The Professor and the Casino

“My own rationale for gambling was highbrow deception. I had glommed onto Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, in which Ishmael sought release in the ‘watery part of the world.’ I sought it at the green felt of the crap table. For me the great white whale was the hot dice or the lucky blackjack deck. I was hooked.”

Burt Dragin, a journalism professor and investigative reporter, writes about gambling because it’s what he knows best. In this wise, wit­ty and wonderful book, he traces his own gambling addiction back through past generations and looks at the national passion for games of chance from early colonial times to today’s multibillion-dollar ca­sino boom.

Along the way, he shares not only intimate interviews with recover­ing problem gamblers but also his own firsthand experiences of win-ning-streak exhilaration, loser’s humiliation and the inner struggle for freedom from the tyranny of the house edge.

“Working on this book,” Dragin writes, “I felt a special affinity with the late Damon Runyon, a fellow journalist who shared my fascination with gambling and gamblers. Runyon once said, ‘I long ago came to the conclusion that all life is 6–5 against.’ Who can argue?”

“Burt Dragin has delivered the compulsive gambler’s sourcebook, a detailed, troubling account of a family passion for the losing bet. Six to Five Against is funny and touching, full of compassion, brimming with detail that’ll make any gambler wince with recognition, and steeped in foreboding. If you gamble more often that you want to (gamblers will understand this paradox), read this book. It won’t make you stop gambling but you’ll know you’re not alone, and you’ll be a lot more aware of what you’re doing when you’re doing it, which is one of the few tunnels out.”

—Frederick Barthelme