Gambling. Exciting, romantic, and fun, in movies at least. The good guys are always good at whatever game they play, and the women flock around them. They always make it look so easy. And it is! Beyond a shadow of a doubt, gambling is about the simplest thing there is to do with your money. You don't need any secret skills or special training, studies, or advanced degrees. Anyone can step up to a table, toss their money down, and wait for the decision. The tough part is winning. Actually, that's not quite true either. Winning is easy as well, and you can do it much of the time. The tough part is winning more frequently than expected and walking away with your winnings, enough to offset the losses that will inevitably occur. And the tough part is also keeping your losses to a minimum while allowing your wins to go as high as they can, not limiting them.

The Idea of this book is to boil down a portion of the huge amount of system literature in the gambling world to its bare basics, to present the basic ideas, systems, and strategies in a brief format. In fact, after looking over the format, I decided that it was not compressed enough. I shrunk it to an even smaller level, the base system Cheat Sheets as Appendix II. After reading and rereading this book, becoming very familiar with the concepts and with the games themselves, you should be able to only take a copy of the four or five pages of systems for a game with you on a trip to the casino, rather than this entire bulky book, and still be able to remind yourself of different systems to play on a game.

Will any of these systems make you rich? No, not in and of themselves. However, if you carefully follow the appropriate system at the appropriate time and use a money management strategy in order to preserve your bankroll and take advantage of potential trends, the goal is to help you to regularly walk away from the casino with a profit.

Mr. Philip Nehrt has been interested in gambling for about 25 years but does not do this for a living. He is a computer consultant focusing on Quality practices in software development. This has come in very handy, lending a critical and logical approach to researching any gambling system he comes across.