Advantage Player : A Story 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. It was there that she discovered some players win using skill and not luck. 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 chased, assaulted, and detained in backrooms by casino employees and law enforcement.

In this propulsive and captivating memoir, Gina pulls back the curtain on a system designed to create losers and how her ability to reinvent her­self allowed her to survive both in the casino and in life.