Posts by bilakios | News Blog

InterCasino Blackjack Challenge: Win $2000 in Bonuses

Placing your fate in a deck of cards may be excitement enough for many of us, but there’s little doubt that the challenge of competing against other players can make your blackjack experience that bit more special. InterCasino gives you the chance to pit your wits against the best on the site, and possibly win a share of the €2,000 prize pool at the same time.

Click on the banner below to join the challenge!

Every time you play blackjack, you score loyalty points. These will be logged over the course of the competition period, and, at the end, the five players with the highest points scores will grab their share – €1,000 goes to the winner, with €500 to the runner-up, €300 to third place, and €100 to the players in fourth and fifth. You can check the leaderboard at any time to see if you’re currently making the top five.

There are no onerous requirements. All you need to do make a deposit of €100 or more between the 7th and the 10th of November. You don’t have to do any more, and will automatically start accumulating points towards your total as soon as you begin playing. The deadline closes at 11:59 CEST on the 10th of November, so get in as soon as you can for the best chance.

You can choose from any of the titles (with the exception of Live Blackjack) in InterCasino’s impressive range of blackjack games. These include Atlantic City, Blackjack European, Vegas Blackjack, Micro-Limit Blackjack, Lucky 7, and Perfect Pairs. How exactly you plot your way to leaderboard-topping status is up to you.

If you win, the money will be added to your account as casino credits. You can either play normally with these, or you can try and convert them to a withdrawable amount. To do this, you’ll need to wager the credits 20 times within 30 days.

The challenge revolves around InterCasino’s loyalty points scheme. Shrewd players would do well to acquaint themselves with this system, as it gives them an extra source of cash. Loyalty points can be converted to cash once you’ve scored 500 or more. You score points for every €10 you wager, and for every 100 points gathered, you can get €1 in cash. These points mount up even without you noticing, so it’s a great way of getting back some money in return for playing your favourite game.

Live Dealer vs RNGs in Blackjack

Every so often, an innovation comes along that burns its way through the gambling industry like wildfire. The Live Dealer option has had just such an effect in recent years, injecting excitement and glamour – and even a touch of increased security – into a previously rather lonely and joyless gaming experience. Here we’ll look at what exactly Live Dealer is, and whether it’s all that it’s cracked up to be. But first, let’s go back and look at what it’s replacing.

RNGs

Initially, many casino sites relied on an RNG (Random Number Generator) to pick cards at random. Technically, these sites are monitored very closely, and it’s not possible for the house to cheat the player with manipulated numbers. In reality, it’s doubtful whether the oversight extends to much more than looking at the percentages and making sure that, overall, everything’s above board. That certainly doesn’t preclude a casino from massaging the numbers at key points, or from targeting a particular player. It’s also fair to say that, while the graphics have become fairly slick in recent years, you’re still very much aware that you’re playing a computer simulation. It’s you against the machine and, for many players, that lack of a human presence makes the whole experience feel somewhat downbeat.

gala casino RNG Blackjack — Source: galacasino.com

That’s not to say that RNGs aren’t without their charms. Unlike the situation in a casino, you’re the only person playing. Therefore, the pace of the game can be adjusted to suit you. If you want to remove all the bells and whistles, and play a dozen hands a minute, you can. On the other hand, if you want to relax and deliberate (perhaps over a beer), you can do it that way too. The RNG is all about you in so many ways. And that’s both its strength and its downfall.

Live Dealer

A Live Dealer game, on the other hand, does away with (at least part of) the computer interface. Instead, you lock into a live video stream of a dealer (quite frequently female and highly attractive!), and watch the cards being dealt out in front of you. The experience suddenly feels a lot more real, especially if you get to play alongside other live players, joining in with their trials and tribulations. Some platforms even allow you to talk directly to the dealer and (possibly) the other players. It’s this sense of being part of something that makes Live Dealer a great option for many people. There’s also a sense of greater trust, as you see the cards being dealt in front of you, so the game has to be more trustworthy. Right? Well, we’ll come back to that one in due course..

Live Dealer games do offer considerably more in terms of pressure. You’re always aware that you’re being asked to make a decision, and the sense that other people are waiting for you can ratchet up the tension. This, of course, is one of the aspects that makes Live Dealer a more exciting experience. It could, though, make it less enjoyable for some players. You also have to go at a fixed pace, so you can’t cut down on the options in order to speed things up. There’s little doubt, though, that many see Live Dealer as a more attractive way of playing the game.

Smoke and Mirrors

Not that things are necessarily as they seem to be on the surface. Although it appears that the live videofeed is coming directly from a real casino, in most cases the stream is beamed from a custom-made set. There are exceptions, and Dublinbet’s feed, for instance, is set in a genuine location – Fitzwilliam’s Casino and Card Club in Ireland. As a rule, though, the casinos are artificial. That’s done essentially for practical reasons. The multiple cameras and OCR technology used to display and read cards would be hard to accommodate in a real casino. It’s easier to light properly, and there’s no chance that the filming can disrupt players who are physically present.

It’s also worth remembering that when you play Live Dealer games, the stream is usually coming from a third party (the platform provider). If you’re betting with William Hill, Bet365, Betfair or BetFred, for instance, the stream will probably be provided by Playtech. 888, Paddy Power and Unibet use the Evolution platform. Other names include MicroGaming, CWC, and Vuetec. This use of other companies isn’t as strange as it might seem, as most casino software used by online sites has been provided by a third party – worth considering next time you shout at your betting site after a string of bad cards. The use of third party streams does, though, throw up the peculiar situation where you might be playing alongside people from another site completely – so William Hill customers, for instance, could find themselves swapping battle scars with a player from B365, for instance. Alternatively, it might explain why, occasionally, you’ll end up with the same dealer you saw earlier in the day, even though you’ve switched to another site in the meantime.

Trust is the Thing

So how trustworthy are these Live Dealer games? For Blackjack players, that’s a particularly pertinent question, since this game is prime turf for card counting. RNGs tend to throw out cards at random, so there’s little chance that you can count the number of cards and try and predict what might be coming up. On the other hand, Live Dealers are drawing from a proper pack so, theoretically, a long run of low cards will suggest that some higher ones are due imminently – and vice versa. The problem is, you can’t guarantee this. Decks are generally changed at regular intervals, and often you can’t tell from the filming whether a deck has been altered or not. Casinos don’t see it as being in their interests to entertain card counters, so they’re quick to make it difficult, if not impossible, for such systems to work. A few players have claimed victory here, but generally, the consensus is that card counting won’t work, even with Live Dealer games.

The games do, undoubtedly, have higher levels of trust associated with them. Live video isn’t impossible to ‘fix’ – multiple outcomes could be videoed, and then dropped in to suit the situation. However, it is undoubtedly more time consuming to fiddle than a simple RNG. And because the same feeds are used for multiple players, it would be very difficult indeed to target a particular player. Given that casino games generally have a built-in edge in any case, it seems highly unlikely that casino sites and platform providers are colluding to cheat specific players. In truth, the Live Dealer option is probably the best for the sceptical gambler believing the sites are out to rob them of their money.

Is Live Dealer the Future?

The idea of the Live Dealer is unlikely to go away, although it will undoubtedly evolve. The video will become higher resolution, and as new user-input devices and Augmented Reality techniques are developed, the entire experience will become more natural to the feel, and more realistic. For Blackjack players looking for the ultimate online kick, that can only be a good thing.

Superstition and Lucky Charms in Gambling

All gamblers know a few fellow players who use superstitions or rituals to bring them greater fortune. Whether that’s blowing on the dice for luck, wearing the same sock every time they go to the casino, or carrying around some kind of ‘lucky mascot’, these players often insist that they wouldn’t be having the great run they’re on unless they were sticking to the same routine again and again. Indeed, even quite sensible people believe that a pair of ones (Snake Eyes) represents the devil and, therefore, will bring bad luck – the use of the number two is also the reason why many Americans believe two dollar bills to be unlucky. It may well be that you believe in some sort of ‘luck’ yourself, to a greater or lesser degree. Deep down, you know a two-tailed lizard in your pocket can’t possibly change the spin of the dice, but there’s part of you that can’t resist the idea that, just maybe, you’re turning chance in your favour.

The idea of superstition, of course, comes from the earliest days of civilisation, when humans would try and invoke supernatural powers to help them succeed in something that they didn’t really understand. Weather and agriculture, for instance, were largely a mystery for thousands of years. Science and experimentation has gradually enlightened us, to the point where we know that ‘the gods’ have little, if anything, to do with these things. We now have sufficient knowledge of farming that very little is left to chance – scientists can even genetically modify crops so that they are more resistant to disease, can produce higher yields etc. Essentially, humans have found out how to control farming. Weather poses more uncertainties, but we do have a fairly strong understanding of what causes the elements to act as they do, and certain weather events can be predicted with greater success than before. We can’t control weather, but we can bring some sense of order to it.

Gambling, on the other hand, remains unfathomable to the majority of us. It’s a dark power that we can’t really explain, and one that we certainly can’t control. The dice and cards are totally random, and any attempt to make order of the chaos is doomed to failure. Mathematically, of course, we can calculate the probabilities of a certain throw or deal going our way. In reality, though, few gamblers ever bother to look at such figures. Instead, the game remains one large wheel of fortune, and the players hurl the dice and hope that the mystical force that governs chance will stop the wheel at the right place, just as long as each player goes through his or her ritual – their offering to the gods. All superstitions, rituals and lucky mascots are really just a way of inviting these unknowable forces to work in our favour.

The impulses to appeal to some mightier power seem to exist deep within us. In the late 1940s, the famous psychologist, B F Skinner, showed that this was the case even in other animals. His experiment saw a pigeon fed food at random intervals. If the bird was performing a certain action (turning its head from side to side, for instance) as the food appeared, the pigeon would often attribute the arrival of the food to the performing of this particular action. Performing the action would then become a mysterious ritual which the bird thought it could use to make food appear – even though, the majority of the time, it was having no immediate effect. Humans are clearly more sophisticated than pigeons, but the same impulse seems to exist even in us – certain ‘rituals’ that appear to produce winning results (generally by happening to coincide with a lucky run) are performed again and again. At some point, a bad run tends to go against us and we’ll drop the ritual, only to pick up a new ‘better’ one shortly after.

In truth, many of us know that these superstitions can’t really work, and yet we often resort to them for at least part of the time. (I confess that I refuse to bet on any horse that bears my own name, for instance, or that of my dog!) But as long as we know, deep down, that nothing can come of them in the long-term, where is the problem? If you’re using superstition as an easy replacement for doing research and getting to ‘know the figures’, then that’s clearly a bad thing. But a little extra superstition on top of a solid betting strategy can actually be a benefit. Winning gamblers always want to have some logic to their plays, but self-doubt (brought on by tension) can cause them to second-guess themselves. Anything that can counteract those negative impulses, therefore, and make the gambler more confident in following their carefully honed instincts, is likely to be a bonus. It’ll be the odds that decide whether we win or lose over the long term. But in the meantime, what’s wrong with trying to will a little randomness to work for rather than against us.

Famous Blackjack Players Part II

James Grosjean

Most Blackjack players know about card counting, but the sequence of cards themselves isn’t the only factor that allows you to beat the house edge. James Grosjean was fascinated by gaming from childhood, learning how to win time and again in the tile-based game Mah Jong by using a humble Sinclair ZX80 computer to analyze the different playing strategies of his friends, and then crafting the optimum strategy for each one.
james-grosjean By the time he had reached adulthood, he had developed strong analytical skills that he put to good use count cards in Blackjack. It was while playing cards one day that he noticed a careless dealer briefly revealing her hole card. After careful observation, he noticed that the dealer made this slip on a regular basis. Once again using his computer skills to analyze the possibilities, he worked out what the optimum play would be based on knowing the hole card. Armed with this new information, he went back to the same casino, and supposedly won 95% of his games against that dealer. He then jacked in his potential Wall Street career, and devoted himself to developing his ‘hole carding’ strategy, eventually using it across a string of casinos before putting his knowledge to use writing his successful (but now hard to find) book, ‘Beyond Counting’.
Grosjean has also fought a strong fight for the rights of gamblers, and his lawsuits against Caesar’s Palace and Imperial Palace, and the security consultants Griffin Investigations, resulted in a Nevada court ruling that hole carding was a technique that could be legally used.

Keith Taft

KeithTaft Grosjean may have made good use of early computers, but Keith Taft can rightly qualify as a true pioneer in the field of IT, crafting a Blackjack computer as early as 1970 – half a decade before the first proper home computers arrived on the market. The idea of this early project was to take the writings of Edward O Thorp (author of the hugely influential book ***), and to turn them into electronic form, creating a machine that could count cards far more successfully than Taft could himself. The computer consisted of several book-sized components fastened to his body, and his toes were used as the controls – one newspaper named him ‘The Fastest Toes in the West’. It initially worked well, before he lost over $6,000 after a poor run of cards.

A more modern and easily portable version was created in the late 70s, and, realising that he was better at the technology than he was at the betting, Taft decided to introduce the device to another blackjack player – Ken Uston. At this time, Uston had only recently broken his partnership with Al Francesco, and was looking to create his own team of card counters. Powered by Taft’s technology, the new team refined their technique and skills. However, an unpromising initial run and a low percentage of the profits caused many of the team-members to become demotivated, and the team broke up soon after. Strangely, it was several of Taft’s children and in-laws who breathed new life into the enterprise, insisting that they could take the places of the original members. Heavily tutored by Uston, the new squad (now including Taft himself) took over $100K in a week.

Taft would come up against the casino authorities on several occasions, and the initial family team broke up after a series of heavy-handed ‘arrests’. Taft didn’t give up, though, and it was only when casinos made electronic devices illegal in the mid-80s that his plans were finally ended. The catalyst for the casino ban was another incident involving Taft and his family – or, specifically, his brother, who was arrested for having a mini video camera stored in his belt buckle. Taft’s attempts, then, may ultimately have fizzled out, but not before he did much to extend the use of technology, and to lay down in hard code and figures the optimum way of card-counting.

Zeljko Ranogajec

zeljko-ranogajec

Born in Australia to Croatian parents, Ranogajec’s name is now known across the whole world. And yet, those who truly know of him are small in number, while the number who know the secrets of what he does are sparser still. Such has been the secrecy surrounding Ranogajec (he has been dubbed the Loch Ness Monster) that he has become almost a mythical player in the world of big-stakes gambling. Now possibly the largest of the large whales, the foundations of his empire were built upon blackjack. Starting off just a couple of hundred dollars, he used iron nerves and patience, finely-honed card-counting skills, and a willingness to exploit tiny percentage edges, to amass a multi-million fortune in the space of just a few years. First he conquered Australian casinos. Having been banned from almost every major outlet in that continent, he swept across the United States in similar fashion. Acknowledged as one of the greatest and most successful blackjack players of all time, he has been elected to the Blackjack Hall of Fame for his exploits. However, it’s not only blackjack where he has thrived. Indeed, he topped off his gaming winnings with a rumored $7.5 million win on Keno.

Having conquered much of the casino world, Ranogajec has since used his significant fortune to crack horse racing. Few details are available on his betting there, but it seems that he uses powerful computers to create huge amounts of data on each race, employing select teams to trawl through the data looking for badly priced horses. He particularly specializes in markets stuffed with ‘mug punter money’ (cash from casual horse players and members of the public), where poor value odds are often at their most frequent – and the juicy prices easiest to place big money on without sending the odds plummeting. Handsome rebates given to him by betting companies – who benefit by getting a nice portion of the huge funds his firm drops onto the markets – are an extra incentive. Whichever game he’s played in, Ranogajec seems to have been wildly successful, and is a convincing rebuttal of the claim that the house always wins.

Top 30 Hints for Playing Blackjack

Beginners

Blackjack can and should be played with optimum strategy – giving the house a mere 0.5% edge over you – so make sure you learn the ropes with a free game before playing the real thing
Learn proper strategy by using an app with coaching, such as Blackjack MH (Apple) or BlackJack 21 (Android)
Top 30 Hints for Playing Blackjack
Once you’re got the rules sussed, try the online casinos, as these give you some great bonuses to start with
Before you go to a casino proper, try Live Dealer online. This halfway house gives you much of the excitement and buzz of the real thing, but with less pressure to grasp etiquette

Choosing a Table

The precise rules can vary dramatically from table to table. Make sure you know the ones for your table – which cards can you double down on, which cards can you split, and how often etc.
Do you have the option of surrender – and is that early or late?
Make sure you know both the minimum and maximum bids for a table before you sit down
Ensure that table is playing standard Blackjack – there are many variations, like Perfect Pairs, Super 21, and Progressive Blackjack, and these all have different rules
Choose the last seat where possible, allowing you to play directly against the dealer without the distraction of what the other players are doing
If possible, find a table with five decks – six or more decks puts you at a greater disadvantage

live dealer blackjack — Image Source: galacasino.com

Basic Playing Strategy

It helps to have a target to aim at, so assume that the dealer’s down card is a 10 – around a third of the cards available are
If a ten will put you above 21 (a ‘bust’ hand), then stick if the dealer is in the same situation – over time, the dealer will go bust more often than you will

When to Hit

Hit on 8 or less
If your hand totals 9, hit if the dealer is showing 7-9
If your hand totals 10, hit if the dealer is showing a 10
If your hand totals 11, hit if the dealer is showing an Ace

When to Stand

Stand if you have a 17 or higher
The exceptions to this rule are when you have a soft 17 (Ace with a 6) or a soft 18 (Ace with a 7). Always hit the soft 17, and hit the soft 18 if the dealer has 8-10

21review — Top 30 Hints for Playing Blackjack

Doubling Down, Splitting, and Insurance

If the hand is a 10 or an 11, always double down unless the dealer has an Ace
Only double down 9 if the dealer is showing 3-6
If you have a pair of Aces, 8s or 9s, always split them
But don’t split them if you have 7s or less
Ignore the insurance option unless you’re a card-counter who knows a lot of high cards are due

Money Management

Success in Blackjack is partly a matter of controlling your money, so never bid too much – the maximum bid should never be more than 5% of your bankroll
Put only a portion of your bankroll onto the table at one time. That way you’ll be given pause for thought before putting up the rest
It’s a moot point whether you should decrease your bet size when you’re doing badly. But you shouldn’t ever be increasing it in such a situation

Mind Management

Cool nerves are essential. Don’t drink before you play!
Take regular breaks – this is crucial
Stop playing as soon as you feel your concentration wavering
There’s little benefit to card counting online – the software generally reshuffles the deck with each hand