Arnold Snyder is a professional gambler and author of books on professional gambling, including a novel about a professional blackjack player, Risk of Ruin, to be published in September 2012. He was elected by professional blackjack players as one of the seven original inductees into the Blackjack Hall of Fame for his discoveries and innovations in professional gambling techniques. He was the first blackjack researcher to publish the importance of deck penetration in card counting, in his 1980 book The Blackjack Formula. In his 1983 book Blackbelt in Blackjack, he published the first unbalanced point count system, a radical simplification of professional-level card counting systems of that time. In his book The Blackjack Shuffle Tracker's Cookbook, he published the first mathematical analysis of the value of different styles of blackjack shuffle tracking, as well as the first analysis of how to most profitably track today's more complicated casino shuffles. Snyder's Big Book of Blackjack covers the history of blackjack, especially the history of the achievements of blackjack's most successful professional players. In 2006, his book The Poker Tournament Formula challenged conventional wisdom on optimal strategy for small buy-in tournaments. His 2008 Poker Tournament Formula 2: Advanced Strategies for Big Money Tournaments, challenged the conventional wisdom on optimal strategy for professional-level tournaments, based on Snyder's insights into chip utility in tournaments. From 1981 through 2006 Snyder was the publisher and editor of Blackjack Forum, a quarterly trade journal for professional gamblers. Snyder's Radical Blackjack, to be published in Spring 2013, is a book of Snyder's personal stories from the professional gambling tables. In 2012, Snyder became senior editor of Vegas Lit, a fiction imprint of Huntington Press in Las Vegas.

Blackjack Hall of Fame Inductee 2002