Play It Right
The Remarkable Story of a Gambler Who Beat the Odds on Wall Street
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A real-life underdog tale of one man turning the tables on the casinos and Wall Street without selling his soul to the devil
All around the world, the words “Wall Street” conjure up a powerful image. For some, it is the center of America’s capitalist system and the engine of its economic growth. For others, it is the home of rapacious bankers and reckless traders whose greed would lead to a global financial crisis. For an Indian-born blackjack player, Wall Street represented something else entirely — a chance for him to play in the largest casino in the world.
Kamal Gupta’s improbable journey, from a wide-eyed Indian immigrant to an ultimate insider in the rarefied world of investment banks and hedge funds, is a uniquely American story. Nowhere else would it have been possible for a scrawny computer scientist to enter the world of high finance solely on the basis of his gambling abilities. After spending seven years creating an investment methodology, Gupta went on an incredible run, generating an unprecedented 103 consecutive months of positive returns while managing money at large hedge funds. His success did not go unnoticed, and he found himself under constant pressure to take bigger risks to make even more money. He refused and always played it right, knowing that there was such a thing as “enough” money, something very few, if any, of his Wall Street peers understood.
Much like Maria Konnikova’s bestseller, The Biggest Bluff, Play It Right isn’t so much about money as it is about the human condition and beating the odds, whether at a casino, on Wall Street, or in life itself.
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Hedge fund manager Gupta traces his finance-world successes in this chatty and wispy memoir. Born and raised in Delhi, Gupta moved to the United States in 1985 after college to pursue a "career in computers" but gave that up when a stint as a card-counting casino habitué led to a professional blackjack career. Gupta describes his life as a game inspired by two books: Million Dollar Blackjack by Ken Uston and Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis. The first guided his blackjack success, and the second showed him the connection between winning in Vegas and hitting it big on Wall Street, where Gupta landed a job at Lehman Brothers and converted his risk-averse gambling strategy into trades. It's not all smooth sailing—obstacles included a racist, homophobic bully of a boss—but Gupta's anecdotal style tends to glory in moments of vindication. "My plan... was simply to play the game well and beat the market," he writes, and his narrative, equally simple, repeatedly describes the bets he won and how everyone else got them wrong. It mostly feels like someone telling stories at a networking event. There aren't a lot of takeaways here.
