If names like Nick the Greek, Sky Masterson, the Cincinnati Kid, and Stanford Wong don't mean anything to you, then you are most definitely not up on the history of gambling and famous gamblers. If you like to gamble online, you should try reading up on the legends of the field; it makes for fascinating reading and it's actually downright inspirational. So I highly recommend that you take your nose out of the online slot machines for just a few minutes and take a look at the people who excelled at the sport of gambling, some of whom, to this day, are still making the really big bucks.

The Blackjack Hall of Fame is a great place to start looking for some of the recent gambling heroes; you're not going to believe how great those guys are. A quick read through the Who's Who of gambling will show you that gambling goes back hundreds of years; it's hard to believe how far the gambling industry has come from the1700s in Europe to the ultra-modern online video poker casinos. Along the way, fact and fiction have melted together to create some of the all-time great legends whose names will live on forever.

Internet gambling is great stuff; it makes it possible for millions of people to gamble, people who may never have gotten to see the inside of a casino otherwise. It enables gamblers who could never afford a trip to Las Vegas, Atlantic City or the Riviera to play roulette for real money, something they probably only fantasized about in the past. But while you play on the Internet, it's also fun to look back, way back, to the days before all the modern comforts, to the days when all a gambler needed was a deck of cards or a pair of dice and the nerves of steel that separated the merely good from the great. The gambling forefathers make for really good reading.