Author: editor

Caribbean Stud Poker, which originated as ‘Casino Poker’ or ‘Tropical Poker’ in the Eighties – depending on whose account you choose to believe – is a straightforward variant of Five-Card Stud Poker. However, unlike Five-Card Stud, Caribbean Stud is played, solely, against the house, so bluffing is impossible. Multiple players may play simultaneously against the house, but collusion is prohibited.

Each player makes a forced or ‘ante’ bet and, optionally, an optional $1 side bet, the majority of which is added to a progressive jackpot meter. To win some, or all, of the progressive jackpot, a player must have a hand of a flush or better; a royal flush pays 100% of the progressive jackpot.

Each player, including the dealer, is dealt five cards, face down, although the dealer turns the fifth and final card in his hand face up. Each player may fold, in which case he loses his ante bet, and side bet, if he made one, or make a raise bet, of twice his ante bet. When the action reaches the dealer, he turns over his remaining four cards and requires at least an ace and a king to ‘open’ his hand, or ‘qualify’.

If the dealer fails to qualify, each player wins his ante bet, which pays even money, and ties, or ‘pushes’, on his raise bet. However, if the dealer does qualify, he may or may not beat each player. If the dealer wins, the player loses his ante and raise bets and, if the dealer loses, the player wins his ante bet, at even money, and his raise bet, at odds according to the pay table; if the dealer and player tie, ante and raise bets push.

In land-based casinos, gaming tables for blackjack, craps, roulette and other games are typically arranged, back-to-back, in groups or ‘pits’ on the gaming floor. As the title suggests, the pit boss is the person who oversees the operation of a particular pit. The pit boss has numerous responsibilities, not least the supervision of all the games in the pit, including dealers and other personnel, to ensure that they run smoothly, according to the policies of the casino and the regulations of the jurisdiction in which it operates.

The pit boss can open and close gaming tables in response to demand, staffing levels and availability and move staff around to create the best possible gaming experience for players. Indeed, the pit boss is heavily involved in customer service, meeting and greeting players, answering questions, resolving disputes quickly and fairly and generally ensuring that players are happy and comfortable. Indeed, this may extend to opening lines of credit or offering ‘comps’, such as free drinks, meals and hotel rooms to winning players as an enticement to stay in the casino and keep playing.

The pit boss must account for all the money entering, or leaving, the pit while he or she is on duty, so must be constantly aware of the security risks posed by so-called ‘advantage players’, such as card counters, and just plain, out-and-out cheats. Of course, dealers and other pit personnel may be guilty of dishonesty, either of their own volition or in collusion with players, so the pit boss really does need eyes in the back of his head.

Of course, nowadays, video slot machines are ubiquitous in land-based and online casinos worldwide. However, when the first such machine, ‘Fortune Coin’, was introduced in Las Vegas in 1975, it was viewed with more than a degree of scepticism. Dyed-in-the-wool slot players, accustomed to physical reels falling into line, under mechanical or electromechanical control, simply failed to believe that the new-fangled technology, with no moving parts at all, could possibly produce fair results and the Fortune Coin failed to take off as expected.

The inventor of the Fortune Coin was Walt Fraley, proprietor of the aptly-named Fortune Coin Company, based in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Fortune Coin was a simple affair; it was a three-reel video slot, built around a modified 19” Sony Trinitron colour television set. ‘Reels’ no longer existed, in the physical sense, and were, in fact, video projections, the finishing positions were determined by a microprocessor and a random number generator (RNG). The Fortune Coin was brilliant in its simplicity and, despite its lukewarm reception, at least initially, by slot players, worked flawlessly.

Obviously, the graphical display of the Fortune Coin was crude by twenty-first century standards, but the potential of the design was recognised by William ‘Si’ Redd, founder of International Game Technology (IGT) and later known as the ‘King of Slot Machines’. A year or so after its original introduction, in 1976, IGT bought the patent for Fortune Coin from Fraley and used it as the basis several new, improved machines, including video poker machines, which further ushered in the age of the video slot.

In a famous scene from the 1988 Oscar-winning film ‘Rain Man’, an apparently-savvy casino security guard says, sagely, while watching main protagonist Charlie Babbit playing blackjack at Caesars Palace, ‘You know there’s no-one in the world that can count into a six-deck shoe.’ However, as anyone familiar with the ‘High-Low’ card counting strategy can testify, this statement is completely untrue.

When using High-Low, a card counter starts with a ‘running count’ of zero at the start of a shoe and adds to, or subtracts from, the running count as each card is revealed, according to the point value assigned to each rank. Aces, court cards and tens are assigned +1, twos, threes, fours, fives and sixes are assigned -1 and sevens, eights and nines are assigned 0. The next step is to divide the running count by the number of decks remaining or, at least, a rough approximation of the number of decks remaining, to establish the so-called ‘true count’. In other words, anyone capable of basic arithmetic is capable of counting a six-deck shoe, or an eighty-deck shoe for that matter.

 It is understandable that Barry Levinson employed dramatic licence to make card counting the preserve of those, such as the autistic savant character Raymond ‘Rain Man’ Babbit, endowed with extraordinary mathematical skills, but the mundane fact is that, with practice, just about anyone can do it. Any casino security guard worth his salt would have known this, even in the late Eighties, but such a revelation would have ruined the plot.