\u2019s in Indiana.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of the blackjack play described in the book took place about eight to ten years ago, at a time when blackjack teams\u2014big and small\u2014were running rampant through the country. I knew some of Josh\u2019s teammates and even sat down to a meal or two with them, including Josh, when they were in Vegas. For a number of years back then, various members of his team were regularly attending Max Rubin\u2019s Blackjack Ball, and one of the team\u2019s founders has even been nominated for the Blackjack Hall of Fame on the basis of the team\u2019s success. None of this is in the book, but I\u2019m telling you this so that when you read the book, you have my word that this book is written by a real player who was once the scourge of the casinos. And Josh Axelrad is his real name. Believe me, the casinos know who he is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One moral of Josh\u2019s story, if there is one, may be that even if you know how to win at gambling, you can\u2019t do it if you\u2019re a compulsive gambler. Josh made a lot of money for himself and for his blackjack team, and he even learned to beat online no-limit hold\u2019em very handily when his casino career burned out. But then he blew it all in online games that he couldn\u2019t beat and knew he couldn\u2019t beat. He just wanted the action, the rush. He was bored with the tedium of playing the way you had to play to win. He also \u201cflunked out\u201d of Gamblers Anonymous, as he couldn\u2019t buy into their group insistence that gambling professionally was a myth, as he knew from five years\u2019 experience that it was not. He was also turned off by the group\u2019s reliance on a \u201chigher power\u201d to see them through difficulties. To his credit, however, this book is not written to moralize or proselytize. It\u2019s simply Josh\u2019s personal story, told with disarming honesty, at times sarcastic, at times cynical, but always truthful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other moral of Josh\u2019s story, however, if there is a second one, is that risk-taking really does pay off for the persistent soul who just keeps plugging away. The professional gambling risk ultimately turned out to be too dangerous for a person of his temperament. Still, he didn\u2019t resign himself to a dead-end job, mumbling \u201cyessirs\u201d to the type of brain-dead corporate bozos he despised. He took the emotional risk of baring his soul in this book, an achievement beyond all of his gambling escapades. No one has ever told the story of the professional card counter quite like this. For all its craziness, meaningless greed, and wasted energy, it\u2019s strangely exhilarating. If he continues to gamble with his words, instead of with his wallet, Josh Axelrad will continue to beat the odds. \u2660<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Repeat Until Rich by Josh Axelrad (reviewed) by Arnold Snyder Josh Axelrad\u2019s Repeat Until Rich: A Professional Card Counter\u2019s Chronicle of the Blackjack War is an engrossing read by a former player on a notorious high-stakes team whose five-year blackjack career ended more or less when he found himself barred from just about every casino in the country. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[631,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123932"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123932\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}