Serious problems with this book:
a)The book is about card counting, yet the author does not provide any details as to a card counting system.

b) It is academically self-indulgent to the point of unreadability. Chapters are glued together from the author's old articles with no cohesion.

c) As the book says, you can spend 500 hours counting cards at blackjack and lose. Kind of pointless don't you think? The fine details of card counting in this book will not help much. You also need a minimum $50,000 dollars to start with.

d) This page and the book itself is liberally sprinkled with comments from blackjack authors, software providers and webmasters all of whom are stablemates or have some financial interest in this book selling & succeeding. Are they all impartial? I very much doubt it.

e) The author calls the book "playing the pros way", yet apparently has some flashy wall st. job. Its easy to make a small fortune at gambling if you start with a large fortune.

Buy this book if you are a wealthy playboy with money and time to burn on a socially useless and unproductive activity.

This will be a classic book in the blackjack world just like Super/System is for poker.
1) Yes the book goes into a lot of details, but this essentially proving his points. You don't want to blindly use the Illustrious 18 without knowing for sure that it is mathematically sound. I admit a lot of times the mathematical derivations get tedious but it's nice to know if you are industrious to use the methods for your own calculations.
2) There is no counting system taught here; Don isn't a counting system producer. He is more of an player-analyst.
3) For beginners, the stuff is probably way over your head. Otherwise chapters 10 and 11 are worth the book itself.

This is definately not a book for blackjack beginners. It expects you to be proficient at basic strategy, at least one card counting system, and all the various rules variations. This book teaches you how to apply that knowledge in real world situations. The best chapters (IMHO) teach you how to accurately evaluate your risk and expectation for any set of casino rules. Unfortunately, the the rambling writing style is often difficult to follow and the graphics are weak. I still recommend it since I know of no other books containing this level of detail.

I found this book to be completely lacking in any new ways to beat blackjack. Furthermore, the methods espoused by this book are well known to all casinos in the world and are very easy to spot. Furthermore, this book is dangerous for the novice player yet useless for the working pro.

Possibly the best book on the subject. Could have been better if it had more info about the european style of play(no-hole card).