Dr. Volberg has given us a comprehensive overview of problem gambling gambling in America. This book is of value to both the casual observer and the serious student of this issue. Problem gambling is THE issue for the gambling industry, including the state and tribal governments who are actively engaged in this business. My only criticism is the decision to not address youth gambling. Although I agree that the data are limited on youth gambling problems, I would argue this only highlights the necessity of addressing this issue. However, this minor quibble aside, I highly recommend this book.

Rachel Volberg's "When the Chips are Down" is the best and most cutting-edge look at problem and compulsive gambling on the market. The book explains in a very clear and insightful style the latest scientific research into the causes of problem and pathological gambling. It also details what is known about the prevalence of both pathological and problem gambling, including research done by Volberg, a pioneer in the field. But, perhaps even more important, "When the Chips are Down" includes a very thorough and thought-provoking analysis of public policy that resulted in the spread of legal gambling to 47 of the 50 states. It is an enjoyable read. And it is a valuable resource to anyone involved in the field of addiction or associated with the business of legal gambling in America. I've been writing about gambling for some 15 years, and few published works on the subject have proven to be a more valuable resource than "When the Chips are Down." Dave Palermo, editor, writer and columnist for Gem Communications, publishers of International Gaming & Wagering Business, Casino Executive Reports and Casino Journal magazines.

addiction in America, but surrounding the spread of the casino, lottery and pari-mutuel industry.

This is the every day, common story of the 'fall from grace' of those touched by the gambling bug. Once you've read a few books about gamblers and gambling addiction, you'll realize that this story is the network TV version of what it's really like (if you want the cable version, check out "Stung: the incredible obsession of Brian Molony"). The author's intent is good I suppose, but characters' dialog is absurd, contrived and filled with unrealistic bravado. Clearly, the author is no gambling addict -- not a bad thing! Though the addictive symtoms and behavior illustrated throughout the novel are conceptually accurate, they're depicted with a simplicity that renders their phenominal effect almost trivial. I struggled and shook my head through the entire book. For the casual enthusiast, could be a good airport terminal read. Otherwise, you're better off playing cell phone solitaire.

If you are a gambler this book should be required reading. Nelson's writing style is engaging and accurate - he captures the feelings of gambling right down to the excitement that just walking into a new casino can generate. He accurately portrays all the little things that go along with gambling - the new "friends", the new social events to attend, the new feeling of acceptance with fellow gamblers, the comraderie around a table. Just like smokers also enjoy unwrapping their cigarettes, and tapping them, and holding them, gamblers enjoy a lot of little side things that make the whole package hard to give up.

A lot of what the main character goes through is very typical to all gamblers - unfortunately his compulsive personality takes over and gambling turns into an addiction for him. We see his slow decent as a gradual process - the final destination is something he would have run away from back when he was starting but by the end it all seems normal to him. You may scare yourself by recognizing the parallels to your own life. How far along are you in his progression? How many of his rationalizations have you already used?

My view of casinos has changed after reading this book. I was focused too much on my own story - an occasional casino day tripper taking advantage of cheap food and drink - and didn't consider all the compulsive personalities out there that casinos help ruin. If you want to put down your last thousand dollars on a bad bet the casinos will gladly call you "sir" and give you a free drink! Just imagine if a similar thing existed for drug addicts - imagine seeing someone in a tuxedo giving someone lying in the gutter a new syringe of heroin for three thousand dollars and calling him "sir" and making him feel important. It would be outlawed instantly and the tuxedo guy exposed as the fraud that he is! But as it is, it is "OK" and legal.

So, as you go out there and buy lots of gambling books explaining how to play and what the odds are, etc., I recommend that you also get this book and see if you see a side of yourself that you might not want to. But so much better to find out in a book!

It is all here....from the initial small bets, "just for fun", to the rush of winning, (the worst thing that can happen to anyone with an addictive personality), to the larger and larger wagers, to the eventual crushing losses. I would be very surprised to learn that the author was not in fact a compuslive gambler. He hints at that in his foreword.

The subtle, insidious slide of the compulsive gambler is portrayed very well in the book. The truth is in the details...the rationalizations, the hiding of money, the lying and self-deceit that takes place as the disease takes over more and more of his life.

See if you recognize anything of yourself in the pages. It will certainly make you think twice about gambling.

I myself am a daytrader and thought this book would be interesting. First of all the guy uses all false names from his own, to even the firms he did his trades with. Second, the options trades are way too technical and every single one is mentioned Just give us the net gain/loss per trade. Third, the guy does maybe 100 to 200 trades in a couple years. I don't consider myself a huge trader but i did over 2000 trades in last year alone. He also blames the discount brokerage firm for letting him trade options so recklessly when he himself had been warned by so many people and articles and even went as far as to change his option paperwork so he could continue trading after the firm had restricted his account. The amounts he writes about are so small (big loss of maybe 18k) it's just not that engrossing...Again i don't consider myself a big player. My account was maybe 300k last year and i had losses and gains of over 130k on some days....if you want my story send me an email..its a lot more exciting!

Told with matter-of-fact honesty and methodical detail, A Sucker's Diary details one man's four-year nightmare in the stock market. Inspired by Peter Lynch's One Up on Wall Street, among other things, the author aspired to be a player in high finance.

By true day trading standards, this person was numerically a small player, controlling perhaps $300,000 in financial assets at his peak in mid-1996 and trading perhaps a few times a week. Many of his later trades in options were hard to follow (for me) so it's hard to tell the exact situation. However, despite the fact that he may be "small time", his story is told with heart and he really helps you get into his shoes (with holes in them, at that).

It's worth wondering if the author "Mr. Katzman" had used an even deeper discount broker ($8 per trade instead of $30), or had been in a more bubble-friendly environment such as 1997-2000 instead of 1994-1997, if he might still be with us, and a millionaire. Particularly in the later stages of his mania he seems to have been bent on destruction, and perhaps his wipeout would have been even more spectacular. One has to admire his dedication to pay off his massive debts following his financial collapse. However, he shows you his ugly traits in this novella as well as his positive qualities, giving the whole tale a good ring of truth.

This book is most helpful to someone new to the financial markets, who might have just read "One Up on Wall Street", thinking, "Hey, I can trade stocks like Peter Lynch too!" I doubt if true day traders, manic-depressive and otherwise, will get much out of this book except the pungent atmosphere.

What did Mr. Katzman do wrong? Without going through the whole book I think there were three key mistakes that he made regularly:

Leverage - Mr. Katzman financed his stock purchases with $50,000+ in credit card debt, and margin debt on top of that. Were he not maximally leveraged with the credit card debt, he might have been able to hold on better when the market went against him. In addition, the added anxiety arising from his leveraged position tended to cloud his thinking.

Lack of Diversification - He normally concentrated his portfolio in fewer than five stocks (it seemed like three) - although with options this is more difficult to measure.

Half-Baked Thinking - Some of the ideas he had for his portfolio would be along the lines of the following: A Business Week article says that global warming is going to increase risk of skin cancer in Americans, so he goes out and buys a company that has a skin cancer treatment. Well, if Business Week has thought of it the market probably discounted it last year, let alone last week. You need to take things to the next level when you think of investing ideas (I am prone to this weakness as well).

If you think you can't make the mistakes Mr. Katzman did, please try to read this book with a little humility. Would that every investor in the market could learn this man's lessons.

I read this book on my ebook, where I stumbled on it while browsing the new catalogue. It was an excellent read and I finished it in a day. The most fascinating part of the book is the story of how the author slowly got suckered in to each level of trading, and set himself up so he could do nothing but fail. The other part of the book I most enjoyed was how vividly he described the methods that brokerages use to rip off the average investor, and how bad the odds are stacked against the active trader. Finally, the author quotes the brilliant speculator Bernard Baruch who wrote that "speculating is a full time profession." Nothing could be more true. I would definitely recommend this book to any investors or traders who want to get a clearer picture of why this game is so difficult to beat.

The authors, two writer brothers who teach at the same university, slipped into a gambling fever, losing a quarter million dollars in the years following their aged parents' deaths. This is a lucid, compelling book: the sense of addiction, the timeless, weird feeling one gets when gambling, is brought vividly to life. There's also some measure of self-analysis: the brothers conclude that guilt and grief fueled their two-day-long losing sprees, and they appear to aptly judged themselves. They are falsely and bizarrely accused of cheating the casino (they lose thousands in the night they're accused); their description of the indictment and booking, their sudden notoriety and helplessness at the indifferent, lying corporation that is the casino, is a scarily real morality tale. On the minus side, the book does engage in a bit too much of this analysis; it gets repetitive. Also, they drop the story of their indictment too early, leaving the conclusion (dismissal of the charges on the DA's request) unexplained.

If this book has a moral, it is that if you're middle class you get away with doing a lot of stupid things. The Barthelme brothers grew up in a close-knit family run by a loving mother and an arbitrary, authoritarian father. Growing up, they never really started families of their own. When the parents died, within a couple of years of each other, their gambling went out of control. By their own account, they blew a quarter of a million dollars in Mississippi riverboat casinos in less than two years. At the end, they were arrested on a trumped-up fraud charge which was later dropped. They kept their jobs and their girlfriends and they got to write a book about it all.

The Barthelmes are smart guys and they analyze endlessly the sources of their gambling "addiction" (which they think lies in their family somewhere) and the fascination of gambling itself (which actually has little to do with winning or losing). There is nothing new here, of course. Still, the Barthelmes keep the story moving forward and there's a lot in here about day-to-day life in a casino.

I'm not sure there is a moral here. It's not as if the brothers learned nothing; if anything, they learned everything there is to know about gambling. It's just that they process this information through the detached and ironic consciousness that comes with being too smart for your own good. You get the idea that if they inherited another quarter million, they'd do it all over again.

I wasn't sure if I trusted the Barthelme brothers to tell this story until fairly late in the book, when they attempt, for maybe the fiftieth time, to explain why they continued to gamble, even in the face of their mounting losses. "Winning is better than losing, but neither is the goal of gambling, which is PLAYING. Losing never feels like the worst part of gambling. Quitting often does."

Maybe it was their demanding father, the loss of their beloved mother, or the sudden influx of inherited cash that drove them to the casino night after night. Ultimately I don't think that matters, and I think a lot of words are wasted trying to figure that out. But the book comes alive as soon as the narrative reaches the casino doors, and it contains some of the truest, and loveliest, writing I've come across about the "gaming" culture of the New South.

As the adult child of a compulsive gambler, I picked up this book in desperation, looking for some answers on how I should react to my father and the chaos he has made of his and my mother's life, so that I am actually helping and not hurting the situation. I was sadly disappointed. The only "answers" presented in this book are many recommendations to join GA/Gam-anon. Unfortunately, there is no Gam-anon meeting in my area. I was also looking for an explanation of what it means to "work the steps" and what each step requires. No luck. Just a list of the steps. There are lots of true stories, enough so that almost any reader can find a situation they can relate to, but after you've read through Part One it starts to get tedious and really only depressed me more.

This book is an excellent source for understanding not only the gambler and his/her addiction, but the family members touched by the addiction. It is so well-written, that all members involved in the gambler's life (including the gambler) can relate to its message. For the spouse of a gambler, it can help you to get to the most important stage of grief, which is acceptance. Understanding breeds acceptance.

Anyone affected by another's gambling must read this book. Also anyone who has ever been told by another that their gambling is problematic must stop and look for themselves in Losing Your Shirt. Being able to identify may be the beginning of getting help before all is lost.

I thought sexist comments and introductions such as the one in this book went out with the buggywhip. If you like books that are me. me followed by I, I. you'll enjoy this one.

This is an informative and interestingly written book about a little discussed problem. Castellani opens his book with a dialogue between two individuals, a friend of the author who is about to treat her first compulsive gambling patient and the author himself, who has experience and expertise in this area. It is within this dialogue that we are introduced to pathological gambling as a social problem, the therapeutic challenge it represents, and the theoretical and methodological approach taken by the author as he attempts to tackle this topic. The author then moves to a seminal court case (United States v. Toriero) and structures the rest of the book around this trial. As we are introduced to the major arguments put forth by the prosecution and defense, we encounter a wealth of information about how gambling is framed from a variety of vantagepoints (the government, the gambling industry, medicine, therapists, and special interest organizations). Each of these entities represents a "voice" (a "discourse") with each discourse having its own history, agents, and social dynamics. The various intersections of these discourses--how they compliment and conflict with one another--takes us to the heart of this study. Castellani ends his book with a series of policy implications and recommendations

The book itself is very well written. It is a quick and "clean" read. The three hours I spent with it (reasonably slim at 222 pages) was enjoyable and educative. I learned a lot about how pathological gambling came to be viewed as a disease rather than a failure of character and (God forbid) a little social theory along the way.

this is a good native american book and should be read by many people

Sorry but I dont understand how this book got such a high rating on Amazon.
It didnt offer much help to someone with a problem - I think the title is misleading.
I cant see the benefit of reading this book. Gamblers need direction and help, not just understanding.
Very disappointing.

John Eades has a unique perspective as a trained psychologist and addiction specialist who lost his own position and everything else to his own addiction. The story of his recovery will not only enrich the lives of all who read it, but could well lead to more recoveries.
As a practicing physician and a friend of Dr. Eades I have seen and felt his pain; and I have also seen the joy his recovery and his new career path have brought.
Heed his advice. You too can have a new life!

Donald M Philpott,MD

I picked this book up thinking that it was about the psychology of gamblers and gaming, and was ultimately disappointed. This is a book about literature, authors, and fictional characters, and there is no real psychology or non-fictional content about gambling at all! Knapp devotes each of nine chapters to a different author and a specific character from that author's work. All of these characters happen to be gamblers, but even the use of "gambler" is loosely defined--some of the characters could be better classified as "people who make a decision with some risk." Most of the book's content thus focuses upon the nine authors, and how they created these characters in their works.

Perhaps if I had been a student of literature, I might have found this book interesting. However, as a reader who was looking for insight into the psychology of gambling, I was extremely disappointed, and, frankly, quite bored by this book.