Having finished, this is how I might write a review of the book.
Overall, the idea for History of the World from a Gambler’s Perspective isn’t awful, but the execution is horrible. Most of the chapters begin with a lengthy restatement cribbed from Wikipedia. The use of quoted sections from Wikipedia seem like they were intended to lend gravitas, but they are completely random. These historical sections come across as written by an incompetent high school student who is too lazy to paraphrase the entire article and haphazardly chooses certain parts to be direct quotes.
The chapters end with an assertion that some sort of gambling has taken place. The authors appear to lack the imagination or the depth to posit counterfactual scenarios whenever the claim is that a historical figure made a bad gamble. This leads to the perception that the book is results-oriented in its interpretations. There might be a token example of someone making a good decision but getting a bad outcome due to variance. A book that wanted to about how to think like a good gambler should be making this point more often.
A better way to write and organize this book would be to come up with several topics important to a gambler–bluffing, metagame, bankroll management–and coming up with several examples that illustrate those concepts. This book feels more like a few chapters on people the authors wanted to write about, plus some shallowly-researched chapters to pad things out and make it a book-length effort. In many chapters, it feels like a struggle to shoehorn the story into a gambling motif. This might be forgivable if the book consisted of entertaining re-tellings of historical events with crisp narratives that put us inside the heads of historical personages, but what we get instead is clunky prose that is significantly more awkward than the Wikipedia articles that the facts are cribbed from.
Combine this with a comically amateurish proofreading job–I have never seen more typos, misspellings, and grammatical mistakes in a book–and this is not really a book worth reading, but it could have been. Instead, what we have is a vanity press offering from a man who owns a publishing company.