There is nothing better than being able to relax from the comfort of your own home and play an online game of blackjack or poker. But wait- what if you do choose to go this route with your gaming? You’d want the best in the business, right? So often, people try to get online to play a great game of online poker and find themselves lost in the great big universe known as the internet, looking for the right game for them. When they do find one, they are stuck between a quality site that offers nice virtual games but shoddy customer service. They might even have that problem the other way around. Before you begin playing any online casino, you should know who you’re dealing with. Top online casinos offer you the best in online blackjack, slots online and more in addition to the safety, security, and familiarity of playing on a safe site. The casino online site that you choose should also have a variety of games to play. You can find yourself playing within minutes, not hours, waiting for a page to load or waiting for software to download. All this waiting around and you could have been in a car to the casino in the desert, right? Be smart when you go to the online casino of your choice and you’ll walk away more of a winner than you could have dreamed.

When I was young, so many years ago I can hardly remember, gambling was so much easier. You either got in your car or on an airplane, and went where people were playing casino games for real money, or you asked around and found out where the floating games were for that night. I guess when I was starting out, the illegal kind was always more exciting until you got to know everyone then it was down to a routine. After that, going to a real casino had the edge. But everything loses its shine eventually.

Then along came the internet with a whole lot more freedom. Although when you look around today there is a whole new bunch of casinos opening up, nothing really beats the convenience of sitting at home and playing your way through games in comfort. Yet, there is a “crackdown”. The US has been legislating. This has produced international litigation with Antigua taking action against the US. This is more action than you see in some casinos.

I suppose some of the motivation for regulation is the sense that online gaming is not regulated. Go into any real world casino, and you should always be “safe” except from your own gambling habit, of course. There are security cameras everywhere making sure no-one is going to cheat you. Regulators check the slots to make sure they are all working properly. Once you are online, there are no external eyes looking after you. You have to protect yourself. Except you do not know who the company is behind the online casino.

Another explanation for the US Government’s action is protectionism that too many online dollars means less profit for the real world gaming establishments in the US.

So why should anyone want to play online? All you have are a few animated versions of the casino games that lack any sense of physical involvement. Worse, some of the games just are not the same. For example, thanks to the random number generator, counting the cards in online blackjack is a waste of time.

But because the overheads for running an online casino are significantly less than the real world equivalents (paying salaries to all those countless people is not required), the online payout schedules are more generous. Online operators can afford to return more of the stake money to the players and still make a good profit. This means you get better odds on the slots and at the roulette table than you would in the real world. But even more importantly, once you are online, you can switch games at the click of a mouse. You no longer have to wait on other players or croupiers. There is always another game ready to play. Because you do not have people looking over your shoulder (and judging you), you have more freedom to learn new games or try out different strategies without people getting impatient with you. And finally, you can get free money. In the real world, you can get drinks, food and, sometimes, accommodation comped. Online, the only thing the casino can give you is a credit of money.

So does that mean online gaming is a “good thing”? The only thing wrong with it is that it is too easy to play. There you are at home or sitting in a hot spot with your wifi laptop and there is no-one to tap you on the shoulder to warn you that you are riding a losing streak into bankruptcy. But, so long as you have your gambling under control, you say when, where and how long you play. What can be better than that?

To the public at large, one of the most incomprehensible things about professional blackjack strategies is hole-card play. Hole-card play is not a single strategy, but a whole range of strategies. The one feature that can be found in all of these strategies is that the player either knows the dealer’s hole card, or has valuable information about that hole card, whether it’s a paint or not. To most casual blackjack players, this seems absolutely incredible and impossible, unless there is some sort of cheating going on. But it’s not impossible, and in fact, most hole-card strategies are perfectly legal.

In the Spring 2003 Blackjack Forum, Richard W. Munchkin, author of Gambling Wizards, interviewed “RC,” one of the most successful hole-carders of modem times. In introducing us to RC, Munchkin writes, “For every one hour spent on the table playing, the hole-card player may spend ten hours scouting… Most players, even if shown a dealer who is flashing, would not be able to spot the hole card anyway. Holecarders spend hundreds of hours training their eyes to see something that flashes by in a fraction of a second, often cast in shadow.”

James Grosjean’s Beyond Counting (now out of print, though a second edition has been announced) is widely regarded as the hole-carder’s bible. A meticulous mathematician, Grosjean was the first person to accurately figure out the hole-carder’s edge at blackjack with perfect reads and perfect play (just over 13 percent), and in addition to his work on blackjack, he provided some of the first detailed hole-card analyses of games like Three-Card Poker, Let It Ride, and Caribbean Stud Poker.

Hole-card players speak their own language and have their own heroes. Most consider card counting too weak to be worth the trouble. Many quickly attain notoriety in the casinos and a degree of fame among other pros that appreciate the rare skills they have developed. But let’s look at some of the forerunners of today’s players, describe some of the most common hole-card strategies, and get a historical overview of this type of legal strategy.

In 1980, Stanford Wong published a book, Winning Without Counting (now out of print), with an initial price tag of $200. To pros, the book was well worth it. Wong discussed many methods of hole-card play for the first time and provided the only detailed description and analysis of “warp” play ever in print.

What is warp play? In the old days, dealers used to manually peek under their tens and aces to see if they had a blackjack before satisfying the players’ hands. This constant bending up of the corners on the tens and aces tended to put a warp into these cards if the casino did not change its decks frequently. An observant player could see the arc in a dealer’s hole card created by hours of bending the corners of the tens and aces. Warp play was simply using this information to make strategy decisions.

Then, Ken Uston’s Million Dollar Blackjack was published by SRS Publishing in 1981. In addition to everything Uston wrote about card counting and team play, Uston went into more detail about two of the hole-card techniques Wong had revealed the year before in Winning lnthout Counting: “spooking” and “front-loading.” Uston, in fact, had become quite adept as a hole-card player after his first book, The Big Player, was published in 1977.

What is front-loading? A front loader is simply a sloppy dealer who flashes his hole card as he is placing it beneath his upcard. It’s actually a pretty descriptive term, since one common way that such a dealer inadvertently flashes the hole card is by tipping the face of the card up toward the “front” of the table as he is “loading” it. A player who sits in a seat that provides him a view of this card is said to be “front-loading.”

Spooking is something else again. It used to be standard procedure for dealers to manually peek under any 10 or ace to see if they had a blackjack, in which case they would immediately turn up the card and collect all bets without playing the hands. Some dealers, in peeking, angled the card in such a way that a person standing behind them, or sitting at another table on the other side of the same pit, could glimpse the card also. It wasn’t long before players started working in teams to take advantage of such dealers. The guy behind the dealer was called the spook. He would signal his buddies playing at the table with whatever information he could get on the hole card. Dealers don’t peek this way anymore, and this is one of the reasons why.

The roulette table attracts the largest number of players attempting to apply a betting system. The most prominent progressive betting system is the Martingale system, in which you double your bet after each loss. Another popular one is the Reverse Martingale, in which you cut your bet in half after each win. (Check out Chapter 3 for more about different wagering systems.)
I don’t recommend using any progressive betting system, because a streak of four or five bad spins can cripple your bankroll in less than ten minutes.
Despite all the systems advertised for sale, no magic bullet can help you beat a roulette wheel. Books on roulette systems are scams to separate you from your money. Why does someone want to share her amazing supersecret strat¬egy with you? If you’d written such a system, wouldn’t you prefer to just make a quick fortune, buy a small island, and retire? So beware of roulette pros. They make money by selling books, not by divulging a consistently winning roulette system.

Choosing which casino to play can be daunting. How can you locate the honest sites and weed out the bad guys? Instead of hacking your way through the jungle, follow the paths paved by other pioneers.

Several watchdog Web sites offer rankings, recommendations, warnings, and tips to maximize your online casino gambling experience. Check out their message boards in particular. Reading about others’ experiences — good and bad — with various sites can be incredibly helpful.

Fortunately, the vast majority of Internet casinos are safe to play, so it’s more important to know which places to avoid. (The watchdog sites cover those sites in their blacklisted section.) In fact, I have played at a number of cyber casinos and have been cheated only a few times. In almost every case, I could have avoided that aggravation if I had first visited a watchdog site before depositing any cold cash.

Just as financial planners advise you to diversify your investments, I suggest that you spread your gambling dollars among different casinos to help reduce risk. Even after you’ve done your homework and homed in on the best sites, divvy your money up among ten or so safe sites, instead of plunk¬ing $5,000 on one location.

You can usually request to cash out either all or part of the money in your account at any time. The best online casinos process your request immediately and cheerfully send the funds within a day. However, some shady sites may take weeks to pay while putting you off with a litany of excuses. As a result, I recommend only playing reputable casinos endorsed by the watchdog groups
In most cases, your money will be sent back to you via the same method you deposited. For example, if you funded your account through NETELLER, then the Internet casino uses that same vehicle to return money to you when you cash out. One exception is credit cards. For example, if your initial deposit of $200 was made with a credit card and you doubled your money, the online casino processes your $400 as such: The casino can only pay back $200 to your credit card; the casino has to pay you any winnings via another method, such as check, wire, and so on.
Transferring money to and from the casino is usually free, although some casinos back on a service charge (especially if you do multiple transactions a month). You may also have to pay bank wire and delivery fees.