To be forever

Traditional land-based tournaments have always been favored by poker players, yet in recent years there is no doubt that the real poker action takes place in the online poker tournaments held by the variety of online poker rooms (Biggest poker room PokerStars offer great tournaments). Before you make your choice of an online poker tournament, it is important that you know everything there is to know about tournaments of poker online:

Just like in a regular poker tournament, all the players begin the poker game with the same amount of chips, and the game continues up until the point that only one poker player has remaining chips, the winner of the particular poker game and tournament.

In order to make sure that the poker tournament will be concluded after a reasonable amount of time, the antes or blinds are gradually incremented, making the poker players think twice before they continue.

Usually the winner does not take it all and the online poker room divides the prize pool between the top positions, and the winner gets to pick the biggest share.

Poker Tournaments can be about ten people in one table or thousands of players in multiple tables, they can be about Texas poker or 7 card stud but the types of poker tournaments are usually fixed and they are as follows:

Sit &Go Tournaments: These tournaments of poker online, as their name implies, begin as soon as enough players, usually 9 or 10, have assembled around the table.

Multi-Table Tournaments (MTT): These poker tournaments are scheduled for a predetermined time and involve hundreds and sometimes thousands of people playing Texas Holdem or Omaha poker at various tables.

Knockout Tournaments: This type of poker involves two online poker players with the same amount of chips. The one who cleans out the others poker chips will be the winner.

Satellites: This poker tournament is different from the rest in that the first prize is not only money, but a buy-in to another poker tournament. This prize usually includes a package of plain ticket, hotel and spending money besides the desired buy-in to that poker tournament. The idea behind this type of tournaments is to give good players the chance to participate in a big poker tournament which they probably cannot afford otherwise.

Re-Buys: Once your chips run out in this kind of poker tournament, you can purchase more chips. You can make a limited or unlimited number of purchases depending on the establishment or online poker room you play in.

Freezeouts: Once your chips run out in this type of poker tournament, you have no choice but to withdraw from the race to the prizes since no re-buys are allowed here.

Free slots are a simple way to enjoy playing slots without paying any money. Sometimes we all want to have fun and gamble for a little. While some go to land casinos and spend their money there, others choose playing free slots online. It is a much more comfortable way of putting your luck to the test, when you can play for as much as you like right at your home.

All you need to play free slots online is a computer and Internet connection. No credit cards, or other payment methods are required. Unless, you wish to play slots for money, of course. There are two basic ways you can play free slots online. One way is by downloading a stand-alone program from an online casino website. There are numerous online casinos that offer such free slots programs. They don’t require any payments for downloading the game. The other way is to play free slots directly on the casino website, by using Flash, Shockwave or Java plug-ins in your browser.

Just like real slot machines, there are numerous variations and themes on which the slot games are based. You are a big fan of Star Wars? There are hundreds of free slots based on the movie. Looking for the classic «one armed bandit» slot machines? You will definitely find plenty of those. The possibilities are endless, but what’s really important is that you have fun while playing free slots online.

According to well-known Richard Epstein, blackjack became popular during World War I, and was called “black-jack” from the practice of paying a bonus to a player who held an ace of spades with a jack of spades or clubs. John Scarne, (New Complete Guide to Gambling, 1961, Simon & Schuster), puts the year when this curious rule first appeared at 1912, when twenty-one tables appeared in horse-betting parlors in Evanston, Illinois. According to Scarne, by 1919a Chicago gambling equipment distributor was selling felt table layouts embla-zoned with the announcement: “Blackjack Pays Odds of 3 to 2.”

I am skeptical of much of what Scarne has written about blackjack, so I’ll quote from Mickey MacDougall’s MacDougall on Dice and Cards, which was published prior to any of Scarne’s books: “Many professionals dress up the game by giving prizes for certain hands. A favorite stunt is to offer ten times the size of the wager to anyone holding a natural twenty-one with a black jack online. This adds interest to the game, but it also tempts a player to increase his stakes.”

In an honestly dealt single-deck game, this gimmick bonus would give the player a substantial edge over the house, assuming the player knew basic strategy (an unlikely assumption). I would also assume that a gambling house that offered this bonus would be using any number of illegitimate methods to assure the house a healthy edge.

Thorp was keeping the casinos on the run.

Thorp also included a Simple Point Count in this new edition of his book, but at the time that strategy seemed way too simple to most players to gain much of an edge, or to be taken seriously by players who wanted to beat the game. Later, the power of Thorp’s simpler method of adjusting the running count, without keeping a separate count of the exact number of cards played, would be shown.

Still, the casino’s fears were mostly unfounded. The Complete Point Count was easier to use than the ten-count, but it was not a lot easier. It required players to keep two separate counts. In addition to the running count of the cards’ point total, the player had to keep a count of the exact number of cards remaining to be played. And in order to play his hand, he had to memorize a chart of 158 different strategy changes to be made according to the count.

Over in Louisiana, there’s a small and unremarkable community called Ventress. It sits in Pointe Coupee Parish. Pass down Main Street to False River Drive and you’ve missed it. Except there’s been a crime. Nothing too heavy. No gore. Just two guys who stole two video poker machines. There’s never been a crime wave in this small town but there were surveillance cameras saw the whole thing. The bad guys pulled up outside the Waterloo Exxon and Daiquiris Shop in their Chevy truck. For those of you who don’t know Ventress, that’s right next to the levee on the corner. Now these two climb out wearing masks - shows foresight and planning. The smaller of the two has a gimpy leg but that’s not going to hold him back. The big guy (local CSI have him wearing a size 13 boot which matches his impressive build) smashes through the glass frontage like it was a movie set fake. They pick up the two machines. Now that’s impressive. Each video poker machine comes in at a slimline 300 pounds but these two heroes exit their truck and drive away with the two machines in the back in 33 seconds. That’s 33 seconds!!! We’d like to be able to say these robbers peeled the machines open with their bare hands, but they used sledgehammers. A bit of cheating there, but they made a few thousand dollars for their efforts. So if you meet a small guy with biceps to die for and a limp in a bar down in Louisiana, he’s buying the next round.

The young fellah tells me to just let rip, so now I’m gonna give it to you straight and fast. You don’t like it. Well, you can do the other thing. At my time of life, I got no time for them as thinks they know better unless they’re buying me drinks. Then I reckon they’re buying my time - anyways, people in bars always seem more interesting when free alcohol kicks in.

Now, if it’s one thing my father taught me that’s become a kinda guiding principle, it’s that people without math live their lives in a fog. They’ve got no idea what they’re doing. An’ you never see this more often than in a casino watching how people play the slot machines. So, just for a moment, I’m going to slip into their mindset - give you a quick tour of how a gambler can fall into a trap. Need a drink first, though, to dull the pain.

So, here I am, playing video poker. I’m feeding the machine and keeping count of the number of times I do and don’t get winning combinations in the pay table. Got me some serious scientific study going on here! My video poker strategy is down pat! You see, to my way of thinking, there’s no such thing as a random sequence. The probability of any one thing happening is set by what went before. So, if I got me a winning hand, the law of averages says the odds of that happening again is poorer for the hands that come just after it. An’ that’s true for the reverse as well. The longer I go without a winning hand, the more likely a big hand gets.

vThese folk live in a dream world. You ever watch a Poker Dealer wash and shuffle a deck of 52 cards fairly. Then the Dealer deals five cards to each player from that shuffled deck. The first card dealt comes with a 1 in 52 chance, the second with a 1 in 51 chance, and so on as the cards are dealt in turn. All the countries licensing video versions of card and dice games have laws. No country wants to kill the golden goose that’s laying all them tax eggs so they all want to see fair games. Players vote with their feet if they think a game’s crooked. That’s in no-one’s interest. So all casinos gotta match the odds of a real card game with a human dealer. You might be thinking these casinos’ll still be out to cheat you in some way - after all, wouldn’t nothing be easier than to tweak the software - and those countries’re probably corrupt, take a backhander and look the other way. But there’s no need to cheat. No matter how you cut it, the games make more’n enough money when played fairly. Even when serious professionals come out to play, the House has an edge.

So, on a video poker machine, the Random Number Generator (RNG for short) shuffles that virtual deck of 52 cards and pulls out your first five. Now sometimes, the slot machines sit with that randomized deck and deal the next cards off the top when you press draw. In others, that ol’ RNG don’t know when to quit. It keeps on notionally shuffling the deck while you’re busy trying to decide what to do with your hand. The longer you take, the more times the RNG has cycled. Finally, you decide what you’re holding and hit the draw button. You get whatever’s on top of the deck at that precise moment. Wait a fraction of a second longer, and you get different cards. It don’t matter which wy the machines’re set up. The deck has a random distribution of cards.

What these dreamers in a fog never see clearly is the principle of statistical independence. This a fancy way of saying that events are unrelated - when the first occurrence has no effect on the second. When events are random. So when is a sequence of cards random? When the odds of you predicting the next card are no better than chance. It’s like tossing a coin. Every time you toss a coin, the chances of getting one of two sides is always 1 in 2. It never changes from one toss to the next.

So don’t you never fall into no gambler’s fallacy. There ain’t no deck of cards or dice that got a memory. They’re just the tools we use to gamble with. Sure these new video poker machines can have big memories but there ain’t no point to that. So long as they all got a RNG, all they’re doing is remembering the longest string of random numbers anyone’s ever bothered to collect.

So I’ll be getting back to the free online video poker - I’m looking over a new game. Ain’t no reason to pay to play. Just browsing for now.

In 1967, Griffin started a company called Griffin Investigations, Inc., “for the purpose of providing surveillance and investigative services to casinos,” according to their promotional brochure. Prior to the Griffin Agency, casinos had always provided their own surveillance, and they had rarely shared information with each other. But now, casinos had a common enemy-card counters-and Griffin’s main product was a mug book of names and photos of counters who had been identified and barred.

Most card counters learned about Griffin the hard way, when they found themselves being ejected from casinos where they had never played before, shortly after arriving at the blackjack tables for an initial play. Elaborate disguises and fake IDs soon became a necessity for high-stakes pros once they were “in the book.” Some players who were not card counters also found themselves being identified as counters in the Griffin book, as they had been misidentified to Griffin as such by paranoid pit bosses. Other non-pros had their names and photos entered into the Griffin book as “associates” of card counters simply because they had been seen socializing in the casinos with other players who were already in the book.

In the mid-eighteen hundreds, San Francisco’s Barbary Coast district had more than one thousand gambling houses, most being saloons, brothels, or some combination of saloon, brothel, hotel, and casino. We know that twenty-one was being played in the wild western states during the eighteen hundreds, and we can assume that it had come from the more civilized East, where casino gambling was technically illegal in most states, but still widespread. Some of the professional gamblers who came west with the ‘4gers were likely Mississippi riverboat gamblers looking for fresh suckers.
The first steam-powered paddleboats had appeared on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers in 1811, and by 1833 there were more than five hundred boats in service. According to Alan Wykes (The Complete Illustrated Guide to Gambling, Doubleday, 1964), by the l830s, approximately fifteen hundred professional gamblers were working the steamboats that ran between New Orleans and Louisville. That’s an average of three cardsharps on every boat. Says Wykes: “At first the cardsharp was an outcast … but as the boats’ officers became aware of the large potential income that lay at the tips of the cardsharps’ fingers … they became his accomplices.” The riverboat captains were soon competing with each other to attract not only the slickest cardsharps to their boats, but the wealthy travelers who were known to like a leisurely game of twenty-one or faro to pass the time on their journey. But with all the boats, and a growing army of cardsharps, the competition for suckers was getting worse every year. So, when gold was discovered in California in 1849, many of the gamblers went west to mine the pockets of the miners.
Eleanore Dumont is the first known professional twenty-one player in history. She was widely respected by the miners and gamblers who played against her because she was believed to deal an honest game. For all we know, she may have dealt completely on the square, and simply beat her customers as a result of the “house edge.” But most traveling card gamblers of that time did use sleight of hand, which was much more of an arcane art than it is today. Surely, there were other blackjack specialists before her, but none whose names are known and who specialized in the game of twenty-one exclusively. Throughout a gambling career of almost thirty years, Madame Mustache played only one game-twenty-one-and in the gambling dens of the old West, she became a legend in her lifetime.

Hi-Lo counting system that could be used to count cards with any number of decks, the casinos knew they were in trouble. Thorp was not letting up-more and more books and counting systems were being sold, and John Scame had no solution.
Robert A. Griffin did.

In baccarat the house advantage is between l percent and 1 1/2 percent for bets on both player and banker, with banker coming in a little lower than player. Baccarat is often viewed as the high-rollers’ game to start playing blackjack, with tables beneath chandeliers in posh rooms off the main casino floor. But no matter how or where it’s dealt, the player is still playing at a disadvantage.

Roulette players, who must play a game with a negative expectation, should stick to one-zero wheels only, due to the tremendous reduction in house advantage. Yet you will often see the one-zero playing free blackjack wheel empty while throngs of gamblers reach over one another to place bets at the double-zero wheels. That makes little sense. Someone please tell these folks that if you’re getting 35:1 in both cases special blackjack, there’s no point to doing battle with 38 numbers when it’s possible to reduce the number of possible outcomes to 37. The down side for many roulette players, though, is that often one-zero tables are kept at much higher minimums. What about blackjack bonus offers…