Месяц: Февраль 2014

Short and sweet, much like my experience the first time I played China Shores. And then I dared to play the slot machine again.
Much like the review I did about Buffalos a few weeks back, this slot game can get addictive. Tough to hit, you bet. But when it does, the experience is a major rush.
The second time around, this machine actually gave me over 400 free games thanks to a few pandas and a bunch of circular symbols that hit all five reels.
It took close to 90 minutes to exhaust all the systems and I was lucky enough to hit a few major winners in the bonus to walk away with over $350.
Naturally, I thought there was finally a slot game that could actually pay off more than my investment. Of course, I was wrong.
Yet, I highly recommend the game, if for no other reason the shot at coming up with a huge number of bonus games. That’s really the key. I don’t know if it will replace Buffalos in popularity, but it’s a good second choice.
There’s always Caveman Keno!
Hello, WSOP
For those who can’t get enough World Series of Poker, the first of 62 events begins Wednesday at the Rio.
The Main Event doesn’t begin until July 9, but there is plenty of opportunity to watch the world’s best. There will be two One Drop tourneys, although the $1 million buy-in is not on the slate.
A nice twist is the WSOP officially deciding to allow men in the Ladies Event on June 28. Usually, it’s the other way around in sports.

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Life is all about taking risks. That doesn’t mean random risk taking. It’s about knowing when to step out of your daily routine and try a new challenge if and when the opportunity presents itself. In this respect poker is a paradigm of life. You play with your own money and your fate is in your own hands. Brushing up on your poker skills, therefore, could be the difference between success and being a loser.
While following your inner voice is part of the instinctive pleasure of playing poker, nothing quite beats experience. However becoming experienced often requires losing. That’s why William Hill Poker Online developed its online poker school. It provides the key to unlocking the techniques you need to give you the best advantage when you’re at the online poker table.
William Hill Poker School has easy to follow presentations about poker hand rankings and how best to play each hand. There are insightful tournament tips about playing style and drawing to the nuts. A dedicated and free online poker tutorial movie presents a guide to strategy for both beginners and advanced players. Each movie is broken in to specific lessons, which are concise and easy to follow.
Being able to make out the poker odds on each hand dealt is a major part of playing poker. Knowing the odds helps you anticipate your opponent’s next move. That’s why William Hill’s Poker Odds - Advanced Guide, is an invaluable asset on your path to becoming a master poker player.

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In 1975, Paul Simon sang about 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. While I like the song, I have to admit, I’ve never listened to it closely enough to know if he actually lists 50 ways or even starts to list any.
Fortunately, in video poker, there are only 32 ways. No, not to leave your lover, but to draw on your hand. When I tell people this, the most common reaction is to give me that little deer in the headlights type of look. So, let me explain.
When dealt an initial 5-card hand in video poker, you have to choose which of the 32 ways to go with it.
What does this 32 represent? Well, I think it is fairly obvious that you can choose to keep the five cards you were dealt. That’s way No. 1. You can also choose to discard all five cards and draw new ones. We’ll call that way No. 2.
If you decide you want to draw 1 card, there are five ways you can do this. You can discard any one of the five cards originally dealt to you. So, these are ways 3-7. In similar fashion, you can choose to keep any one of the five cards and discard the remaining four. This gives us five more ways or 8-12.
Only 20 more ways to go, but it does get a bit more complex. The last remaining choices are to discard two (and keep three) or to discard three (and keep two). If we have five cards and we want to pick two of them, there are 10 combinations we can pick from. Mathematically, this is called 5 Choose 2.
To calculate this, we need to use something called a factorial, which is a number multiplied by itself and all numbers less than it, down to 1. It is represented by an exclamation mark. So five factorial (5!) is 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1. This works out to be 120. 5 Choose 2 is mathematically equivalent to 5! divided by 2! divided by (5-2)!
In the end, this turns out to be 10. This is true so long as order does not matter. Thus we are picking two cards that are not assigned a position of 1 and 2, but are simply those we are choosing to keep or discard. So, we have our remaining 20 ways – 10 that go with discarding two cards and 10 that go with discarding three. This gives us ways 13-32.
Of course, the average player doesn’t play video poker thinking through each of the 32 ways. Instead, the human brain can look at the 5-cards dealt to him and determine what hand type he has and match it to the strategy table.
The player also doesn’t take into account the specific card position to notice that there are 10 ways to discard 2 cards. Instead that person might recognize having a 3-card Straight Flush and needing to discard the other two cards.
For about 75% of the hands, the choice is very easy and straight forward. The importance of strategy comes into play with the remaining 25%. But, even for these, most of the time there are only two ways the player must consider.
Perhaps he has a Low Pair and a 4-card Flush or a 3-card Straight Flush that is also a 4-card Straight. Once in a while there’s a hand that has three ways that must be considered. The hand might be a 3-card Straight Flush, a 4-card Flush and a Low Pair.
I’m sure if I thought about it long enough, I’d find cases where the player might have to consider four ways, but these are rare, if they exist at all.
So, why do we concern ourselves with talking about the 32 different ways a hand can be played?
On a theoretical level, all 32 must be analyzed to determine which maximizes our overall payback. For a computer program, it is almost easier for it to consider every possibility rather than attempt to eliminate them through some form of human assumptions programmed in. These assumptions might lead to errors.
Who knew 20 years ago they would come up with all the bonus pay tables that they have? Who knows what “bizarre” pay table might be offered in the future?
Thus, when I create programs that analyze a game like video poker, I don’t make any assumptions about how the hand should be played. I allow the computer to look over every possible combination.
When the computer is analyzing every draw for all possible ways to play a hand for each of the 2,598,960 possible 5-card deals, it is actually analyzing approximately 6.7 trillion situations. It is almost hard to believe that when all is said and done, we can boil this down to about 35-40 lines on a strategy table.

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Last week, I discussed the 32 different ways a 5-card video poker hand can be played. This, is of course, the theoretical ways.
When one looks at his 5-card hand, he rarely (OK, never) reviews all 32 ways. This isn’t because it isn’t practical to do so, but rather because it is simply unnecessary.
If a player is dealt a Pair of 3’s, along with a 4-5-6 of mixed suits, he doesn’t have to give any thought to throwing away one of the 3’s, along with a 4 and 5 and keeping an offsuit 3-6. I can’t imagine what a paytable would have to look like to make this the right way to play the hand.
If a Straight were to pay that well, he would hold 3-4-5-6. If a Pair (or Trips, etc.) were to pay high enough, it might be worth it for him to keep the Low Pair. If a Straight Flush payout was high enough, it might persuade him to keep the suited cards of the Straight, in order to go for the Straight Flush.
When I programmed my video poker analysis program, I didn’t have it eliminate any of the 32 possible ways as, well, “too dumb to consider.” Given the nature of programs, it is easier to simply tell the program to play every hand every way and then compare the results. No need to make ANY assumptions.
So, what does a video poker analysis program do with the 32 possible ways the hand can be played? To put it simply, it plays all 32 of them and figures out the final hand for EVERY possible draw for each one of them.
So, it begins with the easiest scenario of holding all five cards. The hand is currently a loser, so the expected value for this way is 0. Not likely the right play. On the other end of the chart is to discard all five cards.
The program will figure out the final hand for all 1,533,939 possible draws, taking into account the five cards that were already dealt and discarded. While the exact expected value will vary slightly depending on exactly which cards were originally dealt, the approximate expected value of this Razgu will be 0.36.
It will then evaluate the remaining 30 ways. Along the way, it will come across the most likely hand that will prove to be the correct strategy. It will hold the Pair of 3’s and discard the 4-5-6. It will review the 16,215 possible draws and determine how many Two Pairs, Trips, Full Houses and Quads the Player will wind up with.
These are the only winning hands from a Pair of 3’s. It will add up the total payout the player can expect to win if every possible draw is played, and then divide this number by the total possible draws (16,215) to arrive at the expected value of this hand. It will be 0.82. This outranks the Draw 5 and Discard 5, so we can eliminate those hands as possible plays.
It will eventually come across the 3-4-5-6 (off-suit). It will review the 47 possible draws and determine that eight will result in a Straight. The Straight pays 4, so the Player will get back 32 units. Divide this by 47 and the expected value is just about 0.68. This is below the Low Pair, so the Low Pair continues to be the proper play.
The program will keep going, analyzing absurd possibilities like holding an offsuit 3-6. It’s not even worth my time to determine what the expected value of such a hand is. I know it will be below the Razgu’s 0.36. So, while the program will go through the motions of analyzing even this hand’s 16,215 possible draws, I will not waste my time on it.
Perhaps there is a suited 3-4-5 in the hand I described. The program will analyze the 1,081 possible draws. Just as before, it will determine how many winning hands will be drawn and multiplies each by its payout. It will sum up these values and divide by 1,081 to get this hand’s expected value. It will be about 0.63, still below the Low Pair.
The program will go through ALL 32 ways and keep track of which one of the 32 has the highest expected value. In the case shown here, it will prove to be the Low Pair with its 0.82, and this becomes the proper play for this hand.
It is not necessary for a player to memorize the expected value for any hand. You must, however, remember the order of the strategy table that lists the hands in descending order of expected value. You do not need to know that a Low Pair has an expected value of 0.82, but you will need to know that it outranks a 4-card Straight with 0 High Cards and a 3-card Straight Flush with 0 High Cards.
Yes, if you want to become an Expert Player, you’ll need to learn the strategy table.

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While you might think casinos in Las Vegas spend all their time trying to snag one “whale” on the baccarat tables, this isn’t where their bread and butter business lies. In fact, you’ll find that around 70% of the Las Vegas casino floor space is filled with just one type of game that has existed for over a hundred years.
For those who haven’t guessed yet, we’re talking about the slot machine, of course. Every day millions of dollars in dimes, nickels and quarters are pumped into their coin slots and almost as much is paid out as prizes, with that valuable little house edge of around 6% going into the pockets of the casino owners.
Believe it or not, the first slot was created as a poker game. Well-known gambling historian David G Schwartz claims a Brooklyn company sold the first poker playing machine in 1881. It used five reels, each with 10 cards, which were spun to create random poker hands.
The owner of the machine would hand-pay players based on the odds of any winning hand. Usually, these machines only paid for a pair of Jacks or better, which is where the term jackpot originates from.
It is thanks to this heritage that most slots in Las Vegas originally used a standard five-reel set up that featured the top royal cards from the deck.
It was in 1890’s poker-crazed San Francisco that these new machines really caught the imagination of the gaming public. When three German mechanics, including slot legend Charles Fey, decided to tinker with this idea, the first mechanised reel game was born in 1898 – The Card Bell.
Fey found it impossible to engineer a machine with five reels, so this first prototype of the one-armed bandit game was created using a three-reel arrangement that would come to dominate the early years of this industry.
It wasn’t until gambling licenses were granted in Las Vegas in 1931 – a year when slot machines reportedly made a staggering $25 million profit in New York – that these games began to appear around town. Believe it or not, the place to go to play these games was actually the Las Vegas Sweet Shoppe, which had a license for 17 machines – the largest selection available at the time.
The city that never sleeps had finally caught the reel virus, and from then on the fever was only going to get hotter.
A number of new inventions over the years paved the way for the slot’s dominance, including the development of the so-called bottomless hopper, first appearing on the Bally machine Money Honey. This allowed players to continuously churn through big wins, which for the first time ever were actually paid out by the machine as opposed to hand pay via an attendant.
IGT is one of the biggest gaming development companies in Las Vegas, with titles like Sex And The City, Ghostbusters and Siberian Storm under their belt. They’re also responsible for some of the biggest innovations in slot machine history.
When Bally engineer Inge Telnaes first devised the legendary virtual reel in the early 1980s, IGT was one of the companies that grabbed this processing ball of fun and ran with it as far as they possibly could. The result was the creation of the legendary Megabucks machine, the first ever wide-area network progressive slot the world had ever seen.
This system linked a number of game terminals together, syphoning a portion of every penny spent on the game into a huge, ever-growing jackpot, often in the region of several million dollars, all waiting to be won by one lucky player.
This was the first time in casino history the average Joe or Jane had a chance to stick a dollar in a game and walk away with a life-changing amount of money. Needless to say these progressive slot machines were a huge hit on the Nevada gaming scene, so much so that their jackpots began to run as a regular feature in the local press.
With the sharp rise in processing power other Las Vegas casino development companies began to jump on board the slot machine train. The next big innovation in the gaming industry was to come from WMS, which recently signed a deal in March 2013 with casino super-company Caesars Entertainment to bring their titles to an online audience in Nevada.
In the 1990s WMS came up with the game that is recognized as the first-ever slot to feature a second screen bonus round – Reel Em In. When players managed to hit the right combination of symbols on the slot’s base-game grid they got a chance to take part in a fishing contest unlike anything that had ever been seen on a slot machine at that time.
Needless to say, this was an instant hit with Las Vegas gamers who really took the game to heart, and you can still find a special version of it, Reel Em In – Big Bass Bucks, on casino floors today.
The slot machine craze is showing no signs of dissipating. In fact, as more and more people are visiting Las Vegas on an annual basis, the amount of floor space designated for these machines is growing, with traditional games like roulette, blackjack and craps being pushed out the door.
There is no other type of gambling that’s as fun and accessible as spinning the reels on one of the thousands of titles that endlessly blink into the warm Nevada nights, which all have the ability to put a rush and flutter into the hearts of even the most pious players.

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When it comes to casino slot machines, they don’t come much bigger than IGT’s Cleopatra, a game that’s based on one of the most famous queens of all time. In this article we take a look at the mechanics of this popular casino game and some of the reasons behind its massive success.
If you’ve heard of just one slot machine, we’re willing to bet money it’s Cleopatra. This famous game has been doing the rounds at countless casinos for a number of years. Although there are a several different Cleopatra variants available, we’re going to be investigating the most popular version – the large, multi-payline video slot that seems to have captured the hearts and minds of the Las Vegas gaming audience.
Let’s take a look at the structure of Cleopatra. As with most modern slots it uses a five reel formula that owes its origins to the poker machines from which all reel games have evolved. Players can bet on a maximum of 20 pay-lines, and can adjust their coin size to find their ideal bet level. This machine also gives gamblers an additional helping hand to make money in the form of the signature Cleopatra wild multiplier, which not only helps complete combinations by substituting for other symbols, but also doubles the value of their prize. A huge part of the success of this mathematical model is its simplicity. This isn’t a game that relies on lots of different second-screen action or over-done bonus rounds. Instead it offers what’s known as good action from the first spin to the last.
Believe it or not, this game structure, which is called the ‘Cleopatra formula’ by many critics and reviewers, is actually a copy of another game. Queen of the Nile is a slot from top Australian pokie manufacturer Aristocrat Leisure, and is known to be the first game that featured a mix of Egyptian themes and a triple paying free-spin bonus round. These guys are one of the most under-represented innovators in the casino industry, as they actually came up with the concept of the multi-payline slot. However, as with many things in life, it’s not enough to be the originator – you have to be bold enough to put some real money muscle behind your ideas to make them slide into universal reception.
One of the things that’s made Cleopatra such a world-wide success is its clear theme, graphics and sounds that enable personification. Slot players are well known for bestowing an almost human quality onto their games. Sit in any casino and you’ll hear players talk in sweet, sugary tones to games that are streaking, and plead desperately with machines that have frozen up. Cleopatra is one slot machine that actually whispers seductively back at players, based on the action on the reels, giving its audience the feeling they’re actually communicating with this game.
The visual branding used on Cleopatra harks back to Ancient Egypt, which is a land that’s been associated with hidden riches ever since the days of Howard Carter. The idea of grabbing fabulous wealth from archaeological explorations is one that’s still popular to this day, and this is definitely a cultural reference the Cleopatra slot plays upon strongly. This theme has been carefully chosen to suggest the thrill of chancing across huge wealth to slot gamers, and this is undoubtedly a large part of its success, harnessing people’s subconscious desires.
IGT has continued their success with Cleopatra by following up this awesome production with not one, but two sequel slots. Cleopatra II uses the same formula as the original in its base-game, but introduces a new element into the bonus free-spin round with an incremental multiplier, allowing players to reach some considerable payouts.
There’s also a progressive machine, Cleopatra Megajackpots, which takes a little of every credit spent on the game and siphons it away to form a huge, ever-growing top prize. This is a wide-area network progressive made up of many clone terminals, which allows hundreds of players to spin for the same huge jackpot.
As with everything that’s successful within the casino world, Cleopatra’s highly addictive game structure has been copied ad infinitum by a number of rival companies. However, no matter how many clones you play, the truth of the matter is there’s something about Cleopatra’s base-game balancing act that simply works. It’s low to medium variance structure offers players a constant stream of wins with a chance to hit some big money in the feature round, which apparently just feels right everytime they take this game for a spin.

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