Richard Marcus is a self-described cheater who made a career out of ripping off casinos and now has written a book describing the tricks, camaraderie among cheaters, and casino scene in the last couple of decades. Marcus apparently loves his career choice. He makes it clear, through painstaking description of intricate cheating tricks, that he wouldn't rather be doing anything else for a living. For him, gaming is an offense-defense sport: he's on the prowl, trying to score; the casinos are on guard, trying to stop him.
The only thing he seems to love more than the calculations involved in cheating are his fellow cheaters, particularly his mentor, one Joe Classon. Classon swooped up the twentysomething-year-old baccarat dealer and made a world-class cheater out of him, and the relationship Marcus describes between the two of them is somewhere between paternal and reverential.
At its best, American Roulette informs the non-cheater of an interesting world of manipulative psychology that goes into conning dealers and planning heists. At its worst, the book reads like a long math word problem: "Three of the four were betting stacks of twenty roulette chips on the numbers inside, two numbers each, like Joe had said. I noticed they each bet two numbers in a different section, covering a total of six numbers in the three sections. Besides that, there were no discernible patters. They changed the numbers after every spin, but each stayed in his own section. The fourth guy, the mechanic, was only betting the even-money propositions on the outside. When one of their inside stacks on a number won, they got paid. There was nothing happening that was out of the ordinary."
In another passage that seems to sum up the business and the book, Marcus writes, "You had to have an abundance of patience in this business, I thought."
Indeed.