Interesting aspects of Five-card stud
Posted on July 23, 2008
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Popularity
During the American Civil War, Five-card stud enjoyed a wide popularity. But the once famous table game has seen a gradual decline in its popularity. Despite this drop in status, Five-card stud is still enjoyed by many players worldwide.
Major tournaments
Five-card stud was one of the preliminary events in the World Series of Poker in 1971, 1972, 1973 and 1974. All four of these events were won by Bill Boyd, who won a total of $80,000 from these four events, the only WSOP bracelets he won. Due to the declining popularity of Five-card stud, it was left out of the 1975 World Series of Poker and has been absent from all subsequent World Series of Poker schedules. Although Five-card stud hasn’t been featured in major tournaments since the 70s, it was occasionally still offered in the 1990s in both Europe and North America.
Cash games
Five-card stud was limited to small home games and small casino games until becoming available at some online poker cardrooms.
Five-card stud in popular culture
In the 1965 film, The Cincinnati Kid (directed by Norman Jewison), Five-card stud is the game played by “the Kid” (Steve McQueen) and “the Man” (Edward G. Robinson) heads-up. There has been much debate amongst poker critics about the likelihood of the final hand ever coming up in a heads-up game of five-card stud.
More recently, in the television series “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, the crew is sometimes seen playing poker, which is nearly always five-card stud.
Trivia
The phrase “ace in the hole” is a reference to Five-card stud, since a hidden ace is very powerful in the game and gives the player a hidden advantage.
A five-step guide to Five-card stud poker
Posted on July 23, 2008
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Five-card stud is the earliest form of the card game, stud poker, originating during the American Civil War, but is less commonly played today than many other more popular poker games - clear from its absence from the World Series of Poker. It is still a popular game in parts of the world, especially in Finland where a specific variant of five-card stud called S
Five-card draw, the oldest form of poker
Posted on July 21, 2008
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Five-card draw is the oldest form of poker and often the first variant learned by most players, the game they grew up playing around the kitchen table. Five-card draw is the game you must have seen in numerous poker scenes in old westerns. It is common in home games although it is rare in casino and tournament play. In this game, your goal is to make the best five-card hand after one draw. Like hold’em, it’s a game that’s easy to learn and play, but takes a lifetime to master.
Gameplay / Basic rules
The game is played by 2-5 players. A standard 52-card deck is used. Five Card Draw can be played as a Limit, Pot limit or No limit game. In five card draw, you do not get to see any of your opponents’ cards. The only information you have about their hands is how they bet and how many cards they draw. Here is the sequence of action for Five-card draw.
Home games typically use an ante, the initial bet made by everyone. Online five card draw is played with blinds. Before the cards are dealt, the first two players to the left of the dealer post a small and a big blind respectively to create a starting pot.
Each player is dealt five cards, one at a time, all face down. The remaining deck is placed aside, often protected by placing a chip or other marker on it. Players pick up the cards and hold them in their hands, being careful to keep them concealed from the other players, then a round of betting occurs.
The first betting round begins with the player to the dealer’s left, and the second round begins with the player who opened the first round. In casino play the first betting round begins with the player to the left of the big blind, and subsequent rounds begin with the player to the dealer’s left.
The first player after the big blind has the option to fold, call, or raise. Action continues clockwise around the poker table until betting is complete for the round.
If more than one player remains after the first round, the “draw” phase begins. Each player specifies how many of his cards he wishes to replace, and discards them. The deck is retrieved, and each player is dealt in turn from the deck the same number of cards he discarded so that each player again has five cards. The rules for online 5 card draw are a little different that most home games. You can draw 5 new cards if you like.
A second “after the draw” betting round occurs beginning with the player to the dealer’s left or else beginning with the player who opened the first round (the latter is common in home games, when antes are used instead of blinds). This is followed by a showdown if more than one player remains, in which the player with the best hand wins the pot. After the pot is awarded to the best hand, a new game of Five Draw is ready to be played.
If two or more hands have the same value, the pot is equally split among them.
House rules
A common “house rule” in some places is that a player may not replace more than three cards, unless he draws four cards while keeping an ace (or wild card). This rule is only needed for low-stakes social games where many players will stay for the draw, and will help avoid depletion of the deck. In more serious games such as those played in casinos it is unnecessary and generally not used. A rule that is used by many casinos is that a player is not allowed to draw five consecutive cards from the deck. In this case, if a player wishes to replace all five of his cards, he is given four of them in turn, the other players are given their draws, and then the dealer returns to that player to give him his fifth replacement; if no other player draws it is necessary to deal a burn card first.
Another common house rule is that the bottom card of the deck is never given as a replacement, to avoid the possibility of someone who might have seen it during the deal using that information. If the deck is depleted during the draw before all players have received their replacements, the last players can receive cards chosen randomly from among those discarded by previous players. For example, if the last player to draw wants three replacements but there are only two cards remaining in the deck, the dealer gives the player the one top card he can give, then shuffles together the bottom card of the deck, the burn card, and the earlier players’ discards (but not the player’s own discards), and finally deals two more replacements to the last player.
A brief introduction to Backgammon
Posted on July 18, 2008
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Backgammon is a board game for two players in which the playing pieces, called checkers, are moved according to the roll of dice. A backgammon set consists of a board, two sets of 15 checkers, two pairs of dice, a doubling cube, and dice cups. A player wins by removing all of his checkers from the board. There are many variants of backgammon, most of which share common traits. Backgammon is a member of the tables family, one of the oldest classes of board games in the world.
Although luck plays an important role, there is a large scope for strategy. With each roll of the dice a player must choose from numerous options for moving his checkers and anticipate possible counter-moves by the opponent. Players may raise the stakes during the game. There is an established repertory of common tactics and occurrences.
Like chess, backgammon has been studied with great interest by computer scientists. Owing to this research, backgammon software has been developed capable of beating world-class human players.
International competition
Prior to 1979, there was no single world championship competition in backgammon, although a number of major tournaments were held in Las Vegas, Nevada and the Bahamas. Since 1979, the World Backgammon Championship in Monte Carlo has been widely acknowledged as the top international tournament. The Monte Carlo tournament draws thousands of players and spectators, and is played over the course of a week.
By the 21st century, the largest international tournaments had established the basis of a tour for top professional players. Major tournaments are held yearly in St. Tropez, Rio de Janeiro, Dallas, and Venice. PartyGaming sponsored a tournament in the Bahamas in January 2007 with a prize pool of one million dollars, the largest for any tournament to date.
Gambling
When backgammon is played for money, the most common arrangement is to assign a monetary value to each point, and to play to a certain score, or until either player chooses to stop. The stakes are raised by gammons, backgammons, and use of the doubling cube. Backgammon is sometimes available in casinos. As with most gambling games, successful play requires a combination of luck and skill, as a single dice roll can sometimes significantly change the outcome of the game.
Internet play
Backgammon software has been developed not only to play and analyze games, but also to facilitate play between humans over the internet. Dice rolls are provided by random or pseudorandom number generators. Real-time online play began with the First Internet Backgammon Server in 1992. It is the longest running non-commercial backgammon server and retains an international community of backgammon players. Yahoo Games offers a Java-based online backgammon room, and MSN Games offers a game based on ActiveX. Online gambling providers began to expand their offerings to include backgammon in 2006.
Backgammon has recently become a popular online gambling activity for many Internet gamers and attracts all different sorts of people and players. You can play online backgammon and find thousands of players from all over the world. You also get the chance of becoming a world champ in the most lucrative Backgammon events and tournaments.
Famous roulette gamblers: Charles Wells
Posted on July 18, 2008
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Charles Wells (1841-1926), one of the most famous gamblers in history, is one of the men who broke the bank at Monte Carlo, made famous by the song composed by Fred Gilbert. Although the first famous gambler to get publicity in 1873 was Joseph Jagger, the above mentioned song, “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo”, was not written until 1892. Therefore, it seems that Wells is a more likely inspiration for the song.
Francois Blanc, the owner of Monte Carlo’s casino, wanted to get publicity from stories of big winnings. In the French language, if a gambler wins more than the chips on the table, he is said to have “faire sauter la banque”, which was translated as “breaking the bank” (literally to blow up the bank or the safe). A black shroud was placed over the table until replacement chips were brought in. However, no gambler has come close to winning the whole reserves of the casino.
In July 1891 Wells went to Monte Carlo to write himself into history. He had defrauded £4,000 from investors with claims of fake inventions. In an eleven-hour session Wells ‘broke the bank’ twelve times, winning a million francs. At one stage he won 23 times out of 30 successive spins of the wheel. Wells returned to Monte Carlo in November of that year and won again. During this session he made another million francs in three days, including successful bets on the number five for five consecutive turns. Despite hiring private detectives the Casino never discovered Wells’s system; Wells later admitted it was just a lucky streak. His system was the high-risk martingale, doubling the stake to make up losses.
In April 1892, Fred Gilbert wrote a popular song, “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo”. The song was popularized by the music hall star, Charles Coborn. The song helped Wells to become a celebrity. He explained that his success was because he was a brilliant engineer, who had also invented a fuel-saving device for steam-ships. He persuaded many wealthy people to invest in his invention. He made another trip to Monte Carlo in a large yacht in the winter of 1892 with his mistress. Wells broke the bank six more times but then lost his money and that of his investors, some of whom had sent additional money that he said was needed for repairs to his device.
Wells was arrested at Le Havre and extradited to England. He was found guilty of fraud at the Old Bailey and given eight years. Later Wells served another three-year sentence for fraud and immigrated to France, where a financial scam earned him another five year sentence.
In 1926, Wells died poor in Paris.
In 1935, there was a film called “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo”, and in 1983, Michael Butterworth wrote a book of the same name.
A brief introduction to Omaha Poker
Posted on July 16, 2008
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Omaha hold ‘em (or Omaha holdem or simply Omaha) is a community card poker game (often referred to as a “flop game”) similar to Texas hold ‘em, where each player is dealt four cards and must make his best hand using exactly two of them, plus exactly three of the five community cards. The exact origination of the game is unknown, but casino executive Robert Turner first brought Omaha into a casino setting when he introduced the game to Bill Boyd who offered it as a game at the Las Vegas Golden Nugget Casino (calling it “Nugget Hold’em”.)
There are two variations of the game, Omaha High only and Omaha Hi/Lo split. It can be played with the betting being a structured Limit game or you can find No Limit and Pot Limit games.
In Limit Omaha Poker, there is a specific betting limit applied in each game and on each round of betting.
In Pot Limit Omaha Poker, a player can bet what is in the pot (for example, $100 into a $100 pot).
Pot-Limit Omaha is the second-most-common form of poker in the world today. Before the 2003 poker boom, Omaha was much more prevalent in American cardrooms, and was the most popular cash game in many rooms around Europe.
Texas Hold’em has become the poker standard across the world, leaving Omaha the most popular alternate game. Every major tournament tour brand (WPT, WSOP, LAPT …) regularly spreads Omaha events, with buy-ins ranging from small to championship level.
The rules of play for Omaha make the game into much more of a “drawing” or “action” game than a typical Hold’em game at the same limits. Because of the nature of the game, Omaha is rarely if ever played as a No-Limit game. Action/drawing games require more structure than Hold’em, making the game work best as a Limit- or Pot-Limit-only endeavor.
In Hold’em, the first two betting rounds (pre-flop and flop) are the most important, while in Omaha pre-flop is far less important than the flop and turn. In fact, when comparing Hold’em to Omaha, it’s common to refer to Hold’em as a “flop game,” while Omaha is characterized as a “turn game” and a “nut game.”
A handy guide to learning Texas Hold ‘Em
Posted on July 15, 2008
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Texas Hold ‘Em (or Texas Holdem) is the primary version of Poker played in many casinos, and it’s the version seen on television shows like the Travel Channel’s World Poker Tour and ESPN’s World Series of Poker.
Hold’em poker is played with a standard 52 card deck. The difference lies in the use of five community cards ‘ by this we mean five cards that are dealt face up on the table and that all players share. Every player receives two cards from the dealer ‘ these are known as hole or pocket cards and make up your starting hand.
Every round of poker starts with each player receiving their two hole cards. The winner is the player who, after several betting rounds, can use his hole cards together with the five community cards to create the best ranked five-card poker hand.
Here are some ground rules for Texas Hold ‘Em Poker.
The Shuffle, The Deal and The Blinds
The dealer shuffles a standard 52-card deck.
In casinos, the dealer never plays. A round disc - known as a “dealer button” - moves clockwise from player to player with each hand. The button marks which player would be the dealer if the deal were advanced from player to player as the game went along.
Most Texas Hold ‘Em Poker games start with the two players to the left of the dealer (the button) putting a predetermined amount of money into the pot before any cards are dealt, ensuring that there’s something to play for on every hand. This is called “posting the blinds.” Most often, the “first blind” - the player to the left of the dealer - puts up half the minimum bet, and the “second blind” puts up the full minimum bet.
Each player is dealt two cards, face down. These are known as the “hole cards.”
Betting Begins
A round of betting takes place, beginning with the player to the left of the two who posted the blinds. Players can call, raise, or fold when it’s their turn to bet.
The Flop
After the first betting round, the dealer discards the top card of the deck. This is called burning the card and is done to ensure that no one accidentally saw the top card, and to help prevent cheating.
The dealer then flips the next three cards face up on the table. These cards are called the “flop.”
Eventually, a total of five community cards will be placed face up on the table. Players can use any combination of the community cards and their own two hole cards to form the best possible five-card Poker hand.
After the flop, another round of betting takes place, beginning with the player to the left of the dealer (the button). During this and all future rounds of betting, players can check, call, raise, or fold when it’s their turn to bet.
The turn / Fourth Street
The dealer burns another card and plays one more face up onto the table. This, the fourth community card, is called the “turn” or “Fourth Street.”
The player to the left of the dealer (the button) begins the third round of betting.
The river / Fifth Street
The dealer burns another card before placing the final face-up card on the table. This card is called the “river” or “Fifth Street.”
Final betting and the winner
Players can now use any combination of seven cards - the five community cards and the two hole cards known only to them - to form the best possible five-card Poker hand.
The fourth and final round of betting starts with the player to the left of the dealer (the button).
After the final betting round, all players who remain in the game reveal their hands. The player who made the initial bet or the player who made the last raise shows their hand first.
The player with the best hand wins
The history of bingo
Posted on July 12, 2008
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Like many other popular games of chance, bingo has a fascinating history. Few people know that bingo has been around for nearly 500 years. But the first bingo game ever played was not quite the game that we all know today. Here are some less known facts to impress your friends with, while you are playing an online bingo game.
In the U.S., bingo was originally called “beano”. It was a country fair game where a dealer would select numbered discs from a cigar box and players would mark their cards with beans. They yelled “beano” if they won.
The earliest form of bingo was played in Italy and dates back to 1530. Back then it was a lottery-style game, known as “Lo Giuoco Code Lotto” or “Lo Giuoco del Lotto D’Italia,” and is still played in Italy every Saturday.
In the late 1770s, the game was introduced from Italy to France where it was called “Le Lotto”, a game played among the most intellectual and wealthiest of Frenchmen. The Germans also played a version of the game in the 1800s, but they used it as an educational tool, to teach children about mathematics, spelling and history. In some areas, bingo online is also used for education today.
The game reached North America in 1929, when it became known as “beano”. It was first played at a carnival near Atlanta, Georgia. If the caller yells a number present on the player’s card, they place a bean on the said number. When the beans form a straight line in any direction, the winner shouts ‘Beano!’ A New York toy salesman Edwin S. Lowe overheard someone accidentally yell “bingo” instead of “beano” and decided to rename the game “bingo”. He hired a Columbia University math professor, Carl Leffler, to help him increase the number of combinations in bingo cards. By 1930, Leffler had invented 6,000 different bingo cards. It is rumoured that Leffler then went insane.
A Catholic priest from Pennsylvania asked Lowe about using bingo to help raise church funds. Therefore, bingo started being played in churches and became increasingly popular. By 1934, an estimated 10,000 bingo games were played every week at least.
In 1968, under the Gaming Act of 1968, bingo is formalized in the UK. In 1986 the National bingo game was launched in the UK. By then, online bingo was still a speck on the horizon!
Today, more than 3 million people regularly play bingo offline, with numbers soaring in online bingo. Also, more than $90 million dollars are spent on bingo each week in North America alone.
Famous roulette gamblers: Joseph Jagger
Posted on July 10, 2008
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Everyone knows a few famous poker players. As a famous casino game, roulette, too, has its amazing players both in the past and the present day.
In the mid 1800’s Joseph Jagger, a British engineer, made a huge name for himself. In a brief but exciting roulette career, Jagger went down in gambling history (specifically roulette history) as “The Man Who Broke the Bank in Monte Carlo.”
Born in September 1830 in the village of Shelf in England, Joseph Hobson Jagger (sometimes reported as Jaggers) was a mechanic and engineer in the cotton industry. In 1873, he decided to apply his mechanical and engineering knowledge to the game of roulette. He seriously doubted the pure randomness of the roulette wheel. He believed that each individual wheel was built in a way as to create imbalances that would determine a bias in favor of particular numbers. These imbalances could skew the results of a roulette spin and a savvy gambler could take advantage of these discrepancies.
Eager to put his theory to the test, he hired 6 workers to secretly record the outcomes of the roulette wheels at the Beaux-Arts casino in Monte Carlo. Each clerk manned a different wheel. When he analyzed the results, Jagger found that five of the roulette wheels produced the random results that one would expect. On the sixth wheel, however, he found that nine particular numbers (7, 8, 9, 17, 18, 19, 22, 28 and 29) occurred more frequently than the others. Jagger concluded that the wheel was biased, that is imperfectly balanced.
He therefore placed his first bets on 7 July 1875 and quickly won a considerable amount of money, £14,000 (equivalent to around 50 times that amount, or £700,000 in 2005).
The Beaux-Arts Casino, of course, was not happy to be losing so much money. During the night, while the casino was closed, it moved all the roulette wheels around to different tables. The next morning, Jagger went to his usual roulette table but, facing an unbiased wheel, he did not win as he expected. He then realized that a tiny scratch that he had previously noticed on his biased wheel was no longer there. He surveyed the room, and found his biased roulette wheel, with its tell-tale scratch, at a different table. He started gambling again, and raised his total winnings to more than £60,000 and had a slew of impressed fellow gamblers copying his bets.
In response the casino rearranged the wheels, which threw Jagger into confusion. After a losing streak, Jagger finally recalled that a scratch he noted on the biased wheel wasn’t present. Looking for this telltale mark, Jagger was able to locate his preferred wheel and resumed winning. Counterattacking again, the casino moved the frets, metal dividers between numbers, around daily. Over the next two days Jagger lost and gave up, but he took his remaining earnings, two million francs, then about £65,000 (around £3,250,000 in 2005), and left Monte Carlo never to return.
Jagger resigned from his job at the mill and invested his money in property. He is buried at Bethel Church, Shelf.
In 1892, Fred Gilbert wrote a popular song, “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” that is mistakenly attributed to Jagger’s exploits. Instead, the song is a celebration of Charles Wells, another Englishman, who in 1891 won handsomely in Monte Carlo. The song was popularized by the music hall star, Charles Coburn.
An introduction to Blackjack
Posted on July 9, 2008
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Also known as Twenty-one, Vingt-et-un (French for Twenty-one), or Pontoon, Blackjack is one of the most popular casino card games in the world.
Much of blackjack’s popularity is due to the mix of chance with elements of skill, and the publicity that surrounds card counting (calculating the probability of advantages based on the ratio of high cards to low cards). The casino version of the game should not be confused with the British card game Black Jack (a variant of Crazy Eights).
Blackjack has soared in popularity with the 2008 release of the recent Hollywood film “21″ which has taken the world by storm over the last months. Based on a true story, the film is about a group of MIT students who, playing Blackjack, employed sophisticated card-counting techniques to legally take millions of dollars from several Vegas casinos.
History of blackjack
Blackjack’s precursor was vingt-et-un (”twenty-one”), which originated in French casinos around 1700, and did not offer the 3:2 bonus for a two-card 21. When 21 was first introduced in the United States it was not very popular, so gambling houses tried offering various bonus payouts to get the players to the tables. One such bonus was a 10-to-1 payout if the player’s hand consisted of the ace of spades and a black Jack (either the Jack of clubs or the Jack of spades). This hand was called a “blackjack” and the name stuck to the game even though the bonus payout was soon abolished. As the game is currently played, a ‘blackjack’ may not necessarily contain a jack or any black cards at all.
Getting started - Basic blackjack rules
There is one dealer and normally between 1 to 5 players plopped down in front of him/her. Before the dealer begins issuing cards, players set their wagers down on the table. Depending on the table at which you?re playing, these can range from a $1 minimum to a $500 maximum.
Each Blackjack player competes 1-on-1 with the Dealer (or Croupier) and the goal is to have a hand which totals 21, or beats the Dealer’s hand by coming as close to 21 as possible without surpassing it or ‘busting.’ If the first two cards you get are an ace and a ten (or, any other face card) you’ve got “Blackjack” or a “natural” 21 which pays 1.5x your original wager.
A Blackjack always beats a hand that totals 21, but requires more than the first two cards to do so. A face card is counted as 10 and cards from 2-10 are counted according to their face values. Aces can be counted as either 1 or 11. A “hard hand” is a hand that does not contain an ace or contains an ace that can only be counted as 1 so as not to bust. A dealer’s ace always counts as 11.
Each Blackjack player receives 2 cards and the aim is to reach a total of 21 with your cards, or to be closer to 21 than the dealer/croupier who, of course, is also competing in the game. Players can receive as many cards as they wish. This is achieved by what’s known as hitting. Or they can choose to stand and receive no more cards. When a tie occurs between the player and the dealer, the hand becomes a push and the player keeps his bet. Generally speaking, dealers are required to hit when they have 16 or less, and will stop when they have 17 or more.
