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Jake Jacobs has lived a life defined by calculated risks. As a professional gambler who traveled the globe to beat the house at its own game, his exploits read like Hollywood script.

But before he was facing down phalanxes of casino bosses in Atlantic City or navigating the gaming tables of Southeast Asia, he was a kid who knew every square inch of Des Plaines.

Now retired in Tucson, Arizona, Jacobs has captured the adrenaline-fueled highs and grueling lows of his early career in his memoir, “Have Bets, Will Travel: The Adventures of a Professional Gambler”. The book is a testament not only to a unique career, but also to the monumental effort required to distill a lifetime of high-stakes adventure onto the page.

For Jacobs, the road to the world’s most exclusive casinos began in the heart of Des Plaines. His family roots in the community run deep. He is the son of William R. “Bill” Jacobs II, a prominent local attorney and 1950s alderman, and Shirley Spiegler Jacobs, a local actress whose family owned the iconic Spiegler’s Department Store — a cornerstone of downtown Des Plaines on Ellinwood Street for over 90 years.

“My grandparents’ parents, Louis and Minnie Spiegler, moved to Des Plaines from Chicago in May of 1900,” Jacobs recalls. “They bought a store… which became Spiegler’s Department Store. It was the anchor store of the Des Plaines Mall until 1991.”

Jacobs’ own childhood was woven into the very fabric of the town. Born in 1953, his parents bought a home at 663 Laurel Ave., right at the corner of Prairie, directly across the street from his maternal grandparents. Jacobs grew up attending Central School and Thacker Junior High, and graduated from Maine West High School in 1969 before attending Oakton Community College.

From swimming and attending Friday night dances at Rand Park to taking classes at the Northwest YMCA and catching movies at the historic Des Plaines Theatre, Jacobs’ early life was typical of the northwest suburbs. To make ends meet in those early days, he delivered pizzas and drove a local taxi for Community Cab, eventually working as a night dispatcher — hustles that gave him an intimate view of the town before his life took a drastic turn west.

In early 1982, opportunity knocked in the form of a phone call from his brother, a Las Vegas dealer. A professional blackjack team was looking for recruits. Intrigued by the challenge, Jacobs packed his bags and headed for Nevada.

He quickly learned that blackjack was entirely different from games of pure chance like roulette or craps. “When the dealer deals cards from the deck, the composition of the remainder changes,” Jacobs explains. “Card counting requires keeping track of the changes… Broadly, we know if there are more tens and aces — good for us — or more small cards, which favor the dealer. We increase and decrease our bets to take advantage of that.”

Mastering the math at a kitchen table was one thing; executing it under the watchful eyes of casino security was another. Jacobs proved to be exceptionally adept. He mastered basic and count-based strategies, learned how to legally track the dealer’s hole card, and eventually joined an elite team in Atlantic City that utilized early computers when they were still legal in New Jersey.

His talent earned him invitations to the Blackjack Ball, a hyper-exclusive annual event attended by only about 100 of the best players in the world. But the pressure was immense. Jacobs recalls a particularly grueling “Memory Game” in Atlantic City where he was betting up to three hands of $5,000 at a time.

“I had six bosses standing in a phalanx, glaring at him, while they tried to figure out what he was doing,” Jacobs says. “By the end of the night, I was limp.”

His skills took him far beyond Nevada and New Jersey. Between 1987 and 1992, Jacobs played for international teams in South Korea and Malaysia, and on cruise ships sailing out of Singapore to Thailand and Indonesia.

Decades after his final international cruise, Jacobs found himself presenting a lecture on gambling to the Arizona Mystery Writers association. The presentation sparked a realization: it was time to write it all down.

However, translating a 40-year gambling career into a readable book proved to be an uphill battle that required as much discipline as beating a casino.

“I quickly realized that my career was too long and eventful for one book, and whittled it down several times,” Jacobs says. He made the executive decision to focus almost exclusively on blackjack, structuring the narrative around his intense initial run from 1982 to 1984 in Las Vegas, a brief return to Des Plaines, and his international circuit ending in 1992.

The writing was only the first hurdle. When Jacobs pitched the book to a friend who ran a gambling-specific publishing house, the publisher loved the manuscript but balked at the size. The publisher wanted a sleek 75,000 words; Jacobs’ draft was twice that length.

Unwilling to sacrifice the depth of his experiences, Jacobs chose a different route. “I wanted my book to be the best book possible, not the best short book possible,” he says.

To bring his vision to life without compromising, Jacobs hired an independent editor and production specialist to navigate the grueling technical realities of modern publishing. Together, they meticulously formatted the manuscript to ensure it met the distinct digital and print criteria for multiple platforms, ultimately launching it successfully on Amazon, IngramSpark, and Draft2Digital.

With his first memoir successfully on the shelves and available to readers nationwide (as well as by special order at local libraries back home in the Chicago suburbs), Jacobs is already looking toward the next project.

He has begun drafting a sequel, and fittingly, the opening section takes place right back where it all began: in Des Plaines. For a man who has traveled the world breaking the bank, all roads, it seems, eventually lead back home.

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