Occasionally players do check on the final round,
so what happens then?
Most casinos and card rooms still have the player
who made the last bet
or raise show their cards first, although, I have
seen in a few card
rooms that in this situation, the player nearest
the button shows their
hand first.
Dear
Mark,
If you had to make but one bet on a roulette table,
what would it be?
You've mentioned in the past playing on a single
zero wheel if you can
find one, but is there any bet that is better
than another on that
table? Frank S.
Hip,
hip, Frank, always go for searching out a single
zero roulette
game, as that little extra effort -- if successful
-- allows you to
chop the house edge from 5.26% to 2.63%. Now,
that's something; you cut
it in half! But your base question still remains:
is there one bet
that stands out over all others on a single zero
game?
Yep,
Frank, there's one. The absolute best bet is an
"even-money" wager
on a French (or single zero) wheel that offers
the En Prison
(Surrender) option. The house edge with this one
wager is slashed to
1.35%.
And
what the heck do I mean by En Prison? Guess.
The
French phrase "en prison" signifies
that if you're betting an even
money outside wager like red, and the next number
called is green 0,
the dealer won't snatch your losing chips. Instead,
he or she will put
a small marker on top of your bet. It's then en
prison, Frank; your bet
is temporarily held hostage until the outcome
of the next spin. If
black or the green 0 appears on the next spin,
you would then lose your
entire original wager. But if red reappears, the
dealer will remove the
en prison marker and you are free to either pick
up your bet or replay
it.
By
the way, Frank, when I mentioned above "one
bet that stands out over
all others," it's important to note that
most players erroneously
believe that certain wagers on a roulette table
are superior to others.
Not so. All bets, except one (the five-number
bet, 0, 00, 1, 2, and 3)
suffer the same 5.26% house edge on a double zero
wheel. Switching to a
single zero game guillotines the house edge about
in half on every
wager on the layout except for the En Prison bet.
Dear Mark,
I've noticed that some casinos offer more than
two-times odds on the
crap table. How much of the house edge am I whittling
away by playing 5X or even 10X odds? Duncan M.
Below
is the casino advantage on your total bet when
taking odds
combined with your pass line wager. Without placing
an odds bet, the
house edge is 1.41%; on 1X odds it's 0.85%; on
2X odds 0.61%; on 5X
odds 0.33%, and on10X odds 0.18%.
Dear
Mark,
For every new hand in video poker, are you playing
on a never-ending
deck or is the deck reshuffled? Billie F.
Casinos
do not use a perpetual deck in video poker. For
example, on a
Jacks-or-Better game, each new hand begins with
a freshly shuffled
52-card deck. When you press the "play credits"
button for the next
hand, you're starting over with 52, new, randomly
shuffled, cards.
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