roulette articles

People are often seduced by the idea of something for nothing (or very little). That is why they often drop a coin or two into a slot machine as they walk into a real world casino.These myths and legends are often based on the fact that indeed there are many cases of astronomical jackpots.

One of the major companies in the online casino industry is Playtech. WinAJackpot has produced the first 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, this is the second payout exceeding $2m. The total amount paid out on this system since its launch now stands at more than $33m.

So, our congratulations go to Rens.S. who, on the 1st February, was just $23,750 shy of $2.5m for a 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.

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.Klaus was the thirteenth player to become a 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 “pulls”. There were an uncountable number of players who did not win.

Well, meet Klaus E. from Finland. This April, he also 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.

If you start looking at the facts, online casino business is growing extremely fast, almost a million players a day join the internet community of the online gambling. You see that when your luck is in, you can suddenly find yourself rich for a small stake. 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 never hurts to drop a coin or two into one of the casino games in the USA. You never know, today might be your lucky day when fantasy does become reality and changes your life.

History tells us that 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. 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 believe Epstein’s information is taken from Scarne, and Scarne states that he discovered the origins of blackjack in America as a result of his private discussions with old-time gamblers, not from any published texts that can be looked up today.

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 (Coward-McCann, 1944, NY), which was published prior to any of Scarne’s books: “A lot of good players 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. This adds interest to the game and tempts a player to increase his stakes.”

That curious bonus payout that gave blackjack its name, however, has long since disappeared. There may be some casino somewhere that pays a small bonus if a player is dealt a natural 21 which includes a jack of spades or clubs, but that is no longer a normal rule of the game. Nowadays, blackjack is simply any two cards including an ace and any ten-valued card.

That’s when Ed Thorp dropped another bombshell. Under the auspices of their Vintage Paperback division, Random House published a revised and expanded edition of Beat the Dealer. And the most important addition was Hi-Lo counting system, which Thorp called the Complete Point Count, with a computer-optimized strategy devised by Julian Braun. To the casinos’ frustration, this was a system that could be applied to many multiple-deck games.

Thorp was keeping the casinos on the run.

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.

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.