A.P Heat

Earlier this month I was in Las Vegas presenting my Advanced Advantage Play seminar with Bill Zender. The day before the seminar, I walked into severalcasinos on the Las Vegas strip. What immediately got my attention was a visually apparent increase in the number of table games. During the seminar, I asked the group if my observations had any merit. Several participantsconfirmed that there was an increase in the number of table games at their property. Time for a survey!

During a recent trip to Las Vegas, I saw a new (to me) blackjack side bet in a downtown casino called Golden 21 (G21). What struck me as immediately suspect were events listed in the pay table corresponding to the player getting an unsuited blackjack, a suited blackjack or a suited A/K. Wagers based around blackjacks are usually very vulnerable to card counting. However, in the case of G21, there are also events in the pay table paying if the hand is a straight (consecutive ranks) or a pair, so the most obvious vulnerability was certainly mitigated.

I have been trying to get a sense of the landscape of casino proprietary table games across the United States. I’ve examined CEC’s database of table games in this post. I’ve done a casino-by-casino survey of Las Vegas casinos in this article.  I researched the approved table games by state in this post.

The High Tie blackjack side bet (HT) dates back at least to 2004, where it is mentioned in this article. I recently ran into this bet at a casino I was visiting. After all these years, it’s still around. In fact, it is also part of the DigiDeal lineup.  This wager pays when the player is dealt blackjacks and pairs, with bonuses for suited hands.

Ultimate Texas Hold'em (UTH) is a rich source of advantage play opportunities. This post considers yet another possibility: when the player knows one of the two cards he will be dealt in advance of placing his initial bet. I often refer to this knowledge as "top carding," though the known card can be either player card. Knowledge of one player card can be gained, for example, by edge sorting, accidental exposure, card location, skilled cutting, shuffler issues, incidental marks on the cards and outright cheating. Whatever the means, the edge the player can get is extraordinary.

Back in 2012, I was very fortunate to be able to speak at the annual convention of the Casino Chip and Gaming Token Collectors Club. There was an expo associated with the convention, where people were selling casino collectibles of all sorts. My interest was in obtaining a collection that had a single card representing each distinct design used by each U.S. casino, as well as casinos worldwide.

I recently learned about the Deuces Wild (DW) blackjack side bet from a thread started by a quizzical poster on the Wizard of Vegas message board. This side bet is trivial to describe. The outcome for DW is completely determined by the initial two cards the player is dealt. DW wins if one of the player's first two cards is a deuce, otherwise it loses. If the player's winning hand is 2/X, then the winning payout is based on the rank of the card X. This post presents DW dealt from a six-deck shoe.

The game of Ultimate Three Card Poker is a version of Three Card Poker where the dealer exposes one of his three cards before the player acts. It may seem that this solves the ubiquitous "hole-card" problem for Three Card Poker, especially if the card that is flipped face-up is the bottom card from the three-card packet delivered by the shuffle machine. However, it is still possible that the player sees one of the two remaining dealer hole-cards. I considered how to beat the game in this unlikely circumstance.