Tips for playing online

When you look at the welcome bonus and all the other benefits from joining an online casino, playing online has real advantages over the real world alternatives. Because the virtual operation does not need a major building and significant number of people to run the games, all that saving can go into financial benefits for members. If you play regularly enough and qualify for VIP membership, you can find the casino more financially generous than through the real world comps. Nevertheless, you still need to play smart to give yourself the best chance of winning more than you lose.

How can you improve your chances of winning? Well, the bad news is you have to study. Even though every spin of the wheel is an independent event and what has happened has no bearing on what will happen, you still have to know all the rules and what the odds are on each bet. This is a game of chance, but which game you decide to play and how you bet can affect the outcome.

As you know from the information contained on other parts of this site, there are two versions of the game. The difference between the two lies in the number of zeros, i.e. if the ball lands on a zero, the house takes some or all of the bets depending on the local rules. In the European version, there is only one zero. This makes the house edge 2.63%. In the American version, there are two zeros. The house edge doubles to 5.26%. Thus, if you have the choice, always play the European version because this gives the house the lowest advantage. Always check the local rules. If the house plays the en prison rule, all even money bets stay on the table for the next spin of the wheel if a zero comes up. This has the effect of further reducing the European house edge to 1.35%, i.e. this version of the game gives you the best chance of winning. Now learn how to calculate the odds and always play the bets giving you the best chance of winning and avoid the bets with the worst odds. The following is a simple guide:

• single number bets including zero and double zero 35:1
• two neighboring numbers 17:1
• any three numbers in a row 11:1
• any of the four touching numbers in a corner 8:1
• five numbers, e.g. 1,2,3,0,00 6:1
• any six numbers in two rows 5:1
• any twelve numbers in a column 2:1
• dozens 2:1
• red/black, odd/even 1:1

Now the choice is yours. If you are playing roulette for "profit", set yourself a limit on the amount your are prepared to lose. Then play the bets with the bigger returns. If your luck is in and you hit one or two times, take your winnings. You can enjoy the rest of the evening at the casino's expense. The worst mistake anyone can make is to be seduced by the idea of a hot streak. The reality is clear. If you keep on playing roulette, you will lose all your winnings.

Keith Taft

Keith Taft is not well known to the general public, but professional blackjack players know him as an electronics genius who has spent more than thirty years devising high-tech equipment-computers, video cameras, and communication devices - to beat the casinos. Blackjack was his initial and prime target. His first blackjack computer, which he completed in 1972, weighed fifteen pounds. Over the years, as computer chip technology developed, his computers became smaller, faster, lighter and much more effective. By the mid-1970s, he had a device that weighed only a few ounces that could play perfect strategy based on the exact cards remaining to be dealt.

His son Marty's name would be right along his in the Blackjack Hall of Fame, as the two have worked as a good partners since Marty was a teenager. For thirty years they have jointly created ever-more-clever hidden devices to beat the casinos, trained teams of players in their use, and have personally gone into the casinos to get the money. Keith and Marty may, in fact, have literally invented the concept of computer "networking," as they were wiring computer-equipped players together at casino blackjack tables thirty years ago in their efforts to beat the games.

When Nevada had forbidden devices in 1985, it was result of a Taft device found on Keith's brother, Ted - a miniature video camera built into Ted's belt buckle that could relay an image of the dealer's hole card as it was being dealt to a satellite receiving dish mounted in a pickup truck in the parking lot, where an accomplice read the video image, then transferred Ted at the table the information he needed. An in-depth interview with Keith and Marty Taft was published in the Winter 2003-04 Blackjack Forum, and is available online.

Edward O. Thorp

Edward Oakley Thorp is widely regarded, by professional players as well as the general public, as the Father of Card Counting. It was in his book, Beat the Dealer, first published in 1962, that he presented his Ten-Count system, the first powerful winning blackjack system ever made available to the public. All card-counting systems in use today are variations of Thorp's Ten-Count.

When Thorp's book became a best seller, the Las Vegas casinos attempted to change the standard rules of blackjack, but their customers would not accept the changes and refused to play the new version of the game. So, the Vegas casinos went back to the old rules, but switched from dealing hand-held one-deck games to four-deck shoe games, a change that the players would accept. Unfortunately for the casinos, in 1966 Thorp's revised second edition of Beat the Dealer was published. This edition presented the High-Low Count, as developed by Julian Braun, a more powerful and practical counting system for attacking these new shoe games.

In 1961, Thorp and C. Shannon jointly invented the first wearable computer, a device that successfully predicted results in roulette. Thorp has an M.A. in Physics and a Ph.D. in mathematics, and has taught mathematics at UCLA, MIT, NMSU, and U.C. Irvine, where he also taught quantitative finance. For many years Ed Thorp wrote a column for the now-defunct Gambling Times magazine. Many of these columns were collected in a book titled The Mathematics of Gambling, published in 1984 by Lyle Stuart.

Blackjack Hall of Fame - Stanford Wong

Stanford Wong self-published his first book, Professional Blackjack, in 1975. It was later published by the Gambler's Book Club in Las Vegas, then revised and expanded numerous times and published by Wong's own company, Pi Yee Press.

Wong is widely known as one of the best analysts of systems and ways for beating the casinos. In his first book, he described a never-before-revealed table-hopping style of playing shoe games, a method of play now known as wonging. Professional Blackjack had a deep impact on serious pro-players because it provided card counters with an easy yet powerful method for attacking the abundant four-deck shoe games that had taken over Las Vegas. Many pros still think of card-counting opportunities as "pre-Wong" and "post-Wong."

In his second book, Blackjack in Asia - a book priced at $2,000 and one of the rarest gambling books sought by collectors today - Wong discusses the unique blackjack games he had discovered in Asian casinos as a professional player, along with the optimum strategies he had devised for beating them. The book also included underground advice for exchanging currencies in these countries on the black market, as well as an account of his own hassles with customs officials when he attempted to leave the Philippines with his winnings. Of all of Wong's books, this is my personal favorite, as it reveals more of his rebel personality than any of his later books.

In 1980, he published Winning Without Counting, priced at $200, and again, on a personal note, this is my second favorite book by Wong (and another collector's item if you can find one). He not only discusses many hole card techniques that had never before been mentioned in print-s-front-loading, spooking, and warp play-but he also delved into many clearly illegal methods of getting an edge over the house, including various techniques of bet-capping, card switching, card mucking, etc. He was widely criticized by those in the casino industry for the amusing way in which he discussed and analyzed such techniques, but anyone with half a brain could see that he was merely informing players with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor.

Wong subsequently published Tournament Blackjack (1987), Basic Blackjack (1992), Casino Tournament Strategy (1992), Blackjack Secrets (1993), and since 1979 has published various newsletters including Current Blackjack News, aimed at serious and professional players.

Mr. Stanford Wong is a life blackjack legend and we highly recommend his website http://www.bj21.com/ to anyone seriously interested in blackjack game.