slots blog

Don’t join to people thinking that slots is the game where your skills are the main factor. Slots are a game that offers the ultimate in the “trying your luck” experience. You could literally be anyone, walking around, with nothing to do. You could also have nothing in your pocket but some spare change. Chances are you could find yourself spending that change in a slot machine, trying your luck. If lady luck shines on you in that moment, at that slot machine, you may find that you win a generous amount of money. Playing slots, you are giving all your control to lady luck. And if you are lucky, you can have a life-changing experience. The same simply cannot be said about other casino games. You should have a sense of the game and some skill about the ways the games are played. The options for slots have grown and are now endless. You can play free slots and try your hand at luck from the comfort of your own home. Don’t mistake luck for dumb-luck, though. You should know that you can play the best slots around at the right places. Slots online is one of the places where you can find the games best suited for your skill level and your lucky day!

In the Spring 2003 Blackjack Forum, Richard W. Munchkin, author of Gambling Wizards, interviewed “RC,” one of the most successful hole-carders of modem times. In introducing us to RC, Munchkin writes, “For every one hour spent on the table playing, the hole-card player may spend ten hours scouting… Most players, even if shown a dealer who is flashing, would not be able to spot the hole card anyway. Holecarders spend hundreds of hours training their eyes to see something that flashes by in a fraction of a second, often cast in shadow.”

James Grosjean’s Beyond Counting (now out of print, though a second edition has been announced) is widely regarded as the hole-carder’s bible. A meticulous mathematician, Grosjean was the first person to accurately figure out the hole-carder’s edge at blackjack with perfect reads and perfect play (just over 13 percent), and in addition to his work on blackjack, he provided some of the first detailed hole-card analyses of games like Three-Card Poker, Let It Ride, and Caribbean Stud Poker.

Hole-card players speak their own language and have their own heroes. Most consider card counting too weak to be worth the trouble. Many quickly attain notoriety in the casinos and a degree of fame among other pros that appreciate the rare skills they have developed. Describe some of the most common hole-card strategies, and get a historical overview of this type of legal strategy.

In 1980, Stanford Wong published a book, Winning Without Counting (now out of print), with an initial price tag of $200. To pros, the book was well worth it. Wong discussed many methods of hole-card play for the first time and provided the only detailed description and analysis of “warp” play ever in print.

What is warp play? In the old days, dealers used to manually peek under their tens and aces to see if they had a blackjack before satisfying the players’ hands. This constant bending up of the corners on the tens and aces tended to put a warp into these cards if the casino did not change its decks frequently. An observant player could see the arc in a dealer’s hole card created by hours of bending the corners of the tens and aces. Warp play was simply using this information to make strategy decisions.

Then, Ken Uston’s Million Dollar Blackjack was published by SRS Publishing in 1981. In addition to everything Uston wrote about card counting and team play.A front loader is simply a sloppy dealer who flashes his hole card as he is placing it beneath his upcard. It’s actually a pretty descriptive term, since one common way that such a dealer inadvertently flashes the hole card is by tipping the face of the card up toward the “front” of the table as he is “loading” it. A player who sits in a seat that provides him a view of this card is said to be “front-loading.”

Spooking is something else again. It used to be standard procedure for dealers to manually peek under any 10 or ace to see if they had a blackjack, in which case they would immediately turn up the card and collect all bets without playing the hands. It wasn’t long before players started working in teams to take advantage of such dealers. The guy behind the dealer was called the spook. He would signal his buddies playing at the table with whatever information he could get on the hole card. Dealers don’t peek this way anymore, and this is one of the reasons why.

To the public at large, one of the most incomprehensible things about professional blackjack strategies is hole-card play. Hole-card play is not a single strategy, but a whole range of strategies. The one feature that can be found in all of these strategies is that the player either knows the dealer’s hole card, or has valuable information about that hole card, whether it’s a paint or not. To most casual blackjack players, this seems absolutely fantastic, unless there is some kind of cheater is getting in. But it’s not impossible, and in fact, most hole-card strategies are perfectly legal.

One important fact says that people without math live their lives in a dark. 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. An’ that’s true for the reverse as well. The longer I go without a winning hand, the more likely a big hand gets.

These people live in a fog. 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. 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 don’t think about fate or something like that, cards are just instrument we use to play. 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.

There is one thing that people that live in a fake world, don’t know. 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.

I feel a little nervous every time i need to talk about casino games. Had a bad run with the cards and lost a few dollars - got my pride wacked outa shape. I’ve spent a lot of time sitting in front of the guy who tried to get to the edge of the house and asked me to help him to lose some more money. He’s like a man with a big mouth. Not worth the time of day, most days.

Well, after the second coctail he became more mellow and no-one with the cojones to try anything against me for real - not with my connections. But there’s lots of folk get it into their heads that online video poker sites are cheating them. So I s’pose I’d better say a few words of reassurance - not that it’ll actually boost your confidence. The truth ain’t designed to do that.

So, let me sit you down in front of a video poker machine playing Jacks or Better on a pay table that’s offering 9-6-250 like online at goldencasino.com. For those who’ve not boned up on the jargon, that’s a machine paying 250 per coin on a Royal Flush, 9 on a Full House and 6 on a Flush. No matter which lucky rabbit’s foot you got in your pants, the very best you can hope to do is to almost break even.

If I stopped there, there’s no sense in any casino cheating on the slot machines. But there’s no denying you’re right ’bout one thing. Greed’s the worm in the gambling apple. Don’t matter which side of the fence you’re on, there’s always some as thinks they’re gonna hit it big. So I’ve seen pit bosses and managers decide the Vig’s not enough and rig the games. I’ve seen a few do it to put the money in their own pockets - most of them got decent burials, too. Yeh, there’s some cheating going on, but most of it’s on your side and it’s not very subtle.

‘Cause most folk can’t play the perfect strategy, the House edge on every video poker machine keeps the funds rolling in. That’s why you gotta pass the carousels of slot machines before you get to the tables. They’re the bread-an-butter earners for every casino.

So why do some folk get so all-fired sure they’ve been cheated by slot machines? In a word: frustration. They were hot, certain their luck was in, but had a long bad session. That always makes the loss harder to bear - when your emotion gets in the way of your judgement. Gambling’s got streaks of luck both ways. On one hot August night in 1913, the roulette wheel in Monte Carlo came up black a record-breaking twenty-six times in a row. The House took millions of extra profit. Half the room got to playing the Martingdale System. They were doubling their bets after every loss. But they tapped out of money before the streak ended. Was there anything wrong with the wheel? Nope! The math god smiled and it was true.

And one more wise thought before you stop listening me. Me, I don’t have no problem with that, but some online casinos’re uploading Dynamic Link Library subroutines to identify the applications you’re running at the same time as the casino package. They might not like some of the things they find - not within the spirit of the game from their point of view. Remember the old Chinese saying, “Big fish eat small fish.”

Just ’cause you come up empty on one or two sessions don’t mean nothing ‘cept your wins and losses’re averaging out over time. To make any kinda case against the casino, you’d need evidence. How you gonna that that evidence? Well, you gotta test their slot machines. Pick one of their video poker games. Say before you start how many times you’re gonna play and what you hafta see to prove the machine’s rigged. S’pose you think a video poker game don’t have all the faces in the deck - you’ve to track the frequency of the faces as they show in the count of all non-face cards. Tracking how many hands you played and how many you won or lost ain’t no proof at all. You need a test that’s statistically significant to prove cheating. So how many thousand hands of data you gonna pay to collect to test your hypothesis? It’s put up or shut up. No-one likes a sore loser unless they got the evidence to prove otherwise.

Catch ya ’round.

People are seduced by the idea of something for nothing. That is the reason they often drop a coin or two into a slot machine as they walk into a real world casino. The myths are “out there”. And these habits do have a basis in reality. There are real stories that sound similar to myths, perhaps, it is always worth dropping a coin or two just on the off-chance…

The major company in the casino games industry is Playtech. They have produced the first progressive network to link online, mobile and real-world jackpots. The network has just made a jackpot payout of slightly less than US$2.5m. Over the last three months, there was two playout more than 2 million dollars. The total amount paid out since system launch now stands at more than $33 million.

So, our congratulations go to people who get shy thousands of dollars by single spin of the wheels. Now, you might think this is a single system all on its own. It may be making big payouts, but not every progressive is making big payouts.

This April, one finnish man became an instant millionaire. He risked an entire US $0.50 bet on the Mega-Moolah Progressive Slot Machine and managed to scoop $5.5m. That he was slightly surprised by his good fortune probably does not quite capture the moment. It is possible that he has resigned his job and is currently sitting on an island somewhere with a glass in one hand. What he has in his other hand is anyone’s guess.

Now we must all stay calm. These players are the exception that makes the rule that everyone who plays the slots ends up a loser. These men are great luckies that were in the right place in right time. For the record, Klaus was the thirteenth player to become an instant millionaire on this particular online progressive (let no-one say that thirteen is always an unlucky number). But, by any standards, a win of more than $5m is fairly impressive. It brings the total winnings since the system came online to $27m.

That last sentence puts the win in its proper context. There were twelve previous winners of more than $1m plus the latest win. That makes $17.7 as a minimum or less than $10m paid out to all the other jackpot winners over the last few years. The win of $5.5m is one of the largest the online industry has seen. It took months for the progressive to build up to that level. It took millions of players that couldn’t win even one time.

And yet. . .

When you do start looking at the facts, the online casino games industry is maturing fast. The progressive jackpots will rise the more quickly the more players connect to casino. There will be more big payouts. You see that when your luck is in, you can suddenly find yourself rich for a small stake. When I was younger, cinemas used to run movies back-to-back in a rolling program through the day. You could go in and watch the cycle through as many times as you wanted. So this is where I came in when I started writing this article. People are fascinated by the prospect that, for a small outlay, they might hit it big. The trick is to keep the odds in perspective and never spend more than you can afford chasing the dream. Subject to that, it was never so simple to drop a coin or two into one of the casino games. You never know, today might be your lucky day and all your dreams can became true.