We are excited to officially kick-off the Voting of our annual Readers’ Choice Awards that runs through the end of February.
We are giving away the Ultimate Gambling Getaway to one lucky voter. The winner will receive an overnight stay at the casino of their choice, dinner on us, gambling money to play with and a gas card to get there. Best of luck in the 2019 Reader’s Choice Awards! (more…)
If you are looking for a new game to play in the casino that is easy to learn and can be very profitable, you should consider Pai Gow Poker. It is a combination of American poker and the Chinese domino game that shares its name. Similar to blackjack, it is a slow-paced table game with plenty of player interaction and dealer assistance. With a 5% house vig on your winnings, this game provides the player with a huge advantage which is why the house has to take a cut. The actual house advantage is 2.3 percent. (more…)
Last issue I offered to our readers a few players who articulated their craps strategies – some of these strategies were good, some were mediocre and some were awful. I didn’t comment on these strategies because I wanted our readers to savor them without my own strategic articulation – meaning “Hey, I’m right but I’ll let most of these poor souls have their moments in the sun.”
The next two issues will have me offer my opinions about these various strategies. My first player is Marty, our model of a smart player.
I can remember my mom saying that when life deals you lemons you should make lemonade. Beyonce even had a blockbuster album called “Lemonade”, so I guess moms everywhere (and grandmothers in Bey’s case, since she passed the adage and recipe on to the star’s mom) have some of the same feel-good maxims. It’s not just true about life in general, but also applies to the world of gambling. You might logically assume that with all the competition for players, casinos would be offering better odds than before, but that’s not the case at all. Instead, there are more greedy hands stuck out for pieces of the pie than ever before and our legislative regulators are merrily lowering the minimum ER (expected return) on a state-by-state basis. You may have sworn that if house odds were increased at your expense, then you’d never again enter a casino, but that’s like an ultimatum when angry with your partner; it may not happen. In the mercurial case of casinos your best bet may be to make lemonade. (more…)
When you read gambling books and articles, you sometimes see a distinction made between the “short run” (tonight, this weekend, this week, this month) of a few hundred or a few thousand decisions, and the “long run” (a few years or more) of millions of decisions. In the short run, anything can (and does) happen. Players can go on incredible streaks of improbable wins or equally improbable losses.
The long run is a very long time. Usually, it can be stated as the amount of time, or number of decisions, necessary for the probabilities to be within a given range of results. A coin flip will be, in the long run, faster than a roulette wheel because a coin flip has only two possible decisions and a roulette wheel has 37 or 38, depending on the type of wheel. As I stated, in the long run, the math of a game will win out over any aberrations that take place tonight. (more…)
Let’s examine three ways these eight hands (8-8, 7-7, 6-6, 5-5, 4-4, 3-3, 2-2 and A-Q ) might be played in No Limit Hold ‘em (NLH). These are the kinds of hands you want to take a flop with and are hands worth one raise before the flop, or even making the first raise yourself. If you are going to raise with one of these hands, raise about the size of the pot and hopefully win when everyone folds. Ideally, you want to call a small raise (or the initial blind bet) or make the pot size raise before the flop, and then hit the set on the flop to win a huge pot.
Again, my theory is that you want to call a small raise or make a pot-size raise before the flop to try to win the pot before the flop. (more…)