Category: Gambling and Casinos

It’s completely obvious to you that one player has the nuts, for instance. And you watch, fascinated, as another player bets into the nut hand with NO outs. To compound the error, the player who is drawing dead now calls a raise on the river to lose even more money.

Before the winner is turned over, you mentally call the winning hand to yourself, and are not at all surprised when the two cards you expected to see are revealed.

Why are hands so easy to read when you’re NOT involved? Good question!

Why are they so hard to read when you have YOUR money in the pot? Another good question.

Poker is a game of mistakes. The player who makes the least misjudgments, misreads and downright DUMB plays is most likely to go home with the cash.

I’m going to give you an exercise that is quite advanced for a change. Every once in a while you should be given a chance to go to another level of play. If you are like most players (myself included), you won’t be able to complete this exercise for long. At best you’ll only be able to manage a few minutes of the exercise before failing.

Here is what I want you to do. One night next week, before you get out of the car in your cardroom parking lot and go in to play, I want you to stop for a few minutes and concentrate. I want you to visualize yourself as you sit behind the wheel. As you see yourself, pretend that you are a director in a movie where you are the star. The movie is about you. Now you are NOT the player, you are the director watching an actor playing you.

Are you still with me?

The person that is normally you, now is an actor playing you, ok?

For as long as you can maintain the exercise, watch yourself play poker from a camera angle just over your right shoulder. Within the picture frame, the camera can see all the players at the table and can zoom in on your hand when it is dealt to you.

Instead of you putting your money in the pot, you are watching an actor putting his chips in the pot. Now the camera follows everyone in turn around the table. From this detached point of view, suddenly everyone’s motives for acting are revealed. Including YOURS.

To your amazement, you will find yourself saying about the actor playing you. “Why did he do that? That was so STUPID! The guy in the three seat OBVIOUSLY has the best hand!”

Now as the director, you tell the actor that is playing you to throw the hand away. Of course, the actor does what he is told. The exercise is complete when the player in the three seat turns over EXACTLY the hand the detached, uninvolved you put him on.

You have now done what you couldn’t do before. You’ve played a hand as if you weren’t emotionally and financially involved. And you saved a lot of money.

Don’t expect to be able to maintain this exercise for long. It takes years of practice. But if you can do it even for a few hands a night, the difference in your play can be substantial. Poker will become a game of mistakes for the other players, not you.

If you would like more information regarding online poker rooms that Gambling Guru supports, you can read our Poker Reviews.

Each online casino rewards players differently and moreover, each online casino game does as well. You might have heard, for example, that craps has the best payouts of all while the payout percentages for video poker may be less than ideal (this is not a hard fast rule, merely an example). So what does this mean? What are payout percentages, how much do they matter to you, the player, when searching for a new online casino to enter or online casino game to play, and how can you use this knowledge to rake in as much money as possible? This article will answer all of these questions, and a few others.

The payout percentage of any online casino game is the portion of players’ wagers that is paid out in winnings. That’s right — if you thought that all of the money bet at the online casino is paid out to somebody (hopefully you as much as possible), you thought wrong. The “house”; (or the online casino itself) keeps a small percentage of every bet coming in as part of their “fee” for providing the online gambling venue in the first place.

Now, before you go pouting in a corner, vowing never to set cyber-foot near an online casino game again, let us assure you — not only is it the same way with land-based casinos, but the payout percentages at those brick-and-mortar casinos is lower (or worse for you, the player) than at the online casino.

The primary reason, of course, is the lower cost of operating an online casino as compared with a land-based one. The secondary reason is competition — there are so many online casinos, and more cropping up every day, that one of the only ways to compete in this cutthroat industry is to offer you, the player, better chances of walking away from your computer with money in your account than the competition can promise.

This is why most online casinos will hire a reputed third-party auditing company (like Price Waterhouse Coopers) to audit their games monthly and produce a payout report detailing the percentages of money coming into each online casino game at that casino (slots, craps, roulette, video poker, keno, etc.) that is paid out to players in the form of winnings and bonuses. So if you see something like this — Slots 98.7% – you know that the house keeps 1.3% of each penny bet at the slots. The closer the payout percentages of an online casino game to 100%, the better it is for you, the player. So if we saw — Craps 99.8% – we’d probably brave a few rolls of the dice.

And incidentally, most jurisdictions that regulate gambling require casinos online and off to pay out a minimum of 75% of all incoming monies. Though in some cases this number may be slightly lower, it’s unlikely you’ll ever find it too much lower than that.

These payout reports are generally published openly on the online casino’s website with a complete archive of previous months’ reports all readily available for anyone wishing to view them. If, perchance, you’re considering a site that does not publicly display their payout percentages of each online casino game directly on their site, it is complete reasonable for you to write to the site (see their Contact Info) to inquire about it. They should be more than happy to email that information to you. If they’re not, we’d raise an eyebrow and seriously consider not depositing any of our hard-earned money into such a place.

Now you know how to better evaluate online casinos and each online casino game that they offer in order to learn not only which have the best odds of winning any amount of money at all, but also which have the largest payouts. Armed with this information, you’re now better prepared to venture out into the jungle of online casino games and emerge with a bounty to be proud of!

In part 1 of this 2 part series, we began to lay out for you exactly what online poker reviewers look for when evaluating an online poker room, using the poker review template from our own poker portal at Poker-Ranking.com.

In part 1, we explained in depth the following sections: Software and Graphics, Game Variation and Limits, and Traffic. In this concluding article, we will delve into what information is contained in the rest of the sections of a typical online poker review.

Competition
Here in an online poker review, you’ll find a gauge of the level of skill predominant at the various games (Texas Hold’em, etc.), types (Ring Games, etc.), betting structures (Limit, etc.), and stakes ($100/$200, etc.).

The term fish refers to players that aren’t very good. The call a lot of bad bets and can be intimidated easily. A good player can beat fish consistently with little difficulty.

The term shark refers to expert players that devour the fish. (For another appropriate animal reference, consider a fox in the henhouse.)

Bonuses
This part of an online poker review will tell you the signup bonus you’ll get (usually a percentage match against your first deposit), as well as any other bonuses available at the online poker room.

Some common bonuses are as follows:

Bad Beat Bonus: If you lose a hand holding higher than a certain amount (usually 4 Queens), you win the largest portion of a bonus that is shared amongst all the players that posted blinds in that round

Magic Hand Bonus: Every round (or hand) in an online poker room is given a number (which is how you can later refer back to earlier games); in a Magic Hand Bonus, the online poker room chooses a number (say, every one millionth hand) and gives every player who posted blinds in that hand a share of the bonus, the largest portion going to the winner of the hand

High Hand Bonus: Given to any player that gets the highest hand (above a minimum high hand, eg. 4 Kings) in a set period of time, without folding

Progressive bonuses (or Progressive Jackpots): These start at a certain amount (eg. $500) and each day that goes by without a winner claiming the bonus, a certain amount (eg. $50) is added, until someone wins the accumulated amount and the jackpot is then reset to its starting level.

Rake
Here is where the online poker review will tell you what the commission is that the online poker room takes for each hand. The average rake is 5% of the pot, up to but not exceeding $3. Many online poker rooms take smaller cuts from smaller pots or lower stakes games.

Some have a wonderful No Flop/No Drop policy, stating that if nobody stays in to see the flop, no rake is taken.

Customer Service
This section of the online poker review tells you the ways to reach customer support (toll-free phone, email, live chat), the hours (preferably 24/7), and most importantly, the quality, courteousness, and responsiveness.

Promotions
Similar to bonuses, but meriting their own section of the online poker review, promotions are special, time-sensitive events, generally with extraordinary prizes that include hefty jackpots, vacations, automobiles, and free seats in World Poker Tour and World Series of Poker events.

Deposits and Cashouts
You’ll find two things in this section of an online poker review: first, the payment methods accepted for deposits (purchases) and cashouts (withdrawals), such as PayPal, credit cards, NETeller, etc., and second, the promptness, reliability, and security with which they process these transactions.

Ease of Use
This section of an online poker review usually discusses the usability and intuitiveness (or lack thereof) of the interface. In addition, you’ll learn here about the layout of the lobby and the information given, including lobby stats like the following:

Hands per hour: Tells you how quickly the game moves and could be a gauge of the experience level of the players;

Average pot: Tells you how aggressive the players are and how much you can expect to win or lose each hand; and

Flop percentages: How many players at the table on average are staying in to see the flop; tells you how loose they’re playing.

With this handy, two-part guide to online poker reviews at your side, you should be sitting in at the perfect online poker table for you, any moment now!

Video Poker is a popular game that can be played in casinos across the world, or alternatively at home on your PC, through an Internet connection. The rules are very straightforward and involve the player attempting to get the highest combination of cards possible in order to win money. In this respect it is much the same as a normal game of poker, minus the interaction with other players. Of course, techniques used in a physical game of poker, such as bluffing, will be irrelevant here.

The game of Video Poker begins when the player inserts credit (either tokens, tickets or money) into the machine and presses the ‘play’, ‘deal’ or ‘draw’ button. A hand of five cards will then be electronically ‘dealt’ on the video screen.

The Video Poker machine also has buttons with ‘hold’ written on them, and players should now choose which cards to hold and which to discard. For the cards the player wishes to keep, the ‘hold’ buttons should be pressed so that they light up. The player can choose to keep any amount of cards they wish, from all to none.

After the player has chosen which cards he or she wishes to keep, they should press ‘deal’ or ‘draw’, at which point any new cards are dealt if desired. The game is now completed, with the Video Poker machine scanning the hand to see if it matches any of the winning hands listed in the payment schedule.

Typically, the minimum winning hand on a Video Poker machine is a pair of jacks with the prize money increasing for each better hand. A common list of winning hands begins with jacks or better, moving on to two pairs, three of a kinds, straights, flushes, full houses, four of a kinds, straight flushes and finally royal flushes. It goes without saying that the payment schedule can vary from machine to machine, so that experienced players are able to choose the most profitable ones every time.

Once the initial round has finished, the player can either choose to stay on in an attempt to increase their earnings, or press the ‘collect’ button to retrieve any credits that have been won. Further, some versions of the game allow the player a chance to double their winnings, in which case a further game is played. There are also variations between individual machines, with some virtual decks including wild cards and other varying elements to increase playability.