Review - 'Taking Chances' - John Haigh - gambling

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By oldestmember



Welcome to Reading the Game, sportswriter Jeffrey Prest's review of sporting books he's read, both old and new.

The review of Taking Chances follows beneath the dotted line.

In the meantime, you'll find out a bit more about me in the panel at the foot of this page.

Publishers - if you'd like me to review any of your sports titles, please click the Contact oldestmember link beneath my photo.

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Take any group of Ferrari owners and chances are there'll be some who love being able to give you chapter and verse on why the engine performs as beautifully as it does.

The rest? They won't really care. They're just happy that it does and that they earn enough to own one.

That's the thing you must bear in mind before deciding whether to buy John Haigh's Taking Chances: Winning With Probability: he's written it for the chapter-and-verse type of gambler.

If you love numbers for their own sake and are happy to be led down all manner of highways and byways, then this is the book for you. Haigh, a reader in Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Sussex, will show you the nitty-gritty on putting a number to your chances of just about anything.

His thoroughness probably can't be faulted but I say probably because I'm the who-cares-? type of gambler and was therefore reduced to skimming this book from about the mid-point onwards.

I just need the gist of how odds work and more than anything, I wanted to see applied odds calculation. I wanted Haigh to report from bookies' counters and card dens with a Racing Post under his arm and two months' worth of mortgage repayments crammed into his wallet. I wanted to see his theories applied to individual races or hands of poker.

But that's not really him. He sounds every inch like a Reader in Mathematics and the helpful nuggets I got - that the first of two evenly-matched snooker players to take the lead in a multi-frame contest tends to hold onto it or that when odds are against you (eg roulette) you should bet your money quickly in lumps, rather than spreading it out over a long string of bets - were mere crumbs from the table.

I blame the designer more than the author. Sticking a pair of dice on the cover lends the book a glamour to which it doesn't really aspire but I cannot stress enough that stat-freak gamblers happy to dive deep into the arcane waters of chance may well find much of use in this 332-page paperback.

I just couldn't be bothered to stick with it long enough to be absolutely certain.

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So who the hell is 'oldestmember'?

I'm a sportswriter who has worked for publications on both sides of the Atlantic.

A sports junkie since puberty, I was mercifully 'let go' by the legal profession in 1995 to pursue a freelance writing career that had seen me cover golf and soccer for English and American titles and American sports for England's Birmingham Post newspaper.

Starting in 1996, I spent two-and-a-half years working for the press office of Britain's Budweiser Basketball League, followed by three years writing the matchday programme and club magazine for one of England's Premier League soccer clubs, Aston Villa.

Since 2001, I have worked for Emap (now Bauer), as features editor for Sea Angler magazine and latterly Trout Fisherman. You'll find my fly fishing blog at Taunted By Waters.

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