Sports Illustrated's Richard Hoffer is the author of
Jackpot Nation: Rambling and Gambling Across Our Landscape of Luck and
A Savage Business: The Comeback and Comedown of Mike Tyson.
For the
Wall Street Journal, he tagged five "books about gambling [that] hit the jackpot."
One book on Hoffer's list:
Bringing Down the House
By Ben Mezrich
Free Press, 2002 
Here a half-dozen MIT students put their considerable minds to the game of blackjack and, in a series of carefully orchestrated raids on casinos in Las Vegas, Connecticut and the Gulf Coast, score duffel bags full of cash. The crew is counting cards -- a practice that casinos deplore, even though it is a memory feat and not "cheating" in the word's normal sense. As writer Ben Mezrich notes in his account of their exploits, these geniuses are smart enough to realize, even as they revel in winning more than $3 million, that they won't be able to extract something from nothing indefinitely. With a casino security team tracking their movements and intimidating them, the card-counters fold their operation and, presumably, return full time to engineering something other than blackjacks.
Read about
the book that topped Hoffer's list.
--Marshal Zeringue
Sports Illustrated's Richard Hoffer is the author of Jackpot Nation: Rambling and Gambling Across Our Landscape of Luck and A Savage Business: The Comeback and Comedown of Mike Tyson.
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