A lot of people play Gin Rummy, or at least a lot of people play a game they call Gin Rummy. Few people play it well, and many don’t even realize that it’s a game that requires significant skill to be a consistent winner. Sam Fry’s book aims to provide enough information for the novice player to understand the issues involved in being a winning player, and to provide the rules and suggested strategy changes for most of the common Gin variants.
Gin Rummy How to Play and Win is obviously not a magnum opus. It’s a small book published by Dover Publishing that originally appeared as a series in a periodical in the early 1960s. Dover’s publication strategy is to acquire works in the public domain or buy the rights to out of print material at rock bottom prices and and turn them into high quality, low price press runs for niche markets. This allows Dover to print Fry’s work at a very low price. Basically, as long as the information in a book like this doesn’t harm the reader, it has to provide a reasonable value for the purchaser.
As it turns out, the information provided in this book won’t do the reader any harm. In fact, although brief, it provides a pretty decent introduction on how to be a winning Gin player. The rules as stated here are generally in agreement with rules as I’ve seen them elsewhere, and, in fact, Fry discusses them in more Slot Gacor detail than you’ll find, say, in Hoyle’s Rules of Games. Also, the Gin variants are discussed in reasonable detail. I had to re-read the section on Oklahoma Gin to make sure it did indeed agree with my recollection, so it could have been written in a clearer fashion, but it’s certainly good enough.
As one might expect, although the strategy sections are sound, they’re pretty limited and general. If the book were to be expanded, covering more strategic situations would be the obvious way to go. However, the basics of winning strategy are present, so that an industrious student can work out more detailed rules of optimal play once they have some game experience.
All in all, I have no quarrels whatsoever with this Slot Gacor book. It does its job in a reasonable footprint at a reasonable price. Advanced players can almost certainly pass it by, but at worst, even if a a player who was on the fence about purchasing this book can hardly begrudge Dover the three bucks it would cost to find out if it provides them valuable information or not.
Capsule:
Fry’s book is a brief, solid, and very reasonably priced introduction to the game of Gin Rummy and most of its variants. While Gin Rummy How to Play and Win isn’t the final word in Gin strategy, it’s a solid book for those who are not already experts in this game. I recommend it.
