Author: Bill McBride
Publisher: Bad Bill’s Publishing
Date: 1999
ISBN: 0-9671282-0-X
Pages: 176
Price: $18.95
One of the most explosive Internet services has been online gambling. More sites than I care to count have gone up in the last few years catering to the home gambler, and few topics have engendered such controversy, or such vacillation and half-measures, on the part of world governments. The 4th edition of the Internet Gambling Report is a collection of essays on this topic edited and partially written by Anthony Cabot.
As with any book, the big question is, “Should I buy and read it?” For Internet Gambling Report, I find this to be a tough question to answer simply. Instead, I’ll list a couple of prospective readership groups and analyze how this book might or might not help them.
Internet Gamblers: While there’s a lot of information here on Internet gambling, little of it would be of direct value to Internet gamblers themselves. Information about the legality of Internet gambling in a person’s home area may be worthwhile, but regulations change so rapidly these days that anything one reads here might already be out of date. A better resource for potential Internet gamblers is Bill Haywood’s BeatWebCasinos.Com, although the problem of keeping current applies to this book as well.
Potential Online Casino Operators: Folks who may wish to open an online casino will probably want to read this book. To their credit, Cabot and company do a good job painting just how difficult this is and how it’s not an undertaking to be taken lightly. One complaint I have, though, is that just when the book is about to discuss details that would help readers make an informed decision, they back down. For example, in Chapter 7 where Jim McGeahy discusses Internet security for online casinos, some of the attacks casino servers might face are discussed, but steps to resist those attacks aren’t mentioned, even though those solutions are well known in the Internet security literature, nor are references to these other sources made.
Traditional Gambling Operators: Internet Gambling Report probably most satisfies those who are in management of traditional land-based casinos who want to become more informed about the state of online gambling, but not from the standpoint of gambling there themselves, or setting up shop in cyberspace. For these readers, this book probably provides exactly what they are looking for.
All told, there’s a lot of interesting information in this book, but the audience of folks who are likely to be really interested in what it has to say is quite small.
McBride generally assumes that the reader has at least a passing familiarity with the dog races. The book does not start with a basic introductory chapter. Racing/betting terms, such as “Exacta” and “Schooling Race” are defined in a fine glossary at the end of the book, but they are not always defined when they are first used in the text. Therefore, someone who is new to dog racing may want to spend some time around the track or find some way to become familiar with the terminology before starting in on this book. Or, failing that, a novice may want to read the book’s glossary thoroughly before staring in on the main text.
The author spends several chapters talking about handicapping. While I am by no means a dog-racing expert, it sounds to me like his general tone is pretty good. He categorically states that there’s no single magic way to gain a betting advantage at a track, and the methods that work at one track are by no means assured of making money at another. McBride advocates doing a lot of research before placing a wager, a philosophy I wholeheartedly agree with.
Once a race has been handicapped, the projections need to be translated into mathematics and compared to the posted race odds. The author talks about bets that have a positive ROI (return on investment) and suggests researching a history of races where one would have had a positive ROI using a given set of variables. The reader is then instructed to bet similar races going forward. I’m not sure that’s enough, especially since the numbers of races that are likely to be meaningful are probably statistically small. I also don’t think that in the long-term one can get a 30% edge over the track, as several of McBride’s ROI calculations would demonstrate. For these reasons, I think the book is a better handicapping guide than it is a wagering manual.
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