HBO to Adapt Gina Fiore’s Memoir ‘Advantage Player’ Into Series

The gambling world is getting the HBO prestige drama treatment courtesy of Gina Fiore.

Fiore, the noted gambler and author of the forthcoming Advantage Player: A Memoir of Blackjack, Backrooms, and Beginnings from Penguin Random House, has signed a deal with the cable network to bring the story of her life to the screen.

The show will star Riley Keough, who recently earned an Emmy nomination for her role as Daisy Jones in the Prime Video show Daisy Jones & the Six. Keough, who happens to be the eldest grandchild of Elvis Presley, is also co-executive producing the HBO show along with showrunner and writer Will Graham. Graham was executive producer and co-show runner on Daisy Jones.

The deal, which Deadline broke on Friday, culminates years of discussions between Fiore and Keough. As Fiore put it to Casino Reports last year: “I’ve been working on a one-hour television drama. There’s an actress and writer attached, but I’m not going to call them out before anything is sold. It’s been a slow process.”

Now that it’s sold, though, Fiore shared some details with Casino Reports.

How it happened

“Will was the showrunner (of Daisy Jones), and when it was over he asked Riley what ideas she had and she told him my story. That’s how it started,” Fiore said. “Riley heard my Ringer podcast Gamblers with David Hill in 2021. She and I had a Zoom about it. After Daisy, she introduced Will to me and we’ve all been working on it ever since.”

She said the 2023 writers’ strike in Hollywood put everything on pause, but during that time Keough joined Fiore on a trip to Vegas to see the noted advantage player in action.

This past April, Fiore and crew sat down with a bunch of networks, a few offers were made, and they decided to close the deal with HBO.

“It was a long road, but the timing is right,” Fiore said. “My book is coming out in October, and my life is simpler now than it’s been for years, so I can be present for this.”

And somehow, some way, Fiore turned the process upside down. You might even say she found a loophole. An advantage play, if you will.

“The funny thing is we started working on this show before I ever got a publishing deal,” she said. “It usually goes the other way.”

The show, per Deadline, will portray how when Fiore “discovers the secret to beating casinos at their own game, she’s pulled into a world of obsessive outlaws who all live by one rule: the only way to beat the system is to outplay the people who built it.”