The Gambler conjures a world of myth: not as a fiction of human consciousness but as unconscious image-language. Its ambition is to write geography as material subject. In tracing the discourse written in the built environment the text ranges over the analyses of Marx and Freud and into the gestural worlds of Kafka and the blood sports of the ancient Colosseum. It discovers the myth of New Zealand horse racing, written in pictures in the local pub where virtual racing, abstracted from the living world, (dis)plays on the television screen. Here, finally, The Gambler comes to terms with loss. Key words: cultural geography, dialectics, gambling, historical materialism, New Zealand.