This is the fifth gambling magazine for which Golden writes, joining Gambling.com, iGaming Business, Gambling Online, and Bluff Europe, providing him an unequalled visibility in the international gambling literature.  All are print magazines.

At Jackpots Review Golden will be joining a veritable super star stable of gambling writers.  These include Jon Young, Philip Conneller, and Christopher Bradshaw.  

Les Golden has been a professional blackjack card counter since his days as a graduate student in astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley.   The developer of the Golden Diagram strategy at blackjack and the Magic Circle strategy at roulette, Les, in addition to being an astronomy professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, taught probability and statistics at the graduate student level at the Heller Graduate School of business of Roosevelt University, Chicago, and recently published “An Analysis of the Disadvantage to Players of Multiple Decks in the Game of 21” in the peer-reviewed scholarly journal The Mathematical Scientist.  His magazine writings are known for his strong, iconoclastic, sometimes outrageous sense of humor. 

His astronomy textbook, Laboratory Experiments in Physics for Modern Astronomy:  With Comprehensive Development of the Physical Principles, was published in 2012 by the distinguished science publisher Springer.  Also containing humor, it includes illustrations by Golden, a professional political cartoonist with a listing in Comiclopedia, as well as by Tim Rickards, the creator of the comic strip “Brewster Rockit: Space Guy!”, for which Golden periodically supplies story lines.

A passionate environmentalist and animal welfare advocate, Les was instrumental in saving the dog Onion from death row in Henderson, Nevada.  The case of the dog received international publicity when in April, 2012, Golden stepped forward to advocate for saving the dog after an accidental child mauling.  Funding a trust for the dog and obtaining legal counsel eventually led to the case reaching the Nevada Supreme, in an unprecedented, precedent-setting action.  In January, 2014, the dog was saved and now lives at a rescue.

Golden is also a professional actor and stand-up comic, but his legions of readers probably don’t know he’s a playwright and screenplay writer.  His most recent screenplay, “Never Split Tens,” is based on the true life story of Edward Thorp, the mathematician who developed card counting systems at blackjack.  The script has numerous Hollywood names attached including Lana Wood (Plenty O’Toole in “Diamonds are Forever”), Polly Draper (“Thirty Something”), and George Lazenby, a former James Bond.  Ryan Firpo, the director of “Bet, Raise, Fold,” is the first choice to direct the movie.