Repeat Until Rich: A Professional Card Counter's Chronicle of the Blackjack Wars

Repeat Until Rich is the best narrative account yet of what is blackjack card counting is really like in practice. Josh Axelrad left a low-level job on Wall Street in 2000 and became a professional blackjack player for five years, winning over $700,000. While his memoir is less entertaining than Ben Mezrich's Bringing Down the House, it is more accurate and more intelligent, as it shows the obstacles and tedium a professional gambler will encounter on the job.

Axelrad is also a very good writer with observant turns of phrase. Here he describes walking into the Riviera Casino in Las Vegas:

It had an ill odor, something like an elementary school cafeteria where the children all smoke.

I was among the outlying slot machines, scattered in small clusters like incipient suburbs far removed from some metropolis. The main action lay ahead, and you could hear it. There was always that illusion as you entered -- of widespread, impossible mass jackpots spewing into the drop trays and over the trays to the floor in a flood like a dream: gamblers kicking drunkenly through shin-high mounds of actually silver dollars, cocktail waitresses carrying champagne, wearing snowshoes so they can make their way over all the heaped winnings. It sounds pretty good, every time you're first going into a casino and regardless of how much better you know.

Highly recommended.