Les Golden of Oak Park, Illinois, was granted a contract for his first novel.  The manuscript has now been delivered to his publisher, the distinguished house Springer International.  Never Split Tens relates the story of Edward O. Thorp, the M.I.T. mathematics professor who developed card counting at the gambling game of blackjack, thereby revolutionizing the gambling industry.  It is referred to as a “semi-biographical novel.”

Polymath

In fact, a second distinguished international publisher also sent Dr. Golden a contract.  Leslie M. Golden is a polymath, with careers as a professional astronomer and retired professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, having obtained the Ph.D in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley, and bachelors and masters degrees in Engineering Physics with Distinction from CornellUniversity.  There he was the multiple award-winning editor-in-chief of the Cornell Engineer magazine.  He is a professional actor with over 100 credits, and is a member of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.  His agents are the Shirley Hamilton Agency in Chicago and Sonjia Warren Brandon in Los Angeles.

His editorial cartoons have been published, and he has a listing in comiclopedia, the international cartoonist database.  He is a multiply award-winning writer in fiction and non-fiction, including a winner of the prestigious Lili Fabilli-Eric Hoffer Laconic Essay Prize.  He was one of the founders of the prestigious University of California Jazz Ensembles, and is a professional trumpet player, jazz vocalist, jazz festival emcee, and band leader.  As Flash Golden, he was the play-by-play voice of the California Golden Bears basketball team, and was a jazz disk jockey at KALX-FM.  As a stand-up comic, he has performed on the college circuit, at Playboy Clubs, and in comedy clubs from Los Angeles to Boston and Chicago to Puerta Vallarta.  He was a featured regular on the Eddie Hubbard Radio Show broadcast live from Arnie’s Restaurant in Chicago as one of his comic characters, Jeffrey Clayton Maxwell, from Bhutan.  He performs as himself and as Subrahmanyan Berkowitz (“What! Another comedian from Bangladesh!”)

 He was a letterman at Oak Park and RiverForestHigh School and has managed and played third base for league-winning fast pitch baseball teams in and since college, including the Golden Rods (Cornell) and the Foul Balls (Berkeley).

He is an internationally known environmental activist and animal welfare advocate, being the leader of the eventually successful effort to save Onion the dog, leading to revision of animal control laws in western states.  He is a knowledgeable and blistering critic of zoos, singling out the notorious Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago and the Calgary Zoo (“Auschwitz for Animals”) as examples of concentration camps for imprisoned wild animals.  The literally hundreds upon hundreds of animals murdered at the hands of political-patronage zookeepers at the city-run Calgary Zoo is the subject of Golden’s dedication to the book.  He details dozens of cases by name and specie in a documentary-worthy fashion of historical value for animal rights activists.

Never Split Tens

 Never Split Tens will be part of Springer’s Copernicus series, their premiere imprint of trade books.  It was “reverse-adapted” in large part from Golden’s screenplay of the same name. 

 Edward O. Thorp has been described as making the greatest advance in probability theory since the pioneering work of Gerolamo Cardano in the 16th century.  Never Split Tens is his story in the tradition of “historical fiction.”

 As all stories, it is a love story, and is charming, witty, romantic, and funny, while being true to the mathematics.  Golden provides fictional episodes surrounding Thorp meeting his wife at the Pacific Coast Collegiate Jazz Festival at the University of California, Berkeley, having a high school dance band by the of the Deuces (the name of the band put together by Golden’s twin brother Bruce during their high school years), and being a jazz trumpet player.  Golden made Dr. David W. Tucker and Dave LeFebvre, friends from the actual University of California Jazz Ensembles, the directors of the jazz bands at the festival.  Springer provided Golden a sizable advance for the rights of publication.  Thorp, in fact, grew up in Chicago only two miles from Professor Golden’s home in Oak Park, Illinois.   Golden also has a home in Reno, Nevada.

Film Adaptation

 Golden negotiated his contract with Springer to retain rights to film production.  The renowned Chicago literary agent, Sharon Kissane, in conjunction with the distinguished Chicago entertainment lawyer Jay Ross, has contracted with Golden to pitch the novel and the associated screenplay to film production companies and producers.  Rivers Casino in Des Plaines, Illinois, has been tentatively chosen as the location for gambling scenes for the film version.  James Caan has been contacted to play the co-starring role of Manny Kimmel, the east coast bookie who funded Thorp’s gambling experiments in Nevada, and Lana Wood (Diamonds Are Forever) is attached in the role of the mother of Thorp’s computer programmer colleague, Julian Braun. 

 Mathematician, writer (The Poker Face of Wall Street), and gambler Aaron Brown, who made valuable comments after reading the manuscript, describes it succinctly with these words:   “The dialog crackles and the fictional elements brilliantly illuminate how cool Ed [Thorp] is.  And there’s just the right amount of blackjack and math.  I love it.”  Among other planned cover endorsements is that of David Bland, the editor of Flush magazine and a British television pundit:  “Les Golden is a comedy genius.  It really is as simple as that.”

Historical Value

Although the major portion of the manuscript is a novel, Golden has carefully added material of significant historical value to the game of blackjack.  Dr. Herbert Maisel of the Four Horsemen of Aberdeen provided background information on their work, and the family of Harvey Dubner provided much information about his development of the Hi-Lo strategy, which is the basis of 12,000 word appendix.

Many facts about blackjack history have been misstated in various forums, and Golden has researched primary sources to correct them.  The book, as a result, will be an important addition to the non-fiction blackjack canon, in addition to its entertaining fictional narrative of Thorp’s life.

Golden was particularly diligent about chronicling the important of fellow Jews in Thorp’s story.  Thorp’s wife was an observant Jew, and their children were raised Jewish.  The IBM programmer who performed computer simulations for Thorp was the Jewish Julian Braun, who is buried near Golden’s maternal grandparents in Westlawn Jewish cemetery west of Chicago.  Manny Kimmel, the New Jersey mobster who bankrolled Thorp’s gambling experiments in Nevada and Puerto Rico, was Jewish.  Of the major figures in Thorp’s gambling story, only Claude Shannon, who worked with Thorp on portable roulette wheel computers but who is not a major figure in Never Split Tens, is not Jewish.  The biographical material on Harvey Dubner, who is Jewish, illuminates the significant role he had on what eventually was published by Thorp as the “complete point count” system.  Jess Marcum, the blackjack player who earned substantial blackjack sums before Thorp himself appeared on the blackjack scene and who developed a system mathematically as opposed to computer simulation, was Jewish and appears in the novel.

Acknowledgements and Scholarly Work

Golden acknowledged numerous individual as contributing to the book.  He notes that Edward Thorp and his staff displayed great patience with numerous inquiries and he expressed gratitude to gambling game researcher and mathematician Prof. Stewart Ethier (The Doctrine of Chances:  Probabilistic Aspects of Gambling) for many helpful comments on the manuscript and for providing background information, and for Emeritus Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature James McConkey (Court of Memory etc.), Golden’s former professor at Cornell University, film director Ryan Firpo (Bet, Raise, Fold), agent Sharon Kissane, actress, professor, and director Joyce Porter, actor and writer Rick Plastina (Killing Poe), actress Lana Wood, and numerous others for reading and commenting upon the screenplay version of Never Split Tens.  

 He mentions the late legendary actor, stand-up comic, director, and improv guru Del Close of the Chicago improvisational nightclub Second City, who taught Golden how to both act and write a scene.  He also expressed gratitude to his various magazine editors and publishers at Lyceum Publishing and Players Publishing in London for keeping his interest in this field both alive and financially rewarding and Bo Bernhard and the International Gaming Institute of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, for naming Dr. Golden a 2016 Scholar, which encouraged Golden to complete his “reverse-adaptation” work.

 Golden has written monthly columns for five London-based gambling magazines since 2006.

In 2016, Golden had two papers at the 16th triennial Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking in June at the Mirage Casino/Hotel, “An Analysis of the Disadvantage to Players of Multiple Decks in the Game of Twenty-one” and “A New System for Roulette Based on the Physics of the Roulette Wheel.”  He also had two applied mathematics articles published in a peer-reviewed journal.

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Details about Les Golden’s Renaissance Man activities can be found at:

encyc.org/wiki/Les_Golden and en.wikisage.org/wiki/Les­_Golden

The finances of producing Never Split Tens as a motion picture and the formal prospectus are presented at:  encyc.org/wiki/Never_Split_Tens and http://en.wikisage.org/wiki/Never_Split_Tens_(movie_prospectus)

Les Golden’s activities as a gambling writer are profiled on his alma mater website:  http://www.cornell65.com/interest/golden.html

His papers on the Golden Diagram (blackjack) and Magic  Circle strategy (roulette) presented at the 16th triennial International Conference  on  Gambling  and  Risk  Taking  in  June,  2016,  in Las Vegas are at https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/gaming_institute/2016/June9/

Les’ listing on the Comiclopedia International Database appears at:

http://www.lambiek.com/artists/g/golden_les.htm

The Chicago Tribune presented a political profile of Les Golden at: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1995-10-03/    
/news/9510030038_1_wallace-gator-bradley-candidates-taxes

Some of Les Golden’s animal welfare and environmental activism activities are described at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/07/les-golden-oak-park-dog-a_n_1497423.html en.wikisage.org/wiki/The_Horrors_of_Zoos_and_Horse_Racing.

en.wikisage.org/wiki/CARE_Party_of_Oak_Park