Whether you play every week or only enjoy the atmosphere of a casino from a comfortable armchair, there is a long and brilliant shelf of books about gambling. This is our curated list: classics, thrillers, Las Vegas stories and the best non-fiction about poker and luck.
Nineteenth-century classics
- The Queen of Spades by Alexander Pushkin (1834). A short story about a young officer obsessed with learning an old countess's secret of three winning cards at faro. Eerie, ironic and perfectly constructed.
- The Wild Ass's Skin by Honoré de Balzac (1831). Opens with a young man losing his last coin in a Paris gaming house and then receiving a magic skin that grants wishes at a terrible price. More in our Balzac profile.
- The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray (1844). The boastful memoir of an Irish adventurer who gambles and cheats his way into high society, later filmed by Stanley Kubrick.
- The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866). The great novel of roulette fever, dictated in under a month. Read the story behind it in Dostoevsky's The Gambler.
Twentieth-century fiction
- Casino Royale by Ian Fleming (1953). Bond's debut, built around a single baccarat game. See our feature.
- Loser Takes All by Graham Greene (1955). A light, charming novella about a modest accountant on honeymoon in Monte Carlo who develops a roulette system and discovers what money does to a marriage.
- Fools Die by Mario Puzo (1978). A sprawling novel that opens in a Las Vegas casino hotel and is full of insider detail about high rollers and the house.
- The Cincinnati Kid by Richard Jessup (1963). A young stud poker player challenges the reigning master in a marathon game. The basis of the 1965 film with Steve McQueen and Edward G. Robinson.
- Dick Francis's racing thrillers, starting with Dead Cert (1962). The former champion jockey wrote dozens of mysteries set around horse racing and betting, and they remain wonderfully readable.
Las Vegas
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson (1972).
- Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas by Nicholas Pileggi (1995).
- The Desert Rose by Larry McMurtry (1983).
We cover all three in Las Vegas in Fiction.
Non-fiction about poker, blackjack and luck
| Title | Author | Why read it |
|---|---|---|
| Positively Fifth Street (2003) | James McManus | A journalist reaches the World Series of Poker final table while covering a murder trial |
| The Biggest Game in Town (1983) | A. Alvarez | The road gamblers of early Las Vegas poker, beautifully written |
| Beat the Dealer (1962) | Edward O. Thorp | The book that proved blackjack could be beaten |
| Bringing Down the House (2002) | Ben Mezrich | The dramatised story of the MIT blackjack team |
| Thinking in Bets (2018) | Annie Duke | A champion's guide to deciding under uncertainty |
| The Biggest Bluff (2020) | Maria Konnikova | A psychologist learns poker from scratch and wins a title |
Our full reviews of these are in The Best Poker and Gambling Books.
Card games beyond the casino
Not every great card book is about money. Ronald L. Allen's history of Bid Whist shows how a trick-taking game became part of African American life from slavery to today: read our review of The Evolution of Bid Whist.
How we chose
Every book here earns its place as a good read first, whatever your interest in the games. Some celebrate the thrill of the tables, some expose their costs, and the best do both. If you think we have missed a classic, tell us through our contact page. And if you are writing your own gambling story, read how to write a believable casino scene.
