Casino Questions

In blackjack, if you are dealt a pair of aces you have the option of splitting your cards into two new hands. If you take this option, you need to place a second bet, equal to your original stake, to cover the second hand. You are dealt one – and, in most casinos, only one – additional card on each split ace, you usually cannot double down after split and, if you are dealt another ace, you cannot split again.

According to basic blackjack strategy – which describes the mathematically correct way to play any hand – you should always split a pair of aces, regardless of the card the dealing is showing. A pair of aces technically makes a ‘soft’ total of 12 which, granted that tens and court cards make up 16/52, or 30.76%, of a standard deck of cards, is a difficult starting hand. Notwithstanding the fact that you need to double your stake, and therefore your risk, creating two hands in which the first card is worth 11 points is one of the strongest plays in blackjack; it is, in fact, one of the few moves that has a positive expectation against any dealer upcard.

Any ten or court card – or four of the 13 possibilities – will yield a total of 21, against which the best the dealer can do is push, while a 7, 8 or 9 – or another three of the 13 possibilities – will yield a total of 18 or better. The average winning hand in blackjack is 18.5 so, while there are also six possibilities whereby you can win only if the dealer busts, the attraction of splitting aces is clear to see.

The late Nicholas Andreas Dandolos, commonly known as ‘Nick the Greek’, who died on Christmas Day, 1966, at the age of 83, was a celebrated Greek American professional gambler in the early to mid-twentieth century. Dandolos reputedly won and lost millions of dollars during his lifetime. He once said, “The next best thing to playing and winning is playing and losing. The main thing is the play.” Although he was a millionaire for most of his life, at the time of his death, in Gardena, California, Dandolos was virtually penniless and reduced to playing small-stakes poker.

Born in Rethymnon, Crete on April 27, 1883, travelled to the United States, alone, as a 18-year-old, and settled in Chicago. Initially living on an allowance of $150 a week, provided by his family, he moved to Montreal, Canada, where he proceeded to win $500,000 by gambling on horse racing. On his return to Chicago, he lost all his winnings on cards and dice, but would soon become famous for his willingness to risk huge sums of money; in 1926, for example, he lost $797,000 to Arnold ‘the Brain’ Rothstein in a single hand of poker.

Legend has it that, in 1949, or in 1951, according to which account you choose, Dandolos played a marathon heads-up poker match against Johnny Moss at the Horseshoe Casino, run by Benny Binion, and reportedly lost $2 million. However, it is doubtful if any such match actually took place. Jack Binion, son of Benny, explained many years later that Dandolos and Moss did play a poker match in 1949, but at the Flamingo Casino, in private, rather than in public, and not for five months straight, as suggested in the original version of the story.

Confusingly, ‘outside’ bets in roulette are so-called not because they offer an outside chance of winning – they offer odds of 1/1 or 2/1 so, in fact, the exact opposite – but simply because of their position on the roulette table. The bets available are red/black, odd/even and first 18/second 18, all at 1/1, and first/second/third column and first/second/third dozen, both at 2/1.

Of course, the presence of a green single zero, on a European roulette wheel, and an extra green double zero – and, in some cases, an additional green triple zero – on an American roulette wheel, is what creates the ‘house edge’ and reduces the probability of winning outside bets. On a European roulette wheel, an even money bet on, say, red or black, does not have a 50% chance of winning, but rather a 48.64% chance, while bets on any column or dozen have a 32.4%.

On an American roulette wheel, an extra green double zero pocket also puts paid to all outside bets and increases the house edge to 5.26% from 2.70% when compared to single-zero roulette. In the double-zero version, the probability of a winning 1/1 bet is further reduced to 47.38%, while the probability of a winning a 2/1 bet becomes 31.58%. Triple-zero roulette, which is becoming increasing popular in Las Vegas and elsewhere, does the player fewer favours still, other than offering a lower table minimum stake than the double-zero version. For this ‘privilege’, the player pays an extra 2.5%, in terms of house edge, while the probability of winning outside bets is further reduced, to 46.15% and 30.77%, respectively.

Craps is, of course, a gambling game in which players bet on the outcome of a single roll, or a series of rolls, of two dice. Craps offers numerous betting opportunities, but the main wager, around which the game is structured, is the so-called ‘pass line’ bet.

A pass line bet typically takes more than one roll to decide. The pass sequence starts with the first roll of the dice, known as the ‘come out’ roll. If the first number rolled is 7 or 11, a pass bet wins straight away but, similarly, if the first number rolled is 2, 3 or 12, a.k.a. ‘craps’, a pass bet loses straight away. Any other number establishes, or sets, a ‘point’; thereafter, for a pass bet to win, the shooter must roll the point number again before he or she rolls a 7, or ‘sevens out’. Winning pass bets pay even money, or 1/1, and offer a low house edge of 1.41%. Alternatively, if a point has already been set for pass bettors, players can place a similar bet, known as a ‘come’ bet, the sequence for which starts with the next roll of the dice. The odds, and the house edge, for a come bet are identical to those for a pass bet.

In a bricks-and-mortar casino, players place pass and come bets by putting their own chips on the appropriate area of the craps table. However, certain other bets, such as place bets – which allow players to wager on the numbers 4-10 at any time before the shooter sevens out – are not self-service and require chips to be placed on the table by the dealer, under instruction from the player.

Unlike ‘slow playing’, which is a deceptive, but perfectly acceptable, tactic in poker, ‘slow rolling’ violates the principles of poker etiquette and is universally despised by players. The slow roll comes at the end of a hand, a.k.a. the ‘showdown’, when it is customary for the player who believes he has won to reveal his hole cards immediately. However, a player who believes he has won – indeed, he may hold the best possible hand, a.k.a. ‘the nuts’ – may make a song and dance about calling the final large, or all-in, bet of the hand and, to make matters worse, subsequently delay the process of revealing his hole cards. This unsportsmanlike behaviour may be intended to showboat winning the hand, or to chastise or taunt an opponent, for whatever reason, but serves only to make the player who does the slow rolling hugely unpopular with everyone else at the table.

Of course, situations occur where players, even professional players, ‘accidentally’ slow roll, having failed to realise that they have actually won the hand. Apart from these few, isolated incidents, though, slow rolling is usually done with malice aforethought and should be treated as an insidious tactic that is, above anything else, just plain bad manners. Unfortunately, there is nothing in the rules of poker than explicitly forbids slow rolling but, if you want to maintain the respect of your opponents and avoid negative emotions around the table, just avoid it.

In blackjack, tens are obviously valued at 10 points, but so are court cards or, in other words, kings, queen and jacks. Depending on the rules of the game in question, a pair of ‘tens’ could mean, literally, a pair of tens, a pair of kings, queen or jacks or, in some cases, a ten and a court card or two dissimilar court cards.

In any event, where splitting is allowed, the player can stand, with a hand valued at 20 points, or split his cards into two hands, each with a starting value of 10 points. Some players split a pair of ‘tens’ regardless of the upcard the dealer shows, while others so only if the upcard is one of the weakest possible, such as a five or a six.

However, splitting not only not only doubles your outlay, but also significantly reduces your chances of winning. In a standard game of blackjack, in which cards are dealt from a six-deck shoe and the dealer stands on ‘soft’ 17, the probability of winning if you stand on 20 is 83%. By contrast, in the same game, if you split a pair of ‘tens’ – and thereby run the risk of winding up with two hands both worth less than 20 – the probability of winning each split had us just 63%. In simple terms, unless you are an accomplished card counter and the ‘true’ count is at least +4, the mathematically correct decision is always to stand on a pair of ‘tens’.