City

It was in the early 2000s that I first learned about a technique called “rhythm rolling” from my friend and fellow gambling author Frank Scoblete. Frank and I met periodically in Las Vegas when we were both card counting at blackjack. On one of my trips to Vegas, Frank excused himself and said he was going to play craps.

I received an email from a video poker player who asked me this question:

“I can never win at video poker. Are the video poker machines rigged?”

Ask a sharp advantage player what he thinks of the lottery and said AP will most likely laugh in your face. You don’t need to be James Grosjean to know that the lottery is strictly for suckers, dreamers and grandmothers. After all, the odds of winning the grand prize looms at around 1 in 292-million. To put things into perspective, the likelihood of being struck by lightning over the course of your lifetime: 1 in 3,000. Fortunately, nobody shared any of this information with Stefan Mandel.

(Note: I’m not telling this story just to brag about my good fortune but rather to use it as a teaching example for video poker players.)

In a previous article, I bemoaned my long royal flush drought in which I played about 270,000 hands between one royal flush and the next one.  Then boom … I found myself in another mini-drought beginning in July 2019, lasting until the middle of December 2019. I was hoping for one more royal before the year ended. Here’s what happened.

This expert strategy guide explains how to play blackjack when you’ve been dealt a pair of 4s. If you want to activate a lower house edge in blackjack games—you need to make the right decisions by using basic blackjack strategy.