6Gambling is something that many of us participate in, and this can include a trip to a casino or perhaps a home game of poker. But it turns out gambling, or aspects of gambling, will appear in many places, and this, of course, includes history, and that s what this book is about.

First, we ll define exactly what gambling is, explain why both luck and skill (or lack of skill) are important, and also define something called non-self-weighting strategies which just happens to be the right way to gamble.

Then we ll venture into the world of history looking for those situations where great gambles were made, sometimes positive and sometimes negative, and find many other historical situations where aspects of gambling came into play that influenced what was about to happen. To be specific, we ll see how poor Goliath never had a chance, how Hernan Cortes was the luckiest man who ever lived, how the Spanish Armada had the wrong strategy, how Confederate General Braxton Bragg showed that it is