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" In May we listed our Top 10 Summer Books for 2010. So for the next ten days we&amp;#039;re previewing excerpts from each. Today, Lay the Favorite: A Memoir of Gambling by Beth Raymer. The day the Fort Lauderdale airport started offering casino junkets that flew nonstop to the Bahamas was the day my family started taking vacations. My dad, a car salesman, found out about the offer from the guys at the dealership. Basically, he guaranteed that he would spend a certain amount of time at the Paradise Island Casino blackjack tables, and in return, we got free airfare. The next thing I knew there were four airline tickets on the kitchen counter and Dad was coming home from work carrying books. Dad never came home from work carrying anything but Miller Lite tallboys. The only book in our entire house was the Lee Iacocca autobiography Dad won for selling the most cars at the Fourth of July tent sale.   The books were small and glossy and bore titles like A Winner&amp;#039;s Guide to Blackjack and Beat the Casino. They had lots of pictures and were only about sixty pages long. Perfect for an eleven-year-old like me. The week before the trip, after my mom and fourteen-year-old sister went to bed, I sat at the kitchen table and practiced dealing hands of 21 to my dad and my three Cabbage Patch Kids.  On the afternoon my family arrived at Paradise Island, Dad handed my mom, my sister, and me each a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill. He recited our family vacation motto\u2014Money is no object!\u2014then bolted for the casino the moment the airport shuttle&amp;#039;s door slid open. Mom caught the trolley to the outdoor market, my sister went off to buy pot, and I went in search of my dad, eager to sit beside him at the tables and watch him play.  It was my first time in a casino but certainly not my father&amp;#039;s. In the early years of my parents&amp;#039; marriage, he and Mom flew out to Vegas a couple of times a year and stayed at the Tropicana. In 1976, a nun from the orphanage called my parents and told them there was a two-week-old baby girl available. My parents had married young and had been trying to have kids for twelve years. They had adopted my sister three years earlier. Now there was a new baby, from a different family. Were they interested? Mom cried &amp;quot;Yes!&amp;quot; but as soon as she hung up, Dad reminded her of the tickets they had, to see Elvis in Vegas that weekend. The next morning they picked me up from Catholic Social Services, named me after the Kiss song &amp;quot;Beth,&amp;quot; which was playing on the radio, left me with Aunt Bonnie, and took off to Vegas. On the evening of the show, Dad found himself at the blackjack table, in the middle of a &amp;quot;hot streak.&amp;quot; Despite my mother&amp;#039;s pleading, Dad refused to quit playing, and they missed Elvis. Twenty-two years later, during their divorce, Mom repeated this story in front of the judge as proof that my father was a problem gambler.  Excerpted from Lay the Favorite by Beth Raymer Copyright \u00A9 2010 by Beth Raymer. Excerpted by permission of Random House Group, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/news/a4192/summer-reading-lay-the-favorite-a-memoir-of-gambling-573/>