Books

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Pro gambler's luck turned with writing bid

Reviewed by: Douglas J. Johnston

Posted: 07/31/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Lay the Favorite

A Memoir of Gambling

By Beth Raymer

Random House Canada, 228 pages, $30

Have you ever wandered by a Las Vegas casino's sports book area, with its walls of big-screen TVs tuned to horse races, dog races and hockey, baseball, basketball and football games, and crowds of bettors jabbering about "lines," and wondered how sports betting works?

Even if you just want to read about a young woman's sad, funny and saucy tales of her gambling adventures, this is the book for you.

Twenty-four-year-old Beth Raymer moved to Las Vegas in 2001 to be with her boyfriend of a couple of months.They broke up soon after arriving in Sin City.

The only job she could get was as a waitress in a low-end Thai restaurant, and the only apartment she could afford was low-rent in a rough neighbourhood north of the Strip known as "Naked City."

But a chance referral and dumb luck landed her a job working for a professional gambler, Dink Heimowitz.

It was pivotal. Her employment with him earned her big bucks, great stories and the opening chapters of a highly original memoir.

Dink was incorporated as Dink Inc., and he employed an ever-changing team of ne'er-do-wells to work the phones and computers, track the bets and attend to payments and collections.

Dink was strictly legit. He wasn't a bookie, taking and placing bets for others, which is illegal.

He was solo, and ran his business solely with his own cash. He even listed his occupation as "professional gambler" on his tax returns.

When he went to Costa Rica to explore setting up shop offshore, Raymer went with him. She proves far less daunted by the Central American country's penchant for kidnappings, sinister armed bodyguards and drug-addicted gaming clerks than her boss.

Later, she takes up boxing, moves to New York City, and becomes good enough to fight in amateur boxing's premier tournament, the Golden Gloves, in Madison Square Garden. (She lost.)

While in New York she teams up with bookie and gambler Bernard Rose, and when he relocates his operation to the Dutch colonial island of Curacao, she tags along.

Their improbable Caribbean sports book operation eventually goes belly up, due to employee theft, and she winds up in Costa Rica, yet again.

There's an oddly Runyonesque quality to her character and adventures. She portrays herself as a combination of naïve, spicy and tough, and writes in a distinct voice that pulls you along as it catches the sweetness and stink of professional-gambling subculture. And her tales come with insight into the humanity, perfidy and unseemliness of that world.

Raymer ultimately returned to New York City. In 2005, she quit professional gambling and entered Columbia University's non-fiction-writing MFA program. A good career move, on the evidence of this memoir.

And her luck held as a student.

She sold the manuscript of this book to a publisher in 2007, while still enrolled at Columbia.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 31, 2010 H9

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