No 18 ..Playing Blackjack as a Business
Author………………….Lawrence Revere
Published…………….1987
Publishing Com……Citadel Press
I may be wrong and probably am in my estimation of the age of this book. I had to go onto Amazon to check the details and who published it and it gave the publication date as 1987. I am fairly certain that the copy that I had and subsequently lost was over ten years older.
I think that the book written by Lawrence Revere was perhaps the greatest book written on the game after Thorp’s “Beat the Dealer“. I think the title caught the public imagination although I read this book after some considerable time had elapsed when other more modern and better books had been produced.
Although the fact that I read Professional Blackjack and Blackjack Attack before this one did not spoil my enjoyment of this book. Lawrence Revere was an alias and his real name was Griffith Owens. He started out working in casinos and ended up being a pit boss. Little surprise then that he had the knowledge to beat the game knowing what he knew about the casinos from the inside.
Revere is something of a cult figure in blackjack and he worked under several aliases including Leonard Parsons and Paul Mann. But he became almost infamous in a way when he started working the game from both sides. He would train card counters and then inform the casinos of their presence who were also paying him to spot card counters.
The Revere Advanced Point Count was one of the most successful counting systems ever produced and also one of the most compex. It isn’t a system that I have ever used but its complexity means that it is rarely used today as other simpler systems have proven themselves to be just as equally powerful.
RATING…………8/10
See you soon
Carl
