WILLSON'S CASINO

         

            While the life of a professional gambler does have its own mystique and glamour, the financial rewards in blackjack are often far less than some might expect. The reason for this primarily boils down to the fact that it is very difficult to play anywhere near as many hours as you might work in a normal job not because of fatigue or brain drain, but because the casino simply won't tolerate it. For example, if Caesars allowed me to sit peacefully at its tables from nine to five every day, and I could happily get in forty hours every week, I'd easily clear a million bucks a year and still be able to take a couple of weeks of vacation.

          Now, large casinos can easily absorb a loss like that, but they got to be big by plugging all the leaks. And it would be bad business for them to allow hordes of card counters to descend on their tables like locusts looking for easy pickings. Hence, there has evolved a cat-and-mouse battle between skilled players and the house. The casinos tolerate a certain amount of damage to their castle walls, but the boiling oil is sure to come out if you try and scale too high.

         This creates certain limitations on how much money individual card counters can scurry off with. Practically speaking, it is hard for solo players to get in long days at the tables. A full-time pro might only work three hundred hours over a twelve-month period. So instead of raking in a million a year and spending his vacations on a yacht in the Mediterranean, his expected return each year drops down to a much more pedestrian number. Therefore, many card counters are destined to spend their summers on the Allagash River in a canoe shooing away pesky mosquitoes rather than on a boat in the French Riviera fending off amorous Scandinavian blondes.

STANDARD DEVIATIONS

        A ballpark estimate of how much you can hope to make card counting is to take your top bet and multiply it by 25 to 30 percent. This is roughly what you will average per hour of play. That translates to about thirty bucks an hour with our benchmark $10,000 bankroll, which means a serious effort might only net $10,000 a year. Even worse, the recreational player (one hundred hours a year) might only bring home a meager $3,000. Hardly enough to quit' the day job.

        Yet thirty bucks an hour is still attractive enough to entice many people, especially when a few camped meals and shows are thrown in. If you desire a greater return for your labors, there is a simple solution to push you into a higher wage bracket-just start with a bigger bankroll and bet more. If you had $40,000 to work with, your potential hourly return should be over a hundred bucks an hour. And unless you're an attorney or a BMW mechanic, that's starting to sound like pretty good money.

        However, the problem is that unlike other jobs, you don't get paid by the hour. Your actual return will vary dramatically from your expected value (EV). These wild fluctuations are what drive many people out of the business and fall under the mathematical term "standard deviations" (SD).

        Here is an example to explain SD. If you were to flip a coin 100 times, the average results should be 50 heads and 50 tails. However, as everyone knows, there will be a certain amount of fluctuation in any short-term trial. Sometimes heads will clock in at 51 out of 100, and maybe the next test it will finish at 43 out of 100. However, there is an exact formula for predicting how often the results of these coin flips will land within certain parameters.

 

 

           

 

 

 

 

   If you want to earn big with some risk against your hard earned cash then playing blackjack tournament is the option for you. In this game you just got to believe in your luck because if only once your luck shines it makes you shine forever.

     Just when the budding romance was starting to heat up, Stanford Wong entered the bar and casually walked up to them. Without even acknowledging the girl, he gave Curtis a pat on the back and dumped the contents of the box into a shopping bag. A sheepish Anthony Curtis had to explain to his date how the huge win wasn't exactly all his-he had to share it with a team. When she realized his portion came out to less than $4,000, her passion mysteriously disappeared.

         Despite the bad luck at love, it still was his most memorable day gambling. Curtis nailed down many other big tournament wins$50,000 (twice), $60,000, and $125,000, but he still considers winning the World Match Play Championship his finest hour. That victory also firmly established Anthony Curtis as one of the all-time top tournament players. His triumph also illustrates another important principle-if you are more skilled than your opponents, you should seek out tournaments that reward expert play. In general, the better the rules and penetration, the more potential there is for your card-counting ability to influence the outcome.

 WORLD SERIES OF BLACKJACK

      In the past, I skipped tournaments for two reasons: As a high stakes card counter, I didn't want the additional visibility, and I felt there were greater profits in regular blackjack. However, I feel I overlooked the strong advantage sharp players could gain over their opponents in tournaments.

     I recently got invited to play in the prestigious World Series of Blackjack Tournament that is televised on the GSN network. This gave me a terrific chance to see if I could apply the principles from the various experts in this chapter. Since I had virtually no tournament experience, I was hardly the betting favorite in the eyes of the skilled tournament veterans. But I surprised everyone by beating a tough field in my first round and I eventually finished in fifth place overall.

     Almost as important as the money I won was the exhilarating atmosphere of close competition. Like most tournaments, my destiny came down to the final card. Unfortunately I lost out to the legendary Stanford Wong on the very last hand. Had the dealer not busted, I would have moved on to the final four and had a shot at becoming the 2005 World Champion of Blackjack and collecting its $250,000 prize.

     After getting over the disappointment of coming so close and still coming up short, I realized Allan Brown was right. There is a benefit in tournaments well beyond the monetary gain-they are just plain fun to play. And your pleasure can be greatly multiplied by mastering a few strategy tips. With a little practice, you might follow in the footsteps of Lucky Eddie Rhoades and return home from your next tournament with a million dollars in cold hard cash.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

      Many of you who are trying your luck in internet gambling are ignorant about applicability of Wire act to internet gambling. Here I am sharing some crucial information about this topic.

        The applicability of the Wire Act to Internet gambling is the subject of great confusion and debate. Even before gambling made its way to the Internet, it was unclear whether the Wire Act applies only to sports betting or to all gambling. Another issue is that the Wire Act covers "transmission of a wire communication." The law has not answered whether that applies to the Internet, and especially does not answer whether it covers a wireless connection to the Internet. Nevertheless, the federal government has rarely had trouble extending its jurisdiction, and even if the bettor maintains a wireless connection, almost all Internet communications are dependent on some form of wired communication for routing or other purposes.

        The Wire Act has been used to obtain a federal conviction in the case of Jay Cohen. Cohen was one of the operators of an offshore betting service, which was being charged with federal crimes for illegal gambling. Perhaps he thought that the law would vindicate him, but in any event, Cohen made the mistake of returning to the United States from the Caribbean. It was only when he arrived here that he could be arrested and prosecuted. He was convicted in 2000, and that conviction has been upheld.

      I have not been able to find any prosecution of bettors for Internet gambling. Many lawyers fed that the Wire Act does not cover individual bettors. I wouldn't go that far, because an individual bettor could theoretically be charged for aiding and abetting, or for conspiracy to engage in Internet betting. In fact, I know that some prosecutors in the U.S. Justice Department take that very position.

           Since the advent of Internet gambling, there has always been legislation pending in Congress to prohibit Internet casinos, or make them impossible to operate. I think I’ve at least a hundred articles in different publications about the possible passage of bills that would ban Internet casinos or discourage them into oblivion. The Kyle, Good latté, and Leach bills have not yet been passed because of competing legislative interests. I would predict that eventually a watered-down compromise version of one of these bills will pass, with enough loopholes and exemptions that will make enforcement, already a difficult undertaking, impossible.

      These bills get caught up in politics, with various competing special interests, including the gaming industry, banks, Native Americans, antigambling organizations, Internet corporations, and legislators who' don't understand the issues but are sensitive to the direction of political winds. It may well be that any legislation that gets passed is irrelevant.

      The biggest obstacle to the effectiveness of any legislation is enforcement. In the legal field, the key word is jurisdiction. First, the government needs physical jurisdiction over the person or company it seeks to regulate in any way.

      Obviously, it is difficult to arrest, or serve a summons on, a person or an entity that is not located in a given state, and is not even physically in this country. It's just as difficult to fine or jail a person or entity that has never physically been in this country. And even if the federal government, or a state government, won a case against such an entity, how could you get at their assets, which are similarly not even in this country? In addition, the government needs what lawyers call subject matter jurisdiction over a dispute. Basically, this means that there has to be a clear’ law in place to govern Internet gambling, and there has to be sufficient activity within the United States to govern a particular transaction.

      Obviously, the government cannot force people from other countries to submit to the law of the United States, to come to the United States to face trial, and so on.

     However, the regulatory power of the U.S. government is so great that it is the major force behind the decisions of MasterCard and Visa to restrict the use of their cards and accounts for Internet gambling. Similarly, domestic companies that finance Internet Gambling, develop software, and advertise Internet gambling, as well as, Internet service providers and land-based gambling corporations that might diversify onto the Internet, are all vulnerable to governmental regulation and "persuasion", to keep them from becoming involved with Internet casinos.