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The young fellah just called. Caught me in a mellow mood for once. He thinks - well, we can suspend judgement on that for so long as he keeps paying me - he thinks I should explain myself. In one piece I’m saying there’s, “a proper mathematical playing strategy for online video poker.” In the next, I’m saying there’s a gambler’s fallacy and you can’t predict the cards. He thinks they doesn’t fit right together. So here’s a few words to make it all crystal. There was never a hint of walking through the door with a system for winning at the tables or on the slot machines. Hollywood got it right for once. The only way you guarantee a big score at a casino is as a thief - and you’ve to be lucky to enjoy your “takings” and avoid the hail of bullets if you get caught by wrong people. Look around online. You’ll see a small army of people touting their systems for beating all casino games with a house advantage. Play slot machines, win big. Win at blackjack without counting. When I was growing up, my mother used to play 78s all the time. She loved the musicals of the 1920s. She’d never been on the chorus line, but she’d a hankering for it. Her parents disapproved of theatrical folk and that was an end of that. Anyways, one of my favorites was Banana Oil - kinda like snake oil but always applied to lounge-lizard lines. “When he tells you, ‘I adore you,’ that’s banana oil.” In other words, everything he said to get his mark into bed was bullshit. Well, the same goes for all these salesmen pushing betting systems for slot machines. They’re trying to scam you outa your money. Take it from me. There ain’t no system around that even dents the House edge on games where the probabilities are set in the House’s favor. Math is math. Mind you. It’s not my money - you wanna fool yourself you can shade the odds in your favor on video poker, then feel free. So, how do these systems work? You’re supposed to base your bets on the most recent outcomes. Take roulette as an example. Wait for a run of blacks, then bet on red - the longer the run, the bigger the bets on red. If you see a pattern emerging, you’re supposed to think that the probabilities of the game itself have changed. When I worked for casinos, we always nodded wisely when someone cautiously asked if they could play a system. Another little chicken ripe for the plucking. So I got me a little snifter here. Jack’s been working his way through some freebies - a new supplier’s trying to break into supplying the casino. Reckons he needs to make sure all the right people get their taste of the good stuff and we’re both of us out to oblige him. Damn, but some of this stuff is good! Makes me wanna give up the poker and the slot machines, and settle down with a bottle or two to enjoy my retirement. My father was counting deaths by the million over decades for the life companies. Short-term, you’ll find anomalies in all slot machines but, over time, the basic patterns are set in stone and in the House’s favor. You’ll see lucky streaks that look like they’re never going to end. But, so long as the House keeps its nerve, the winner will lose it all back again. It’s the same with the so-called systems. They aim to build up the small wins to offset the big losses. If you’ve the bankroll, you can often win over a session. But you’re obsessional kind, ain’t ya? You’ve invested that money in a system. You’re not going to quit while you’re ahead, are you? Which means that any small winnings you picked up on the good days will all get given back to the casinos on the bad days. It’s just the way the House edge works. Like I say, you can’t beat the math. Which leaves me with my strategy, which I’ll get back to when I’m good and ready.

The biggest company in the casino games industry is Playtech. They have produced the first progressive network to link online, mobile and real-world jackpots. The network has just made a jackpot payout of slightly less than US$2.5m. Over the last three months, this is the second payout exceeding $2m. The total amount paid out on this system since its launch now stands at more than $33m.

One of the winners got $2 million at one second. Now, you might think this is a single system all on its own. It may be making big payouts, but not every progressive is making big payouts.

Another winner from England won $1.2 at one glance of eye. That he was extremely surprised by his good fortune probably does not quite capture the moment. It is possible that he has resigned his job and is currently sitting on an island somewhere with a glass in one hand. What he has in his other hand is anyone’s guess.

All these guys are exceptions of one rule, that it is impossible to win playing against the slots machine. Ren and Klaus have joined a fairly exclusive band of players that have “hit the big time”. For the record, Klaus was the thirteenth player to become an instant millionaire on this particular online progressive (let no-one say that thirteen is always an unlucky number). But, by any standards, a win of more than $5m is fairly impressive. It brings the total winnings since the system came online to $27m.

That last sentence puts the win in its proper context. There were twelve previous winners of more than $1m plus the latest win. That makes $17.7 as a minimum or less than $10m paid out to all the other jackpot winners over the last few years. The win of $5.5m is one of the largest the online industry has seen. It took months for the progressive to build up to that level. It took millions of “pulls”. There were an uncountable number of players who did not win.

But still. . .

You can go in and watch the cycle through as many times as you want. So this is where I came in when I started writing this article. People are fascinated by the prospect that, for a small outlay, they might hit it big. The trick is to keep the odds in perspective and never spend more than you can afford chasing the dream. Subject to that, it never hurts to drop a coin or two into one of the casino games. You never know, today might be your lucky day when fantasy does become reality and changes your life.

Online casino doesn’t differs much from its land colleauges and have slots club are rotated in every fifteen minutes to play for three minutes. The player who racks up the biggest score in those three minutes will be the winner. The total prize money fund is $200,000 with everyone in the top fifty winning at least $1,000.

If you want to play the tournament you need to became very skillful player before. The winner will have used all his or her credits, made the best decisions on holds, and been lucky with the draws. If you cannot get through your credits in the time, you are not going to win unless you are lucky enough to get some good scores. Everytime check the pay table before you start and make sure you aim for the best paying combinations. That means it’s all down to concentration and fast reflexes. As soon as you see the draw, you must be hitting the holds and draw button. If you slow down, you lose.

The same principle we do apply on the online casinos. The winner is the man who has the biggest total at the end of the allocated time. Some tournaments are free or by invitation - they are usually ways in which casinos reward the regulars who have a good spend online. The others have an entry fee. It is customary to return most of the stake money as prizes.

This high excitement may not be for you. If you’re playing for fun, this may be taking life too seriously. But if you do want to improve your skills, playing a tournament or two will get the adrenaline running and build up your speed and accuracy.

Stanford Wong came out with Professional Black jack. Wong had a degree in economics from Stanford, hence his pseudonym. This book was the next big advance for card counters. Wong described his playing style, which included table-hopping shoe games to avoid playing at negative counts. As four-deck shoes were the most widely available games in Las Vegas by that time, his approach was very successive. The casinos looked for card counters by watching for their betting spreads. It had never occurred to the casinos that a counter might be watching a table from the aisles, waiting for an advantageous count before jumping in to bet.

The counting system Wong published was the Hi-Lo Count, and used the easy divide-by-remaining-deck(s) approach to running count adjustments. So, at last, some twelve years after Harvey Dubner had proposed the Hi-Lo count values, his system was available in a format both fully optimized with blackjack strategy indices, and presented with a simple methodology of plaing this game. Wong’s table-hopping approach to shoe games was in many ways similar to Al Francesco’s Big Player (BP) team approach, but allowed a solo card counter to attack shoe games invisibly, and without a team of spotters. This playing style has since become famous.