A.P Heat

The Field Gold 21 (FG21) side bet is one of the more popular side bets available for blackjack. The company that owns it is Fair Trade Gaming, and it is also listed on Shuffle Master’s website. I recall seeing this side bet for many years, and I never thought twice about it. That’s the way it is as a low-level AP.

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.

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.

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.

Ultimate Texas Hold'em (UTH) must surely be the most widely available and profitable opportunity for hole-card play right now. Over the last few months, I finally took this challenging game to task and wrote a series of articles about various hole-carding situations the player might encounter.

At G2E (2013) this year I saw a side bet that seemed very familiar to me, Dealer Bust 21 (DB21), at the TCS John Huxley booth (as of August, 2016, DB21 is offered by AGS). DB21 is yet another blackjack side bet that pays if the dealer busts. This one has a unique distinction: I was the mathematician who did the original mathematical analysis.

The use of fear to influence the opinions and actions of others towards some specific end is called “fear mongering.” One of the most infamous cases of using this tactic was Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy” commercial, which was used it in his 1964 election campaign against Senator Barry Goldwater (watch it here).

Ultimate Texas Hold'em (UTH) is one of the most popular novelty games in the U.S. For example, only Three Card Poker and Let it Ride have more placements in Nevada. What makes UTH so successful is its similarity to Hold'em poker together with the chance for a huge payday if the player makes a top hand.

I was visiting a casino in August, 2011 when I noticed a side bet on the table I had not seen before: “Slingo Bonus Bet 21.” The bet pays purely on the total of the player’s two cards, with an Ace counting 11. I could tell right away that the bet was countable.  One of the wagers the player could make was that his hand would be a blackjack.