As I have written the past two weeks, Bonnie and I recently cruised the Eastern Mediterranean aboard the NCL Jade. I usually avoid casinos on cruise ships, but this time I found plenty of playable opportunities.
Continue reading Gambling Aboard the Norwegian Jade — Part I of II
Two weeks ago, I told you about Bonnie and me spending time at Harrah’s Cherokee prior to a two-week European cruise. This is a continuation of that narrative. Those of you wanting a lot of video poker information from me, come back in two weeks.
Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCL) offers a lot of incentives to entice passengers. Those offers vary over time and the one I’m discussing now may or may not be in effect at any time in the future. One of the incentives is 70% off airfare for the second passenger. With this incentive, you pay full retail only for the first passenger, but have little or no choice of which airlines they book you on. Still, it was the cheapest way for us to get back and forth to Athens from Atlanta, which is the closest major airport to Cherokee.
Continue reading The Old Man and the C (ruise) — Part I of II
I was playing $5 NSU Deuces Wild at Harrah’s Cherokee on a recent Seven Stars trip. This casino is one of many that will not let you accumulate credits on your machine greater than $2,999.99. If I have $2,900 in credits immediately after the deal and I end up with a $100 quad or full house, the machine will “spit” out a $100 ticket and I’ll keep the $2,900 in accumulated credits.
Continue reading Spinach!Recently in Las Vegas, there was a local pub offering a nice promotion between 1 a.m. and 8 a.m. several days a week. Not a great promo and not likely to be repeated, but I’m not interested in providing more details about it than I already have. Suffice it to say it was close enough to where I live and juicy enough that I arranged my sleep schedule so that I was there during the requisite hours most of the days it was offered.
Continue reading It’s a Matter of PrioritiesI had a conversation with a strong player, and he posed a series of ethical questions. He estimated that if I asked this question in a crowd of people, at least 75% of players would claim they would do the right thing in each situation. But if nobody else were around, less than 50% would actually do the right thing.
I’m not sure about his percentages, but they sound approximately right, more or less. So, let’s look at the questions.
Continue reading What Would You Do?I recently posted a few blogs concerning some fine points for the strategy of 9-5 Triple Bonus Poker Plus. They discussed somewhat complicated decisions with relatively small financial impacts. After the second blog came out, a reader posted the following:
I’ve borrowed the late Merle Haggard’s 1981 song title to describe a conversation video poker players have heard hundreds of times. It’s often expressed as an argument where the premises go something like the following:
Continue reading Are the Good Times Really Over for Good?I’ve recently written some more-complicated-than-normal (for me) articles concerning playing strategies. Today won’t be one of those!
One of my regular posters, Boris from Switzerland, posted (paraphrasing): “This is fine for the advanced players. Recreational players can use a phone app to get the same information. And they’ll probably get away with it.”
Continue reading Using Your Cell Phone in the Casino in Order to Look Up the StrategyThis is a continuation of last week’s discussion. You might want to check that blog out for context.
Consider the values of these combinations, playing 9/6 Jacks or Better for dollars, five coins at a time. Note that the value of these combinations can vary depending on the other two cards in the hands. In the examples so far, I’m considering the fourth and fifth card to be an unsuited 2 and 3.
Continue reading A Look at SF3+1, SF3+0, SF3-1, and SF3-2 — Part II of IIWhen Liam W. Daily and I began looking at publishing strategy cards and later Winner’s Guides for a number of video poker games, we devised a terminology for discussing the various forms of 3-card straight flush combinations. We decided to start from zero, add one for every high card in the combination, and subtract one for every inside (which is usually, but not always, a gap).
Although the idea was original to us, in the sense that we didn’t read or hear about it from anybody, we later found out that other strong players were using very similar terminology among their teams. These notations weren’t published or otherwise publicized, so we hadn’t heard about them.
Continue reading A Look at SF3+1, SF3+0, SF3-1, and SF3-2 — Part I of II