Advantage Player: A Memoir of Blackjack, Backrooms, and Beginnings

One woman’s unlikely rise to the top of the professional blackjack world, mastering the art of advantage play while building an elite team to beat casinos at their own game.

From an early age, Gina Fiore wanted to win. Her desire was borne from her family’s financial instability—countless evictions, living in a motel, learning to stave off debt collectors with a tightly rehearsed script dictated by her parents. After Gina dropped out of college, her mother taught her how to deal blackjack, and she got her first job dealing in a Las Vegas casino. But when Gina saw the gamblers on the other side of the table win big, she wanted to learn how.

Advantage Player follows Gina’s journey to becoming one of the best advantage players in the world, beating casinos out of millions by playing the games they offered better than they did. After teaching herself how to count cards, Gina mastered advanced techniques to gain an edge in the casino like hole-carding and edge sorting. Although the methods were legal, casinos didn’t tolerate players gaining the upper hand, and Gina and the advantage-play team she formed were under constant threat of being detained in backrooms, chased and assaulted by casino employees.

In this propulsive and captivating memoir, Gina pulls back the curtain on her years living on the edge and how her ability to reinvent herself allowed her to survive both in the casino and in life.