BOOKS about winning are a dime a dozen these days. Everyone's got some program for winning through positive thought or effective management or life/stress maintenance programs. But read the whole collection of Donald Trump/Lee lacocca/Ed Koch "How-I-Did-It" books, and you'll end up with only one piece of solid advice: hard work is the only way to achieve success.

Fast Company

Jon Bradshaw

Vintage Departures; pp 239; $6.95.

But is it? Not according to the six gamblers in Jon Bradsaw's Fast Company. Pool hustler Minnesota Fats says, "The only way anybody'd get me to work was to make the hours from one to two, with an hour off for lunch."

While Fast Company is not going to make anyone a Vegas-class card-shark overnight, it does provide a refreshing antidote to the self-congratulatory tales of honest, hard-working corporate and political "gamblers."

Winning, whether it's in poker and craps or stocks and bonds, is simply a matter of coming out ahead of the other guy. Not exactly screwing him over, but, well, luring him into a situation he just can't win. And letting him screw himself.

Luck? There's no such thing, according to these gamblers. Almost all of them have ascended from poverty to wealth, but none particularly feel that fortune has smiled on them. As Minnesota Fats says, "When you're poor you don't expect nothin' from life, and when you don't expect nothin', everything that happens is a picnic."

LUCK is the thing losers believe in. It provides hope to keep them in games they can't win. Real gamblers may leave nothing to chance themselves, but they don't hesitate to take advantage of those who do. "Only suckers gamble," says Titanic Thompson.

Thompson, who has repeatedly lured people into betting him that he can't do the undoable, shows how real gamblers leave nothing to luck.

Coming upon a city slicker at his favorite fishing hole, Thompson picks up a rock, carves an X on it, and offers the man a "proposition." He claims that he can throw the rock in the deepest part of the pond and have his hunting dog retrieve it. The man takes the bet, and the dog comes up with the marked stone. The slicker pays up, muttering about dumb luck.

"That dog of mine was good at that trick," Titanic conceded later. "But I ain't one for taking chances. A few days before I'd covered the bottom of that hole with dozens of marked rocks. That slicker never had a prayer."

The gambling world is filled with--and lives off of--slickers who never had a prayer. But the gamblers never scorn them. "Losers are suppliers," says poker champ Pug Pearson. "When you beat a man, you don't rub his face in it. You shrug and agree that it was luck and give him another chance. At double or nothing."

Bradshaw's strong suit is keeping his theories of winners, losers, and gamblers to himself. Instead, he lets the gamblers themselves talk. And talk and talk and talk.

He recounts a lengthy monologue from Minnesota Fats, who harangued a pool opponent while clearing the table: