6:5 – the Casinos Golden Ratio And Players Demise

Posted by: Monty Karlyle  /  Category: Blackjack

There is a disturbing trend in blackjack these days. Many casinos are paying 6:5 on “natural” blackjack. This is an terrible from the perspective of any regular blackjack player, and it should be something to be mindful of getting into serious blackjack gaming.

Blackjack dealers have paid 3:2 for a natural blackjack hand for decades (that is an Ace combine with any 10 value card). The 3:2 ratio is important, and it is used to motivate players to join the game, and to keep them at the tables waiting for the next big payout. Not only is it exciting to receive a blackjack, it is quite rewarding.

Lets understand the financial power of the different ratios. When you are dealt blackjack, and the dealer doesn’t get a blackjack (dealer loses, not push), then at a 3:2 paying table, you win 150% of your bet. Compare that to a 6/5 table where you are paid only 120% of your bet. Thats a 30% difference, and it can add up quickly depending on the size of your bet.

The casinos are increasingly threatened by players who are mastering the game. This is great! Nonetheless, they are resorting to changing the game in ways that reduce your player advantage. This is NOT GOOD AT ALL.

One of the ways the casino increases the house advantage is to reduce the payout on natural blackjack. Consider the effects on your wallet:

Get blackjack at a 3/2 table with a five dollar bet and you’ll win $7.50.

With a five dollar bet at a 6:5 table, you will receive $6 on blackjack. You should have been paid $7.50 according to historical rules, and this is a loss to you.

If you have a hundred dollar bet at a table paying 3:3, you’re payout will be $150.

A $100 bet on a 6:5 table pays $120 for a blackjack (a $30 disadvantage – starting to be somewhat significant).

A $500 bet on a 3:2 table pays $750 for a blackjack.

Imagine this. You will only win $600 on a $500 bet when you get blackjack at a 6:5 paying table. This is a tragedy and a $150 loss to you!

Extrapolate this to higher limit tables, and you can see why this is a problem.

When you don’t receive a full payout for a natural blackjack, which is should be your default right at the casino, then you’re essentially starting from a disadvantage. The amount by which your payout is minimized could amount to multiple hands at the table minimum and that should carry you through a losing streak. Alternatively, it could make a big portion of your profit for the session. The casinos are shorting players when they pay 6:5.

Quite often you’ll find 6:5 at 1 and 2 deck card games, however in many local casinos they pay out 6:5 on low limit tables as well. They may even pull this stunt at tables using 6 or 8 deck shuffle machines. That is highway robbery.

It is your responsibility to know the conditions of the table before you play. Read the writing on the felt, and make sure it doesn’t ready “Dealer Pays 6:5 on blackjack” or you’re playing right into your own disadvantage. There is an undercurrent afoot amongst regular blackjack players to protest these casinos by not playing there. Only if they feel the sting in their pocketbooks at the end of the day will they resort to paying generous (appropriate) payouts on natural blackjack.

Learn more about winning at blackjack. Stop by Monty Karlyle’s site where you can find out all about blackjack strategies and counting cards and what it can do for you.

You To Can Win The Lotto

Posted by: Richard Goback  /  Category: Gambling

As well as being a means of winning money through gambling for an individual, a lottery may also be an easy way to help towards funding numerous and diverse altruistic projects,which might otherwise be under funded or even abandoned, thereby helping society as a whole and helping to underpin its infrastructure.

The origin of today’s lotteries are very ancient, dating back to 100BC, during China’s Hun Dynasty, when the game of Keno was played, with monies going towards the defense of the State, helping with immensely costly projects such as the erecting of The Great Wall of China. The first lottery held in Europe was at the instigation of the Romans. What had begun as a private amusement for parties and gatherings amongst the nobility, was expanded and bettered during the reign of the Emperor Augustus Caesar, who cleverly used it almost as a stealth tax for the raising of large amounts of money to repair the infrastructure of the city.

During the medieval period was the first public lottery held in modern times recorded as taking place in the town of Sluis,in the Netherlands, in 1434. The first time that money rather than prizes was regularly given away was in about 1444, in Flanders – an area now covered by France, Holland and Belgium. These lotteries are reputed to have been held for the benefit of both the poor and the towns fortifications. These lotteries were regarded, especially by the Dutch, as a form of taxation, albeit in a somewhat disguised form.It is recorded that in 1465, in Belgium, lotteries were held to raise money for the construction of almshouses, port facilities and canals.

In the West, there was great appetite for a lottery. Late in the 16th century, Elizabeth initiated the original English state lottery. That this was a great popular success can be seen in the fact that four thousand tickets were sold for the original lottery, with the prizes given away tapestries, plate and cash. After this, the government thought it expedient to sell the rights to brokers, who would then hire agents all over the country to sell on the tickets o the great unwashed. The lottery continued until 1826, when Parliament decided to discontinue it.

Different forms of the lottery were invented and took hold, with lotteries played almost universally worldwide in some fashion or other. Soon, however, the initial noble intentions of the first lotteries were submerged in a sea of greed and corruption. Many private lotteries did not give the prizes as advertised, but maintained the right to substitute inferior prizes; inn the worst cases, no prizes were ever handed over to the unfortunate winners. The United States and Canada eventually banned all lotteries, and prohibiting all such. In time, however, new laws and regulations were decreed to ensure the fair running of the new generation of lotteries and games of chance.

Often, though not exclusively, today’s lotteries feel it expedient for good publicity to allot some portion of the monies raised to altruistic causes, or for the upkeep of public facilities. The modern age has made the playing of games of chance easier and more convenient than ever before, with online sites for gambling available day and night at the press of a button.

Your source for the lottery results: National Lottery Results Checker.

What Are The Best Online Casino Bonuses

Posted by: Simon M Skinner  /  Category: Gambling

The best online casino bonus you will get will be your first deposit bonus. Be wise and shop around. A standard practice in online casino promotion is the use of bonus credit to a players account. This started as a way of encouraging new players to get started. But as the online gaming community had matured, the sign-up bonus strategy has become just the first step in a long line of bonuses intended to keep players coming back, month after month.

A subject that is under-discussed among online players is the importance of paying attention to currency rates while bonus hunting. Online payment providers allow you to convert your funds into any currency at payment. If you do this, you can dramatically increase the limit on the size of the first deposit that is eligible for bonus.

Here is how it works. Let us say you are at an online casino with a hundred and fifty bucks burning a hole in your credit card. You are on an international site that accepts U. S. Players. The site offers a 400 per cent first deposit bonus. It limits the bonus to a top payment of 200 hundred euros or pounds or 100 US dollars. The euro is worth 1.40 dollars, making the top payment for euro denominated deposits worth 2.8 times higher than the top bonus paid out to US dollar denominated first deposits. And when you compare the difference between dollars and pounds, the difference is even more striking.

This is a perfect example of how watching the currency market allows bonus shoppers to dramatically increase the amount of house money they gamble with. Now let us move on to, lets check out some of the notable bonus schemes currently online. Keep in mind, the details given here can and do change frequently. These are promo tactics and they change according to the mood of the crowd.

Some casinos have a miserly 100 per cent signing bonus, but offer good VIP bonus programs. If a player makes the required monthly deposits through the course of a full year, a loyalty program will reward you with up to 5600 dollars in bonuses.

Offering a 200 percent bonus on your sign up deposit and 50 percent on your next deposit is a common initial deposit bonus scheme.

Interesting developments in bonuses are the sites that are introducing on-going loyalty programs with guaranteed monthly bonus amounts up to a maximum, in some cases of 4000 to 5000 dollars per year.

Looking now for an online casino no deposit required ? Check out our super online guide on internet casino gambling online now for the ultimate inside skinny!

Most Popular UK Lottery Tickets

Posted by: Selena Larkey  /  Category: Casino

Winning the lottery is everyone’s dream. Who could say no to the chance to win thousands if not millions? Odds of winning the lottery may be slim but someone does win each game. If you buy UK lottery tickets, it could be you. Imagine your life free from worrying about money. It is a small investment on something that could change your life.

The UK lottery consists of several different games with various prize jackpots. The most popular of all being the Lotto. The Lotto offers millions of Euros for those who match all numbers. Players select six numbers between 1 and 49 on Saturdays and Wednesdays. There is also a bonus number selected that can increase you winnings.

The Euromillions game is sweeping Europe. The lottery drawing is weekly-Friday nights in Paris. To play Euromillions, players must select five numbers and two additional lucky star numbers. These numbers are between 1 and 50. There can be one or thousands of winners for each jackpot depending on how many players match how many numbers.

Another vastly successful game of all UK lottery tickets is Thunderball. Thunderball is drawn on Saturdays each week. There is a fixed monetary value for each drawing with a maximum of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. In the near future, this maximum jackpot will rise to five hundred thousand pounds. Those who play select five numbers from 1 to 34 and also choose an additional number-the Thunderball, a number between 1 and 14. Unlike other lottery games, winners must not share one grand prize.

Lotto Hotpicks is part of the bi-weekly Lotto game. Players opt to select a desired number of matching numbers in order to win smaller cash prizes.

Daily Play is one of the hottest selling UK lottery tickets. This is a daily drawing that takes place Monday through Saturday and consists of players matching seven numbers between one and twenty seven. The top prize for this drawing is a maximum of thirty thousand pounds. Players may win lesser amounts if they match at least four of the seven selected numbers.

There are also numerous UK lottery tickets that are instant winners. These scratch off tickets range in price and maximum prize amount. A portion of the money that is used to purchase tickets goes toward various charitable organizations and causes.

Want to purchase uk lottery tickets via a trustworthy South African website? You can! More info in our comprehensive guide to The UK National Lottery Draw .

A Brief History Of Bingo

Posted by: Jon Jackson  /  Category: Bingo

In common with many popular games, the history of bingo isn’t very clearly set out, and has no definitive set of events that led to its current incarnation. One particular version of the game which is increasingly popular – online bingo – obviously only came about with the rise of the internet from around 1995 onwards.

The true origins of the game, though, are more difficult to discover, so here’s some info about what we can say for certain regarding the history of bingo as we know it today. Starting in the 1500s in Italy, there was a game called Lo Giuoco del Lotto d’Italia, which was a type of lottery.

This game developed through Europe, and evolved in France to make use of the type of playing cards we’re familiar with in modern bingo. It was the Germans who took this a stage further and even used the game for teaching purposes – presumably to teach people about counting and numbers.

In 1920s America, the game of “beano” was played at travelling fairs and carnivals. This was very similar to the European game of bingo, but derived its name from the fact that beans were used for calling the numbers. On winning, one player is thought to have given the game its current name by shouting out “bingo” instead of “beano”.

Travelling back in time to 16th century England, it seems there was a similar game to the one being played in Italy; and there were known to be many illegal lottery-style gambling games being enjoyed by large groups of people in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

At this time, non-state organised lottery games of this type were illegal as the state had its own lottery game in place as a means of raising funds. Obviously, this state lottery was used as the precedent when John Major brought in what we now know as the UK National Lottery in the 1990s.

The early 1900s game of housey housey is one that is an obvious ancestor to today’s bingo. An outside observer, however, may imagine that bingo appeared in Britain as late as the 1960s, which is the so-called “golden age” of bingo, prompted by several changes and amendments to the law which allowed the major bingo hall chains to flourish.

And now we have bingo in its ultimate form, the internet, which brings pleasure and the chance to win real money to millions throughout the country. The success of online bingo has taken many people by surprise, but with its combination of random chance and the ability to utilise lucky numbers, online bingo is here to stay.

Jon Jackson is a bingo specialist, with many years experience of owning and operating internet bingo sites in the UK.