01
Sep
Author: admin // Category:
blackjack,
casino,
divers,
news,
poker
The process of choosing a poker player to enter the Poker Hall of Fame is close to completion as we now have the votes of the public. For 2 months the public has voted for their favourite players.
The chosen players will then be analysed by a 16 member committee which will take the final decision as to whom is the most ‘virtuous’ of them. Besides the player nominated for 2010, the committee will also choose a player that will automatically enter in the next year’s selection process.
The criteria for entering the Poker Hall of Fame is:
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The player had to play against acknowledged top competition
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To play for high stakes
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To play consistently well
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To prove his/her abilities for a long period of time
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Or, for non-players, to have contributed to the development of the poker game in the long term
The 2010 nominations are now closed and the 10 players chosen by the public are:
20
Aug
Author: admin // Category:
blackjack,
divers,
news,
online gambling,
poker,
slots
PokerStars and Full Tilt are operating “illegally” in the US, declared the Bwin CEO’s, Norbert Teufelberger and Manfred Bodner, in an interview for EGRMagazine.com.
Bwin holds the 3rd position worldwide as a poker provider after PokerStars and Full Tilt and the CEO’s believe that their site would have been the first if they hadn’t withdrawn from the US market in 2006.
Teufelberger thinks that these two websites are ranked the first two in the world solely due to their monopoly over the American market:
“It’s not because they have premier marketing skills or premier technology, what they have is hundreds of millions of dollars from what we see as an illegal market. We would expect that once the US regulates, these two companies will not have access to the market, and once that happens we’ll then see who the leader will be. They say they’re not operating illegally but I think they are.”
Teufelberger puts forth the hypothesis that once the US online gambling market will be deregulated, PokerStars and Full Tilt will not be offered a license to continue to operate. He wonders if they will be prosecuted, let alone having withdrawn their licenses.
“I used to be personally licensed and operated in the land-based environment in the US so I know how stringent the US authorities are in their licensing process and I cannot imagine that a company which in the view of the DoJ (Department of Justice) and several state licensing authorities in the US, that acts illegally, will be able or qualify to get a licence. In my view this will be absolutely impossible. What does that mean in the end? I don’t know. They may be prosecuted, they may not be prosecuted”.
The Bwin CEOs are aware that PokerStars and Full Tilt could nonetheless be granted a license in the newly deregulated US market. Should this happen, then pulling out of the US market in 2006 will have been their “biggest mistake”.
03
Jun
Author: admin // Category:
casino,
divers,
news,
online gambling,
slots
Ladbrokes Casino, the winner of the ‘online casino operator of the year’ award at the 2010 Gaming Awards, has launched the June summer slots offers.
You can find below a summary of their summer offers:
Hat Trick Hero – if you play UK Pub slots you can win one of the Hat-trick Hero games daily and a prize of £200. To qualify for the Hat-Trick Hero game the player must deposit and purchase £25 and have a turnover of £100 at a UK Pub slot or make a combination of 3 UK Pub slots every day.
£30K Prize Draw – the sum of £30,000 is up for grabs as you can win £50 daily if you comply with the following conditions: play on the selected slots - Mega Moolah, Burning Desire and Thunderstruck, deposit £20 and turnover £20 every day. There will be 20 randomly selected players rewarded daily with £50 each.
Summer Holiday Free Spins - Ladbrokes Casino offers 25 free spins daily to 20 randomly selected players at the Summer Holidays slot which you can find in the Download Casino. You can also play Summertime and Beach Babes besides Summer Holidays. To qualify for the spins, the deposit should be £25 and the turnover £150 on any of the slots mentioned earlier.
At the 2010 Gaming Awards Ladbrokescasino was voted “the top dog” in the industry of online casinos. The judging panel was formed of 25 specialists from the gaming industry. The judging criteria ranged from quality and variety of games offered, customer services, to innovation on the casino market and the use of modern technologies.
“We’re really proud to receive this award. We have a fantastic team at Ladbrokes and this is great recognition of all the hard work they have done. 2009 was a great year for us and we believe 2010 will be better, it has certainly started the right way” said Natalie Coles, Head of Ladbrokescasino.com.
26
Jun
Author: admin // Category:
blackjack,
casino,
divers
An MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) students team, called Black Jack (Blackjack), became famous in the early 90’s for having won millions of dollars at blackjack by using a technique called “counting the cards”.Does it sound exceptional? Still..
This group of young students was formed in Cambridge, on the desks of the most famous University of Science USA. They focused on casino games and more specifically on the Blackjack game, and realized that this game was the only weapon they had to defeat the casino.
Statistically, Blackjack offers a small advantage at the beginning in comparison with other casino games. In addition to the basic strategy which consists of knowing when to shoot or when to stay, players can use a strategy of placing the bet, counting the cards and monitoring the cards shuffle in order to improve their probabilities.
Counting the cards is a very difficult method, but over the years, 60 techniques have been published in order to facilitate this method. Mathematician students have been attracted by the substantial amounts of money they could win by using this method.
The MIT group has therefore combined the advantages of playing individually and those of team playing, for the counting of cards, in order to maximize their incomes and dissimulate their behavior.
The team leader, Johnny Chang, said that in addition to the counting techniques, the group used also methods of monitoring the cards shuffle and tracking the aces. While the counting of the cards gave them an advantage of 2%,, the techniques used by the group gave them an extra 4% advantage over the casino.
The team recruited their members through leaflets distributed throughout the campus. Interested students have given some tests and if they succeeded, they were trained with the rest of the team.
The plan was clever and sophisticated. Indeed, while it is very easy to detect an isolated cards counter, it is much more difficult to spot a team of counters who have no connection one to another at first sight.
The most impressive is that they all had false identities to help them escape the surveillance of casinos, and that the players were continually changed in order to renew the familiar faces at the game tables.
The division of the group was simple: there were the detectors (spotters), gorillas and the big players. The detectors were players who did not earn and who played at a table yet counting cards but betting only the minimum sums. When the count became positive, therefore advantageous because the number of high cards in stake was important, the detector signaled the gorillas or the big players. The gorillas did not count and were pleased to play big bets. The major players themselves were nothing but more experienced gorillas who counted the cards together with the detectors and managed to dissimulate the casinos by varying their bets.
The trick was well planned because the casinos could not accuse the players of counting the cards because the gorillas or the big players were not present at the table in the “burning” moment.
Supervisors and casino managers were therefore abused for a period of time, not even imagining that an organization of cards counting could exist. But the deception did not last long. A company named “Strategic Investments” discovered the team. Those students who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars have become suspects as the sums they have spent were not normal for young students.
After a few loosing sessions, the group was dismantled by itself. The story said that many students were banned from casinos,surveillance teams were provided with scholar year books (books found in universities, identifying students with their photos) in order to recognize them easily.
Today, these techniques are outdated- croupiers shuffle the cards very quickly, have several card games and sometimes use several clogs.
As to speak about on line blackjack, it is pointless to try any counting technique, as the games are continuously mixed. The movie by Kevin Spacey “Las Vegas 21″ traces the history of these students. A movie as exciting as the extraordinary story it tells…
09
May
Author: admin // Category:
divers,
poker
Harrah’s Entertainment has officially announced the dates and places for the second European World Series of Poker event presented by Betfair. The 2008 edition of WSOP Europe will be held again in three Londoner clubs and international casinos, the same places where the maiden event was held last year – St. James (Fifty), Leicester Square (Empire Casino) and Marble Arch (Sportsman).
EWSOP 2008 begins September 19 and is held until October 1st 2008, but the exact days are still processing.
Betfair returns as the main sponsor of this event, and brings the champion on the main event EWSOP 2007, Annette “Annette_15” Oberstad from Norway as their professional poker player. The Internet star has proven that her online success was not a game and that she has managed to defeat the aces, including former winners of EWSOP, poker legends: Doyle Brunson, Phil Hellmuth and Johnny Chan. Oberstad’s victory was worthed ₤1 million ($2,013,102), the biggest award ever to be won by a woman at poker. Oberstad is still too young to compete at the WSOP events in the United States, where the minimum age is 21, but she will compete at the London events in order to protect her title.
“It was a very long action range for Europeans last year”, said Jeffrey Pollack, World Series of Poker spokesman.”There are many, many talented players in the European Poker Comunity, and I think this fact has taken by surprise some of the world’s best poker players. I believe they have not forgotten what has happened last year and i think young players will carry a stronger battle in 2008.”
“Last year held an exceptional tour that defeated any expectation”, said David Yu, CEO, Betfair, and the qualification stages have already began on this site.