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When every bet comes up a loser

By MIKE FASSO
Published January 1, 2006

SIX TO FIVE AGAINST:

A Gambler's Odyssey

By Burt Dragin

RDR Books, $17.95, 180 pp

BORN TO LOSE:

Memoirs of a Compulsive Gambler

By Bill Lee

Hazelden, $12.95, 285 pp

Reviewed by MIKE FASSO

There is a joke about gamblers that goes like this:

A tourist walks into a Las Vegas casino, where he is accosted by a desperate stranger. "Mister, please, you've got to help," the man pleads. "My wife is deathly ill, and I need money for the treatment." The tourist, immediately suspicious, counters, "You don't fool me. If I give you money, you'll go right in there and gamble it." To which the man replies, "No! No! I have gambling money."

With the country gripped by poker mania - the last World Series in Las Vegas attracted more than 5,600 players competing for $52-million - it may not be the ideal time to publish memoirs by gambling addicts. But two paperbacks from 2005 offer enough history and personal drama to merit attention from gamblers of all types, maybe especially those who will chuckle at that joke while feeling a twinge of recognition.

In Six to Five Against, Burt Dragin, a California journalism professor and reporter, tracks gambling addictions from rustic early America to today's Disneyesque Las Vegas. In 1674, Charles Cotton in The Compleat Gamester was already calling gambling "an itching disease." A Renaissance Italy physician warned that gambling "arouses anger and disturbs the mind."

Dragin, who takes his title from the Damon Runyon quote that "all life is 6-5 against," launched the study in an attempt to understand, and maybe combat, his own destructive urges. The temptations came early in a household where Dec. 25 was known as the day before Santa Anita racetrack opened. Dragin's father was a sometime bookmaker and avid dice player who ran with Cleveland gangsters before World War II.

The euphoria Dragin felt while gambling had little to do with money. He cites a 1974 film, The Gambler, in which the lead character says, "If all my bets were safe, there just wouldn't be any juice." Dragin, similarly, remembers the biggest winning streak of his life - but with distaste. "I vividly recall a disquieting thought when it seemed that I couldn't lose. This is too good, too easy. I don't like it."

What causes compulsive gambling? Dragin presents some of the suspects - psychological, physiological and genetic - and concludes that the psychiatric classification "impulse control disorder" comes closest to describing the addiction. Researchers have shown that many pathological gamblers' brains are lacking in receptors to process the feel-good chemical dopamine, leading them to ever larger or more risky bets to achieve the needed jolt. Dragin also gives a fair hearing to skeptics who don't think that every destructive behavior, from excessive shopping to bonbon eating, should be classified as a disease.

Six to Five Against includes a Gamblers Anonymous screening test to calculate the risk of problem gambling with questions such as, Did you ever lose time from work or school from gambling? and, Have you ever sold anything to finance gambling?

Bill Lee's account in Born to Lose of gambling and family horrors is cautionary and devastating. It begins in China, where his grandfather literally sold Lee's father to pay off a gambling debt. Lee himself was born despite an attempted abortion by a herbal concoction mixed up by his father, who gambled heavily. By age 7, living in San Francisco, Lee had picked up mah-jongg strategy; during rainstorms, he bet with classmates on which water droplet would reach the bottom of the window first.

Much later, after divorces, stock-trading binges and bouts of destructive gambling, Lee played his final hand of blackjack. For anyone with experience in the game, at any stakes, the account is just short of terrifying. Playing a multideck game at a Lake Tahoe casino, Lee was down to his last three hands, betting $1,500 apiece. One hand was a pair of sevens, which he split, producing a fourth hand. There followed another seven, and another, and more splits, until Lee had escalated from three hands at $4,500 to 12 hands with $19,500 on the line, $15,000 of it helpfully advanced by the casino. The object in blackjack is to get closest to 21 without going over; Lee's hands ranged from 13 to 20. The dealer showed a five, a good omen for the player. But when he flipped his hole card, he revealed a six. Eleven. The next card was a jack. Twenty-one. A stunned Lee left his stool. The dealer simply said, "You have a nice day now."

Lee is convinced that the 12-step GA program, modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous, is his salvation, although both he and Dragin note that GA has dropout rates as high as 92 percent. Lee, in fact, didn't gamble for more than seven years starting in the late 1980s, mostly without Gamblers Anonymous, using "white-knuckle" abstinence until a family crisis prompted a relapse into stock day-trading. For Lee and many others, willpower isn't enough; "working the recovery" is the mantra. But as Dragin demonstrates, there are gray areas: He still plays in a weekly poker game, but he avoids casinos.

As the good times roll and poker becomes the new national pastime, complete with a traveling circus of top players, these memoirs stand as a sobering reminder that there are those among us who, as Lee says, will escape gambling's spell in one of only three ways: jail, insanity or death.

- Mike Fasso is a Times copy editor.

[Last modified December 30, 2005, 09:47:03]