BARRY O'HALLORANreviews Repeat Until RichBy Josh Axelrad Ebury Press pp263, £11.99

‘BETTER BUY yourself a ticket for Vegas, my man’ – it sounds like an invitation to a wild weekend or a stag party – but for Josh Axelrad those words kicked off a five-year career as a professional gambler.

In early 2000, he ditched his entry-level job in a Wall Street investment bank and joined a team of professional blackjack players – dubbed Mossad after the Israeli intelligence agency – which regularly worked casinos in Las Vegas and throughout the US, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars for themselves and their backers.

Mossad used a system called card counting. This is based on the premise that when there is a large number of high-value cards left in a blackjack deck, the odds favour the player. Counting anticipates these sequences of play and identifies when to start betting by tracking the value of the cards that are being dealt.

An American mathematician, Edward O. Thorp, devised the system, and outlined it in his book Beat the Dealer. In the 1990s, groups of maths whizzes, mainly from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, perfected it and supposedly took Vegas for millions. Their activities inspired Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House and the film 21. Unlike Mezrich’s Einsteins, Axelrad is no maths genius. “I’m more of a speller,” he confesses. But one of his mentors said that if he could tip a waiter 18 per cent without a calculator, he could count cards. It was not as easy as it sounded.

Counting requires you to carry at least three rolling calculations in your head as you play. The edge that you gain is marginal, so to generate a real return, you need a big bankroll and numbers of people playing for hours and even days – hence the need for a team and big investors. All this has to be done under the watchful eyes of the “heat”, casino security, who go to great lengths to identify and bar successful counters. Counting is legal, and merely exploits a potentially lucrative set of probabilities created by the casino’s own rules. Nonetheless, Axelrad had some hairy moments, including getting wrongfully arrested.

Ironically, he highlights several scenarios where the casinos boost their profits by carefully tending blackjack’s image as a beatable game, as it inspires many people to try counting. Most fail, but they keep going as they can rationalise their losses with dodgy statistics.

Mossad succeeded in beating it. On one night Axelrad netted $770,000 for the team, despite initially losing $200,000. His yearly slice of the action ran well into six figures, more than he'd have made on Wall Street. Axelrad's account is superior to Mezrich's, not least because he doesn't sound like he's writing for Rolling Stone. It's first hand, and the author makes it clear that professional gambling is all about grafting to get an edge and then grinding out results. To underline this, a final chapter outlines the calculations used in his system. Put it this way: it is complex.

His style is direct, but there are passages where he uses the f-word far more than is necessary. This is a pity, as he otherwise writes with real credibility.

Axelrad can look forward to a good writing career, but his stint as a punter did not end happily. The team sundered and he wound up wasting a year playing internet poker very badly. The final twist begins to sound a bit like an unintentional morality tale and runs close to giving some earnest folks an excuse to say “I told you so”. Fortunately, that’s not the point of a book that says more about gambling’s ups and downs than those well-meaning people ever could.

Barry O'Halloran is a business reporter with The Irish Times