Blackjack Blogger - Page 8 of 10

A Primer On Live Dealer Casinos

These days, the best online casinos are always mentioning their Live Dealer games. It’s touted as the biggest revolution in online casino gaming since…well, casinos went online in the late 90s. You can call it a revolution because the technology involved is nothing short of spectacular. But more than revolutionizing the field, what the Live Dealer games actually do, is create a welcome regression into the real of the real and tangible. They, in essence, re-humanize the online casino.

Live Dealer casinos are a commingling of the real with the digital. They take the excitement of brick and mortar casinos, and deliver it over the internet to players all over the world who might not be in the market for a trip to Las Vegas. They go a step further by creating a perfect environment. This is the perfect casino where the dealers are beautiful, and the floor is not littered with drunk or belligerent players. This experience can be brought anywhere, in fact, since players can log in not only from Macs and PCs, but from their smartphones as well. The ability to play on a mobile device or tablet, with the touch interface, goes a long way toward reintroducing the missing human element in the games.

Your day just got that much better since you can now enjoy mobile casino games. Grab your iPhone, your iPad or your Android (among others) and have a great time playing the games you love to enjoy. Each game offers something unique and fun for your enjoyment.

So how do the Live Dealer Casinos operate? As I’ve mentioned, this is not some extremely advanced computer graphics interface. These are actual real casinos set up in a controlled environment such as a studio, with multiple video cameras installed around the room. There is at least one camera per table, which provides players with a live feed showing the dealers or croupiers in the thick of the action. The interface allows interaction between players and dealers. Thus players can place bets in real time, talk to the dealer and ask questions.

What goes on behind the scenes is actually quite ingenuous and interesting. In order to play at a Live Casino, you have to go through a licensee. This means signing up at one of the online casinos that offer Live Dealer games. Generally speaking, casinos that offer Live Dealer games are usually the largest and most well respected. Casinos such as PaddyPower, for instance, are the calibers we’re talking about. The online casino, in turn, must invest in an infrastructure to support Live Dealer games.

The infrastructure comes in the form of third party software that the online casino must license. These software companies offer the interface and code that allow Live Dealer games to function without a hitch. There are several of these third party software companies, and they each have their own platform. The biggest names in this field are Evolution gaming and Entwine Tech. Some of these platforms are actually developed by companies such as Microgaming and Playtech, who cut their teeth by developing some of the best traditional online casino platforms in the industry.

The companies developing these platforms understand that there is an optimal way of doing things. This is why the top online casino platforms might look different, but function in very similar ways. This holds true in Live Dealer games as well. Although some of the surface details that allow the placement of bets might have their own feel, the Live Dealer casinos look very similar to one another. Continue reading “A Primer On Live Dealer Casinos” →

Perfect Blackjack

Keen on acquiring the technicalities of a professional blackjack player? In order to master the Perfect Blackjack strategy, you have to have at least one prerequisite – you must know the blackjack basics well enough. With the basic Perfect Blackjack strategy, you are able to meet the wager requirements with your net profit. The basic strategy is for your use in every online casino. Interested in a better score? Get started with the system of perfect adjusted blackjack. Blackjack has been mathematically projected so as to give the casinos an upper hand. However, if you abide by the multiple deck chart and play perfect blackjack, the casinos advantage is reduced to less than 0.5%.

One of the most common strategies of playing Perfect Blackjack is by making an exhaustive analysis of the chart that is marked as follows:

H: Hit
S: Stand
P: Split
D: Double Down if allowed, otherwise Hit
H/R: Surrender if allowed, otherwise Hit
H/P: Split if allowed to Double after a Split, otherwise Hit

Reading the chart

The Perfect Blackjack chart is categorized into 2 basic segments: the Dealer’s Cards and the cards you have at hand. Always remember to abide by the chart. You must digress under no circumstances in pursuit of a gut feeling, or premonition of bad luck after a suggested action. Remember, it is not luck, but mathematics that is being used as a strategy to beat the casino.

In order to get your hand value, all you must do is simply add the values of all your cards. The Jack, King and Queen are all equal to 10 points. Follow the special rows that have been indicated for Aces and pairs. After you have hit, split, or double, you can still conform to the same chart with your new hand. In case you have above 2 cards in one hand, snub any pair and add the cards’ values together. If you have over 2 cards, with one of them being an Ace, add together all the other cards and follow the row indicated for the special case.

Explanation for Perfect Blackjack Strategy

Place your bet and begin the game
Calculate your hand (usually done by the computer), look at the dealer’s face card and line up the 2 columns to see your best play. Don’t worry if you lose a longer series of games. Keep following the strategy card and you’ll win soon.

Tips

1. Always go for small unit bets (2 dollars)
2. Get used to the never ending series of losses. At the end, the total number of wins is bigger than number of losses
3. Each online casino has different WR (wager requirements). After that, go and withdraw your money.

Blackjack Strategy: Ladder Play

Today, I am going to talk to you about an idea for a blackjack strategy. It´s called a ladder. You can call it an up and down progression chain if you wish. This blackjack strategy is easy to implement and you might find it gives you the opportunity to win more money. I am going to give you the basic concept and show you what happened over a quick 20-hand test. As with any blackjack strategy that revolves solely around money management, the player factors in heavily. For example, a blackjack player that makes poor decisions will destroy any chance a money management strategy has of working.

Blackjack Strategy

This blackjack strategy is a snap to operate. It´ basically a ladder with 10 rungs and you start in the middle of the ladder. As you win, you climb up and as you lose you step down. If you are playing blackjack with $1 wagers, this blackjack strategy won´t work, because you can´t go down. You need to be playing at a level that can be stepped down 4 times. For example, if you were playing at a $1 blackjack table and started at $5, you could go 5-4-3-2-1. Here´s an example ladder for a $25 starting wager.

1: $5
2: $10
3: $15
4: $20
5: $25 (You start here)
6: $30
7: $35
8: $40
9: $45
10: $50

Blackjack Strategy in Use

Every time you win a hand of blackjack, your next bet is one level higher. When you lose a hand of blackjack, your next bet is one step lower. In the following real-world example, I present to you 20 blackjack hands that consisted of 11 wins (including one blackjack), 2 pushes and 7 losses. If I were playing a straight $25 wager per hand, the end result would have been a profit of $112.50. Let´s see what happened. Continue reading “Blackjack Strategy: Ladder Play” →

Blackjack Double Down Theory

There’s a common misconception, in my option, with doubling down in Blackjack. Many people feel that you should double down on 11 every single time. Is this really correct? How can any rule be applied 100% of the time? I don’t believe this rule for a minute. As a former Vegas dealer and gambler, I have seen countless people follow this rule into oblivion.

If I am playing Blackjack and the deck (or shoe) is pretty new, I will double down as long as the dealer is not showing an Ace or Ten. The deeper into the deck or shoe, I will stop doubling down on 11 when the dealer is showing a 9 or higher or an Ace. But here’s why rules are not meant to be followed blindly. Let’s say you are playing single deck Blackjack, the deck is down to the last hand or two and you’ve just been dealt 11. The dealer is showing a 7. You remember seeing a good deal of high cards already. Should you double down?

The answer, in this example, is no. Small cards favor the dealer. Also, if the rest of the deck is comprised mostly of small cards, you will be doubling your wager for a possible 12-16. That’s not good when the dealer will most likely end up with a 17 or greater. Think about this. In a brand-new deck, you have a 50% probability to finish with 18 or better when you double down on 11. If the dealer is showing a 9, 10 or face, you will may need 19 or better just to tie. That drops you under a 50% probability.

The point is that you should try to keep a general idea about the remaining cards in your head. You don’t need to be a card counting wizard. Just think about what you have seen and figure out if the remaining cards are more of the higher or smaller variety. Once you do that, then decide on doubling down. It should never be automatic—especially when the dealer is showing a high card.

Online Blackjack: Fun and Profitable

Are you planning a trip to the casino? Maybe your buddies are putting together plans for a trip to Vegas, or maybe you’ve simply got a night planned at your local. Either way, you’re going to need to know how to play before you head over there.

Blackjack is one of the most popular casino games out there, and has been for a number of years. A lot of its appeal comes from the fact that, unlike other casino games such as Roulette, it isn’t purely down to luck. With a bit of knowledge and a little practice, players can absolutely head to the tables and hold their own.

A good starting point for a new player are online casinos, such as coral.co.uk/casino. Coral as referenced also offer free play so you can practice risk free.These not only allow you to get used to the games, but also do so without the distractions that can come along with playing live in real casinos. Listen, we’ve all been distracted by a conversation, a commotion or whatever it may be, but you want to be able to limit that when it’s your money on the line, which is where online casinos can be invaluable.

Learning the Basics

A great way to get started in Blackjack is to have a read of this guide. The truth of the matter is, Blackjack is an incredibly simple game to learn, and an extremely fun game to play. Being dealt eleven, doubling down and receiving tens is one of the most exhilarating moments possible in gambling, with the added satisfaction that you made the decision by yourself.

After this, having learned basic strategy, it is possible to play online Blackjack, and do well. With live dealers, the interaction can take the enjoyment to a whole new level. The heart-in-mouth moment when you’ve been dealt a ten and your next card is about to be turned over? Recreated, live, from the comfort of your house without having to go near a loud, distracting crowd.

To add to the excitement, this fun can also turn out to be extremely profitable. As mentioned, basic strategy is a great starting point for new Blackjack players, and once you are used to the game, and feel comfortable knowing what you should do in each situation, you can really start to add more to your all-round play. So go on, before you head out to the casino, get online and get started. You never know how it could end.

Make Home Time More Profitable Than Ever – With THIS Casino

Listen, staying at home could be a better option than trying to go into town looking for something to do. Sure, if you’re one of the lucky suckers that get to head outside your door and the city is right there waiting for you, then you really have nothing to worry about. On the other hand, if you’re further out from the city you’re going to be in for quite an adventure. Let’s start with the fact that if you want to really go out and do something, you’re going to have to pay for a good amount of fuel to get there and back. What happens if you get lost, as it often happens? Then you’re stuck trying to get to your destination, which wastes time and money.

But staying home doesn’t always seem like the best idea around either. After all, you start feeling cooped up and lost without anything to do. But is that really the case? For many people, they would say yes. There’s nothing to do, they tell each other. They might as well go back to bed, they’re so bored.

Yet the veterans of the gambling world online know better. They know that instead of going out, staying in to collect money is the best news ever. Now, nothing’s guaranteed. We’re not saying that if you stay inside, you’re going to make so much money that you could buy your very own city block. However, what we are saying is that you can raise your odds of winning something. Gambling actually gives you the avenue to win money back. What other form of entertainment actually gives you the chance to win back the amount that you spend as well as more money on top of it? If you won a big jackpot playing a table game, you get to keep that money. It’s not like the online casino is going to ask you to tell them what you plan to spend the money on.

Excited yet? There’s a lot of opportunity out there, but you’re going to need two things: the right casino to check out, and a bonus code to put a little spending cash in your pocket. Think about it this way: why shouldn’t you get a little side money just for taking a chance? The casinos know that you deserve to be rewarded for checking them out. If you want our advice, we definitely recommend checking out Bovada Casino. This is a place where there’s always a game in progress, which means there’s plenty of chances to get in on all of the fun!

But you want to make sure that you get a good Bovada bonus code before you actually hit the casino and deposit money. Yes, it’s true that you will have to deposit money before you can take advantage of the bonus money, but think of it this way: it extends the money that you put in. Isn’t that worth it, when you really think about it?

Be sure that you’re looking through all of your options before you get too into the game, and you won’t look back! Good luck!

Mad About Bingo now has free to play 888 casino games

Have you been told you’re totally Mad About Bingo? Then get over to the Madaboutbingo.com, where you can see reviews of all the newest sites on different networks.

They provide top, impartial reviews of all the bingo sites out there so you can stop wasting your time and money signing up to poor sites and just go straight for the best ones. When you do decide to take their advice, they’ll help you along with some exclusive bingo bonuses and promo codes for the site you pick.

With so many new bingo sites popping up all over the place, it’s overwhelming to compare all the different joining bonuses on offer. The experts over at Mad About Bingo know exactly how much these bonuses are worth, and which ones are the best to take advantage of. They can tell you if it’s better to take a high first deposit bonus or a no deposit bonus from a site and help you avoid sites that won’t offer you as much. Bingo sites are masters of making a small promotion seem more profitable so this site can help you read the small print and see if it’s really worth all the fuss. Continue reading “Mad About Bingo now has free to play 888 casino games” →

Play Blackjack

If I were to ask you which casino game is the most popular in the world, what would you say? Most likely, the first game to pop into your mind would be Blackjack. You would be wrong, of course, Slots are the most played of all the casino games, but they’re just…Slots. Blackjack is familiar, it is exciting, it is a game you already know how to play. Blackjack is fun. And yes, Blackjack is one of the most popular games on earth. People play it even outside casinos, just for fun.

Blackjack has been around since at least the 1500s. The first reference to the game was in Miguel de Cervantes’ book, Novelas Ejemplares, written in 1601. Some of the characters play a game called 21, and the rules are basically the same as Blackjack. If it was written about in the year 1601, it is safe to deduce that the game was known for a long time before it was ever immortalized on paper by the author of Don Quixote.

The way the game is played is quite easy to grasp by merely observing a game in progress for a few minutes. Players sit around a semi-circular table with up to nine seats. The game starts when the dealer deals out two cards, face down, to each player. The dealer will then deal himself two cards. One of which will be face down and the other face up. The face down card is called the “hole”, which is where expressions such as “ace in the hole” come from. Once the cards have been dealt and everyone has looked at what was dealt to them, the game proper starts. The point of the game is to get the highest total point value without going over 21.

The cards hold their natural value from 2 to 10. Aces are either a 1 or an 11 and face cards are worth 10. Once the total for the two dealt cards is counted by the player, the options are to: hit; stay; double down; split; or surrender. Hit means the player requests an additional card to be dealt. Stay is to tell the dealer not to deal any more cards. Double Down is a special bet allowed before hitting. Players can double their bets with the proviso that they take the next dealt card and stay. Split is when the player is dealt two of the same card. Before hitting, players can split the two cards into two separate hands, which each gets dealt a new initial card. Surrender is when the dealt cards are deemed to be not worth playing and the player takes a loss on half the initial bet.

Simplicity is the key to Blackjack’s enduring popularity. It is simple. And easy to learn game with only a few basic rules to follow—get close to 21. Even a child could learn to play Blackjack at the most basic level. It would seem that all you do is hit or don’t hit and you hope not to bust. It would appear that it’s all based on luck. It would appear so, but appearances can be deceiving. Blackjack is, in reality, a very complex game with a very steep learning curve in order to play it the right way.

Once you learn to play Blackjack properly, you will see the game in a whole new light. It is not just another casino game that lives and dies by the follies of luck. It is actually a game in which you, the player, can have a strong hand in controlling the way the game will go. There is only one other game at the casino that allows that kind of control over your fate—Poker. Have you ever played Poker at the casino? Have you ever sat there, looking around, trying to figure out who the fish is? The reason you can never figure out the fish at the table is because YOU are the fish. Poker is a dangerous no man’s land full of sharks that will take you for all you’re worth. Unless you’re a seasoned and grizzled Poker player with the wounds and the scars to show for it, you will not win at casino Poker. You might think the same thing about Blackjack but once again, you would be wrong. You can learn to play Blackjack well with a relatively short time expenditure on your part. It’s just not that easy is all. Continue reading “Play Blackjack” →

The added value that affiliates can bring to online advertising

Affiliate advertising and marketing on the web is nothing new, of course. In fact, it’s continuing to grow like Topsy as social media continue to gain ever-increasing importance, and this is, perhaps, truer in the online gambling and gaming sphere than anywhere else.

But whilst the landscape has changed a great deal, particularly over the last three years, human nature, of course, has not; as the old saying goes – the more things change, the more they stay the same.

What is seldom recognised, however, by the big brands is the fact that affiliates can really bring creativity and an added dimension to all forms of online advertising. They are able to do so as this is their specialist niche and the information can be presented as completely “objective” (i.e. whether it actually is or not, in practice).

And as the gaming industry matures, this creativity becomes increasingly important. Many affiliates have a very high degree of brand loyalty as users join discussion groups and the like and come back time and again sharing views with fellow users. Others are seen as an absolute pre-requisite by gamblers who take their activity very seriously – such as Oddschecker for gamblers seeking value.

Those who are less serious about their gambling tend to look for more entertainment. So casino and slots devotees looking to play slots now or roulette etc., for small stakes are far more likely to be swayed by creativity through affiliates’ efforts – as well as the more obvious signposting to generous introductory offer etc.

Affiliates offer an alternative which is almost virtually cost-free and risk-free to ‘merchants’ (i.e. the frontline sellers of goods and services such as casinos, bookmakers etc. in the online gaming industry). This is the central tenet of successful marketing for al affiliates across industry types.

Effective affiliates link their online advertising in an unobtrusive seamless way to relevant news stories which prompts genuine interest in the subject matter from gamblers. This factor tends to rely on the creativity and editorial skills of the affiliate organisations in guiding users to merchants – and is very much a balancing act when done well.

When affiliates work well with merchants, then each complements the other’s efforts in a combined desire to recruit customers. In other words, affiliates’ and merchants’ commercial objectives are complementary.

Given the competitiveness of the market place, there should be no sense in which the affiliates perceive that merchants think of them as parasitical – adding in another layer of commission and so taking money out of the industry. They should be seen, instead, as an add-on; a way of attracting more customers to merchants depending on the quality of content of the affiliates’ sites and, of course, the effectiveness of their marketing techniques (the latter being almost exclusively online). And in this way, the real added value that affiliates can bring to online advertising comes through engaging content.

Legends of blackjack

Today, most people play casino games online rather than in a land-based casino. This should come as no surprise as playing at home whenever the mood takes you is so convenient in comparison with having to get to a casino.

You can find all the games that a land-based casino has to offer online. Almost all big names, including 32Red, Sky and BGO, are offering a wide array of game choices and promotions. Click here to visit the bgo casino site and you’ll see there’s a fantastic choice of blackjack games on offer there, as well as other casino classics like poker and roulette and hundreds of slots games to choose from.

Though they wouldn’t be able to use their shady practice of card-counting skills online, there is a legendary group of blackjack players that did manage to use card-counting to the best of their ability in the 80s and in so doing, got away with some huge wins at blackjack tables across the US. The MIT Blackjack Team was made up of talented Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who practiced for hours on end, perfecting the art of card-counting and working as a team before going out to play for real in different casinos.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/people/59937401@N07/

It wasn’t the MIT Blackjack Team that came up with the theory of card-counting though. It was actually a professor at MIT called Edward Thorp, who worked out the probabilities of blackjack using an IBM 704 computer. When he was confident his theory would stand up to real-life situations, he went on the road to different casinos with a friend called Manny Kimmel and together they earned $11,000 during the first weekend of using his system. Thorp could have kept the theory to himself, but instead wrote a book called Beat the Dealer (1996), which made him plenty of money as it got onto the New York Times best seller list.

The MIT Blackjack Team exploited card-counting to the max, winning an amazing $400,000 in the first weekend of play. The members of the team changed over the years, with new members being recruited from other renowned educational institutions such as Harvard, but gradually it became impossible for them to play in US casinos as staff were trained to spot card-counters and they began to be recognised. The team continued to play over the years, but tended to play in other countries instead.

The team’s exploits were written about by Ben Mezrich in a supposedly factual book called Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. Though the characters in the book were composite ones, some of the real MIT Blackjack Team members have refuted some of the events described by Mezrich. The book formed the basis for the 2008 Kevin Spacey film called 21 – about a professor who recruits a number of students to execute a casino heist using card-counting.

Back in the real world, both the MIT Blackjack Team and Edward Thorp have been inducted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame and will go down in history as legends of blackjack.