Category: Gambling and Casinos

Would you like to play a game? Sorry, I couldn’t resist. If you’re a slot lover, then the I.R.I.S. 3000 is something to check out. It stands for Interactive Real Intelligence Slot. The I.R.I.S. 3000 is a 5-reel progressive slot machine. The amount of the progressive depends on the casino of course, but I’ve seen it start at $100,000 and go up from there.

I.R.I.S. 3000 is a 50-cent progressive slot machine, so it might be out of the budget of some. To start playing, you must choose five doors to open-two will be closed. It’s not that complicated. Right under each door is a button that opens and closes it.

Here’s an interesting item. If you don’t trust your own luck, you can let the machine randomly choose for you. As with all slot machines, it’s important to play max coins. If you play just two coins, only one laser beam is activated. When you play three coins, both laser beams are activated.

Once the play button is pressed, the laser beam(s) scan back and forth and randomly stops on one of the 7 doors. When the laser stops on a closed door, that door will open and the Reel activates. The open doors are the possible hits on the pay line.

You can play Bet Max to increase your payout chances. When all 7 of the doors are open, a multiplier wheel spins around. You’ll have a chance to win up to 10x with it.

To win the progressive jackpot, you need to get all 7 doors open, hit 10x on the multiplier wheel and get 5 Radiation Hazards. But remember, you must bet three credits, which is the max, to be eligible for the jackpot.

The payout for I.R.I.S. 3000 is listed on the slot machine itself. On the top are the Radiation Hazards, which are the yellow radiation symbols. Don’t confuse these with the green radiation symbols, which-aside from color-only look slightly different. The green ones are the second best pay on I.R.I.S. 3000. If you get five green radiation symbols and have max coins bet, you’ll win 750 coins, which is $375. One coin only pays 225 coins, which is $112.50.

If you are looking for a fun progressive slot machine to play, I’d check out I.R.I.S. 3000. You can find it online and the progressive is definitely nice. Except to see the I.R.I.S. 3000 progressive jackpot around $100,000 to $250,000 at good casinos. Some online casinos start the progressive much smaller-somewhere around $30,000 to $50,000.

Professional traders of stocks or commodities bear striking resemblances to poker players. Now I know that some of you are already getting angry with this comparison, but please hear me out. As many people today, I have recently found myself quite interested in the WPC (World Poker Championship). I hear people talking about it all the time it seems that we can’t get enough of it. This interest caused me to do some reading on poker strategies. I was struck by the similarities to the many books I have read about trading strategies. If you boil both games down to their essence, both rely on money management, and controlling emotion. After years of trading I can tell you that money management can be taught to anyone with simple mathematics. Controlling emotion on the other hand cannot. In trading as well as poker a person can calculate the odds of the next move to decide whether it makes sense. This is exactly what good players and traders do. Then you have to be able to control your emotions to follow through with your play. Ahh… this is where the good and the great players and traders part company.

In trading I hear the same excuse alot. If I had $100,000 account I would be able to trade

better. Believe me, nothing could be further from the truth. The difficulty of controlling your emotions grows right along with the size of your account. When I was new to trading I thought this same way. I had to change this type of thinking myself to grow as a trader. I think that poker provides an excellent opportunity to explain why this logic is not correct. I made a list of the names of the 15 best players on the WPC tour. I watched the tour on T.V. for several weeks. I noticed that the same 15 people always seem to rotate at the final table of 8 players. Sure there would be the occasional lucky unknown player that would be there at the last table, but names from my list always popped up. In these tournaments you don’t bring your own money, everyone just pays an entry fee. All of the players have an equal stake in the game.

With the popularity of this game today many tournaments start out with several hundred if not thousands of players With all things being equal how do we explain the same handful of players consistently ending up on top. Emotions. Mainly fear and greed. The fear of being knocked out of the game drive them to bad decisions. Later for all those who are still in the game, greed takes over and the thought of winning a bunch of money causes bad decisions. Poker is a game based on mathematical odds of the various hands dealt. Based on that the player with the best math skills would win, but that is often not the case. I’m sure that all the top players are good at math, but there are probably many new players at every tournament that have better math skills. Especially now that poker is the new hot thing to do for a living. No, you can plan things out with perfect math skills but without the emotional control to follow through with your plan it will not succeed.

This is equally true in trading.

When you are entering the world of poker you must be aware of the fact that in order to achieve the best performance you must become skilled not only at playing poker as a game but also at playing poker players as persons. This basically translates through a play that is generally perfect when it comes to techniques and that will also be adjustable to the other’s style and skill. You play must rely on the weaknesses of you opponents and take shelter from their strong points. To do this you have to constantly observe them and pick the most appropriate strategy in each specific case.

You have to consider things like advertising you game. This will give you a variety in your game when mixed with raises with low hand and calls with high hands and will not allow others to play you. As always defense is the best offence so take advantage of it. This strategy includes playing more hands with weak players and loose players and also players known to play badly after the first turn. Also play fewer hands when dealing with experts. Bluff good players and aggressive ones but never bluff a weak inexperienced player because he will ruin your game.

You must make good use of your position in the game. It is an important factor and it is proven that you must sit left to loose players and weak or maniac ones because you can easily control them. When playing against tight players do the opposite thing: keep them to your right if possible. This way you and your maniac player are isolated when you will raise and you can better play him.

When dealing with aggressive players the trick is playing them back using their own weapon: aggression. You will spend more money on hands having to raise and re-raise hands you wouldn’t normally do, but you will make them a bit more passive this way. When you have a good hand you must let them do their bets and raises and then you start yours, trapping them into many other bets as well. When you are dealing with passive players, they are safer to play. They will fold and check when they have almost nothing and they will bet only when they have a good hand, so if they bet you can fold cards, cards that you would’ve kept if you were dealing with an aggressive player.

Participate in more hands next to the loose players and play tight against the tight persons. You should not bluff a loose player ever, maybe just when you have an excellent opportunity on your hands. On the other hand, tight players are to be bluffed as often as possible, a lot more than any other type of players.

I can tell you how to win at roulette, but do you have the patience? You’ll have to sit patiently for thousands of spins before you start to make money. You see, it’s all about “charting” the roulette wheel.

How To Win At Roulette? Biased Wheels

Years ago, when I ran a roulette table, one of my favorite players and I would talk philosophy all night while he patiently made his simple bets. I knew he was winning, but not how much. After I quit the job, I met him for coffee and discovered that he had made over $90,000 in sixteen months of part-time play. That made it more interesting.

On a roulette wheel there are 38 “pockets” (American wheel – 1 through 36, plus 0 and 00). When the ball falls in a particular pocket, players are paid according to the number of that pocket. We’ll ignore all the various bets and concentrate just on the “straight up” bets, which are bets on one number. You get paid 35 to 1 if your number comes up.

You get $35 for each dollar bet, plus you keep the bet. You can see that the house has an edge (5.6 percent, to be precise), but what if certain numbers came up more often than they should – more often than 1-in-38 spins?

Suppose, for example, number 5 is coming up an average of once every 29 spins. If you bet ten dollars on it every time, you would lose 28 times, or $280, every 29 spins, but win once which would pay you $350. In other words, in the long run, you would be making $70 for each 29 spins. ($350 minus $280) When there weren’t many customers, I sometimes did 60 or more spins per hour, so you can see that this could be very lucrative.

Why would that number or any other come up more often? The short answer: Who Cares! The longer explanation has to do with the nature of the wheels. The pockets could be manufactured imperfectly, with one or more slightly larger than the others, therefore catching the ball more often. One or more of the dividers between the pockets could be loose, absorbing the force of the ball instead of bouncing it away, so the ball might drop into that pocket more often.

There are other reasons, including more temporary ones, like a drop of sticky pop in one of the pockets, or a build-up of dust. The important point isn’t what causes a “biased” wheel, though. The important point is that biased wheels exist, and can be taken advantage of.

Why would a casino let this happen? Roulette wheels are expensive, and so they are not often replaced, unlike cards and dice, which casinos replace daily. This means that if there is a bias, it sometimes remains for months. I know for a fact that managers where I worked were aware of the problem, but as long as the table made money overall, they were too lazy to worry about one guy making money on it.

Charting a Roulette Wheel

John (not his real name) came in initially with two friends. They took turns “charting” the wheel, which is nothing more than writing down the number that comes up on every spin. They did this for weeks on both roulette wheels in the casino. It is an incredibly boring, but crucial part of the process, often amounting to nothing, since there may not be a bias.

As it turned out, the number “0” was coming in 1-in-28 spins. Only John had the patience, though, to continue sitting there night after night, placing one bet on one number, over and over. Within a couple weeks, his friends quit. They didn’t have the patience required, and probably also didn’t like the fact that even with the odds in their favor, they had nights when they lost as much as $700.

Night after night John sat there discussing politics and philosophy with me, placing one bet on 0 for each spin of the wheel. He was making $50 to $100 per hour depending on the number of spins per hour, and assuming the bias was consistent in the long run. After more than a year, and $90,000 in profits for John, the casino got a new wheel, and (I assume) John moved on to new wheels. That’s how to win at roulette.