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Saturday, 07 June 2008
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REVIEW OF BASICS
THE BASIC RULES AND PRINCIPLES OF SPADES ARE RELATIVELY SIMPLE. Please refer to the next section if you are familiar with these bare essentials.
THE PLAYERS
The standard game is four handed with two sets of partnerships playing opposite each other. There is also a three handed variation in which each person plays individually. Finally, a four handed option exists with each person playing individually although this form of the game is relatively obsolete. Although each person in the individual games plays for himself, two or more players may team up as a temporary partnership if this is advantageous for them.
THE PACK
A standard 52 card deck is used. There are four suits and the cards of each suit rank as follows:
Ace (high), King, Queen, Jack, 10, 9, and so forth down to the deuce.
Spades are always trump and outrank the other three suits. The terms major and minor are used for quick identification only. Major suits are hearts and spades; minor suits are diamonds and clubs. The ACE, KING, QUEEN, JACK, and 10 are called “honor” cards; the deuces to the nine are called “spot cards.”
THE OBJECT OF THE GAME
Each partnership strives to win the highest score which is usually 500 points. This is accomplished by capturing tricks, setting or defeating the opponent’s contracts and avoiding the accumulation of over tricks. The standard game limit for partnership variation is 500 points. Individual games have a limit of 300 points. There are penalties for defeated contracts, as well as the accumulation of over tricks (bags). In tournament play, the game limit is ten hands. This is designed to control the time, as well as length of each round.
SCORING
Each successful contract scores 10 points for every trick bid and made as well as one as one point for every additional trick. For example, if you bid seven, (combined partnership) and make nine (tricks), you score 70+2 for a total of 72 points. If you are unsuccessful in making your bid (set) your team loses 10 points for every trick bid. Using the above example, if your team was defeated in the contract of seven tricks the result would be minus 70 points.
Remember, partnership bids are combined and the total made or set is the basis of the scoring. Successful nil bids score a premium of 100 points. Defeated nil bids have a penalty of minus 100 points. Please note that a nil is an individual contract and the partner of the nil bidder has his or her score calculated separately. For example, if I bid nil and my partner bids three and we are both successful, we score plus 130 points. If my partner is set and I still make my nil bid, we score plus 70 (100 minus 30).
Any tricks taken by a nil bidder do not count toward the total of the other partner’s bid. Successful blind nails have a premium of 200 points, and a defeated blind nil is penalized 200 points.
Bags are a penalty for over-conservative bidding. Every additional trick (over trick) in a successful contract counts as one bag.* An accumulation of 10 bags results in a penalty of 100 points. It is quite possible to “sit” on a total of nine bags, and not incur a penalty. Bags are sometimes called sandbags.
Friday, 29 February 2008
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BETTING SPREADS
Casino games have lot of surprises for the gamblers. I’ve been trying my hands in almost every casino games and it proves handy to me. The most important thing that the newbie needs to learn is about betting spreads.
I stated earlier that the simplest betting strategy would be to jump immediately from your minimum bet to the maximum bet on any advantageous count. However, this is unwise for several reasons. One is that such a betting technique attracts undue attention from. The pit and the other is that it would severely strain the limits of your bankroll. In the next chapter, on money management, I will cover optimal betting, but the basic premise is to keep your bets in proportion to your advantage. Otherwise you face the very real possibility of tapping out and heading home broke.
The secret to beating the house at blackjack generally hinges on one fact: you have to bet more when there is a high count-and less when it is negative. How much of an edge you obtain is often a reflection of how wide the spread is between your small bets and your big bets.
You don't need much to heat most single-deck games. A 1 to 2 or 1 to 3 spread is sufficient if the rules are good or if the penetration is very deep. However, if you do want to be a strong favorite over the house, then a spread of 1 to 4 will provide a powerful edge in most situations. For our benchmark bankroll of $10,000, that would be roughly going from $20 to $80. With the Hi-Lo count, you would bet $20 on any TC of + 1 or less, $40 for a TC of +2, $60 for a TC of +3, and $80 for any TC of +4 or higher. Since there are more max-bet opportunities in the handheld games, it sometimes is wiser to reduce the risk by having more than a hundred top bets for single or double deck. (If your personal cash stake is different than $10,000, then just extrapolate the numbers for your betting range.)
One advantage of those numbers ($20-$80) is that they contain a bit of built-in camoufla. Each bet consists of exactly four chips, and every bet is always capped by a red chip. This could confuse the eye in the sky into thinking you are always wagering the same amount. Casinos will carefully watch anyone who tends to change his bets frequently. Most gamblers tend to stick with the same. Amount on each hand and the few players who spread their bets up and down are often suspected of being card counters.
The consequence of this unwanted attention might be preferential shuffling whenever you push out your maximum bet, or you could be asked to leave if the casino perceives you to be a true long-term threat. Fortunately, one advantage of good single-deck games is that you don't have to spread your bets very dramatically to be-come a winning player.
However, shoe games provide a much more arduous mountain to climb, and my betting advice on how to beat multiple-deck games will be met with extreme skepticism by some in the gaming community. That is because I suggest you use a very large spread. A lot of players prefer keeping their betting spreads small so the heat doesn't descend on them at the tables.
I certainly understand their logic, but I've always held a slightly different playing philosophy. My bet sizes are rather 'conservative in relation to my bankroll, but I've always been very aggressive in trying to gain a large edge whenever I play blackjack. I accomplish this by being extremely selective about the games I play and employing large betting spreads.
Tuesday, 19 February 2008
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Tournament Blackjack
If you haven’t indulged in black jack tournament as yet then trust me you have missed something well but it’s never too late you can start playing it now and start fulfilling your dreams. I want to through some light on black jack tournament format.
1. Succeed or bust. The best tournament strategy is to either advance to the next round or bust out trying. Develop a killer instinct and always go for the win.
2. When behind, play for the swing. When losing, look for hands in which you can create a big swing, either with the betting amounts or by play decisions, to seize the lead.
3. When ahead, go with the flow. If you have the lead, try to mimic your competition by correlating their bets and reduce the chances of big swings.
4. When in doubt, push it out. In the late rounds, medium-size bets often will do little good. Even if you win, you still won't grab the lead; but if you lose, you have too few chips left to stage a comeback. It is best to bet the max and hope to get back in contention with one hand rather than with a bunch of small bets. It's not always best to bet as much as you tan, but it's almost never the worst.
5. Always be alert for openings. Just because it looks like your Opponent has a lock, don't assume he will make the right play. Give him a chance to make a mistake and allow you back in the كازينو game.
6. Two bets to win. When you need more than your original bet to win the final hand, you must double or split any hand you get. Just don't double for more than is needed, and if you do split, you should usually stand on any stiffs because your best chance of winning both bets is if the dealer busts.
7. Hope for the worst. If it looks unlikely that you will win on the last round, even with a max bet, try to retain the largest stack of unbet chips. That will make you the winner if the dealer beats everyone at the table. (The dealer will win more hands than she loses.) The following table (also frol11 Stanford Wong's book) lists the probable outcomes of various tournament situations and helps explain why this strategy is often a good percentage play.
Ment pros to illustrate how to incorporate these principles into various tournament situations. But before we introduce those intriguing individuals, let's first examine how a tournament operates.
TOURNAMENT FORMAT
As stated earlier, the main difference of blackjack tournaments is that participants compete against each other, rather than the house. This creates a dynamic more similar to Poker Games than to regular blackjack. The usual format consists of a series of elimination or knockout rounds. Typically, the tournament will start with a random draw and place five or six players in designated seats at each table. Whoever finishes with the highest total of chips advances from each table, although some tournaments promote the top two to the next round? All betting limits are fixed in advance. In some cases, you play with real money, but most times the chips used in tournaments are nonnegotiable, or "funny money." They have no real value, so you can never lose more than your original entry fee. Either way, every player always starts with the same amount of chips and can't buy in for more during the round or carryover winnings from the previous table. However, there are many tournaments where you can reenter into a later round, if you had no luck and crashed out prematurely at your first table.
The number of rounds in each tournament varies, depending on how many players entered. In smaller "mini tournaments" there may only be two rounds total, but in larger tournaments it might take four or five rounds to reach the final table. Each round either consists of a fixed time frame or predetermined number of hands (usually twenty to fifty) and is the same for every table.
Saturday, 02 February 2008
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HOW MUCH MONEY DO I NEED
When you are playing casino games you don’t know that how much money you need in order to achieve your pre determined goals.
Whole books have been written for gamblers in an attempt to answer this question. Whole lives have been dedicated to research on it. Still, in my opinion, the greatest failing of most books on card counting-even some of the best ones-is that they do not adequately provide players with a clear picture of how much to bet, based on the various factors, such as bankroll size, game conditions, betting spread, and counting system, to name a few. There is no simple answer, and no "right" answer either. But most books either oversimplify the answers-which leaves players wondering why their system doesn't seem to be working when they hit a perfectly normal downswing-or they overcomplicate the answers, providing perplexing formulas and tables of numbers carried out to four decimal places that are fine for academic discussions by mathematicians, but unwieldy, intimidating, and unnecessary for real players.
I suspect the reason that many authors provide either middling advice or overcomplicated data is that none of the answers are pleasant or comforting. Nobody wants to hear that the fluctuations are wild, that there's no way around the flux, and that you must not only learn to cope with it, but understand it. I will give you the facts as clearly as I can, though, and in such a way that you can make informed betting decisions, with no unpleasant surprises later.
Inevitably, every serious blackjack player ends up learning more about math than he ever thought he wanted to. Any pro can discuss esoteric statistical concepts like standard deviation, risk of ruin., the Kelly Criterion, bet-to-bank ratios, and, by the time you finish studying this book, you should have a pretty good working knowledge of these terms. This is not to say that you must take a course in statistics in order to figure out how much to bet on a hand of blackjack -like every thing else in this game, most players can find answers in a few simple charts and an understanding of what they're up against. Most high-stakes pros, in fact, would tell you that they do not use or pay any attention whatsoever to the massive amount of technical data available on every aspect of win rate, risk, variance, and covariance. It is simply unnecessary for real-world play.
But even if you have no intention of going pro, you should understand the basic concepts of normal fluctuation, and exactly what is meant by "win rate." Stick with me; these concepts are not too difficult to comprehend.
Many card counters would like to believe that mastering a counting system gives them the keys to the vault. They'd like to think that since they have the edge over the house, they can't lose. One of the most common complaints I've heard from players goes something like this: "The table conditions were great, I know I was playing my system well, but I lost my shirt! What happened?"
Why is it that so many smart players believe that negative fluctuations are something that only happens to the other guys?
Forget the math for now. Let's look at a practical example of what can happen. In order to demonstrate what you might have to deal with-in the short run, in a very profitable game, even when you're using your system perfectly-I ran 100 consecutive computer simulations of 1,000 hands of blackjack each. Each simulation represents about 10 hours of play in a truly great game: single-deck, Vegas Strip rules, with double after splits, and 80% dealt out. The player is using the Zen Count with all published indices, and spreading his bets from $25 to $100. His long run advantage in this game is 2.1 %, which translates to about $105 per hour. Before I ran the 100 simulations of 1,000 hands each, I ran a 1O-million-hand simulation to come up with the 2.1 % win rate. Since you probably won't play any 10-million-hand sessions, let's look at what happens in your real world 1O-hour sessions. Let's say that you, a dedicated card counter, actually went out on 100 consecutive weekends, and played ten hours of blackjack every weekend for almost two years, in this same game. What happened?
Of these 100 1O-hour sessions, you won at least some money on 76 of .
Monday, 14 January 2008
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The Point Phase
Casino the game of fortune depends mostly on numbers sometimes it can be in your favor or sometimes it won’t be in your favor it depends on how lucky you are on a given day. Point phase is very crucial in the game of casino so have a look on it
When any number other than a natural or craps is rolled on the come- out, that number becomes the point. The point number may be a 4,5, 6, 8,9, or 10. When one of these numbers is rolled on the come-out, the line bettors neither win nor lose; their bets are unresolved and remain in place on the layout.
For a pass-line bettor to win during the point phase, the established point number has to appear a second time before a 7 is rolled. Thus, it may take only one or two rolls, or it may take many, many rolls to resolve the line bets by repeating the point or tossing a 7. During this time, any other numbers that appear have no effect on the status of the line wagers. If a 7 appears before the point is repeated, the pass-line bettors lose. If the point is thrown before a 7 appears, the pass-line bettors win.
For example, if the first roll is a 3, the pass-line bettors lose, but the shooter retains the dice and throws another come-out. If the second come-out is a 6 that becomes the point. Should the third roll be another 3, the only winners would be a field bet or a bet on 3 (which will be explained later), but the 3 has no effect on the pass-line wagers. A fourth roll of 6 makes the point and the pass-line bettors win.
After winning the first point, the same shooter now rolls a 9 for a new come-out point. Then, after rolling a 2 and a 10, neither of which affect the line bets, the shooter rolls a 7. The pass-line bettors lose and the shooter loses possession of the dice.
PLAYING IN THE CASINO
SELECTING A TABLE
Just as with any other casino game, it is important that you select a table with reasonable care. Stepping up to a table and throwing out your money without first checking the limits and playing conditions may seem like a cool move, but it could prove expensive.
Table limits: Except for downtown Las Vegas where some casinos will still take a $1 bet, craps tables usually have a minimum limit of at least $5. Know ahead of time how much you intend to wager and find a table with appropriate limits. If you can’t find a table with a low enough limit to fit your playing budget, go to another casino. Playing at a limit higher than you intended can be financially disastrous.
Table ambience: Before putting your chips or money down at any craps table, stand back and watch the action for a few minutes. The table should feel comfortable to you and not so crowded that you would have to squeeze into a small space. Unless you are only there to watch, avoid a table populated with overbearing and obnoxious characters.
OBTAINING CHIPS
Although you can place a bet with cash, the casino prefers the use of chips. To get chips, put your money on the table in front of a dealer and tell him what denominations you want. Don’t drop a $100 bill on the table and ask for $50 in chips and $50 change. A casino craps table does not deal in cash—all cash is shoved into a slot in front of the box man and drops into a strongbox that is mounted under the table. If you have a $100 bill and want only $50 in chips, go to the cashier’s cage where they will accommodate you.
If you need to change the denomination of the chips you already have, put them near the dealer and ask for a color change. You should never hand money or chips directly to a dealer, and he will never hand chips directly to you. By first placing the money or chips on the table, the surveillance camera can properly monitor the transaction. Be careful, however, not to toss your chips onto the table, getting them mixed-in with the chips already there.
The craps table has grooves on the top rail where you can store your chips. It is your responsibility to protect your own chips. Just as there are occasional pickpockets, there are people around who watch for inattentive players and will swipe unmonitored chips. Be sure to guard your chips just as if they were real money, which they are. When you are finished playing, you can convert your chips back to currency at the cashier’s cage.
diana000
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- Name: Diana
- Member Since: 10/12/2007
