A.P Heat

There is no doubt that Texas Hold'em Bonus Poker (THB) has a big hole-card issue. In this post I covered the situation when the AP sees one dealer hole-card, which gives the AP a 7.61% edge over the house with perfect play.

Match the Dealer (MD) is a popular side bet offered with six-deck Spanish 21.  I have never seen this wager offered on ordinary blackjack, though it is certainly possible. The wager is similar to the Pair Square side bet, paying for pairs with a premium for suited pairs.

Racing Card Derby (RCD) is a relatively new table game that uses an innovative electronic interface to dress up what is otherwise a very simple idea – betting on the suit of a dealt card. The novelty of this conglomeration has yielded RCD placements both in the U.S.

Criss Cross Poker (CCP) is yet another stud poker clone. Like all poker clones, CCP faces a very tough road towards success. In recent months I’ve been contacted by a few people who have asked me to take a look at hole-carding CCP. Now that CCP is getting a few placements, I decided to do the analysis.

I recently received the following question from a reader:

A few days ago I was contacted by an advantage player who asked me to evaluate a new card counting system for Lucky Lucky (LL). I told him I would do the analysis only if he gave me permission to post the results here. He agreed. His e-mail to me was the following:

During the hold ‘em poker craze that began when Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker in 2003, there was a rush to bring poker variants to the casino floor. Four Card Poker (FCP) was introduced in the height of the poker craze. For several years it wasn’t clear which poker games would succeed.

One of the most massive games to analyze is Texas Hold’em Bonus Poker (THB). The game has a huge cycle, consisting of 55,627,620,048,000 (more than 55 trillion) different possible final hands.  The cycle for hole-card play, knowing one of the dealer’s two cards, is even larger at 111,255,240,096,000 (more than 111 trillion) different possible final hands.

Heads-Up Hold'em (HUH) is a novelty game with rules very similar to Ultimate Texas Hold'em (UTH) (see this post and this post).

Heads-Up Hold'em (HUH) is just Ultimate Texas Hold'em (UTH) with a 3x pre-Flop raise and a bad-beat payout on the mandatory "Odds" = "Blind" wager. Its analysis in every case follows the same logical structure.

I spent yesterday and today doing the research, programming and writing up an article on the "Slingo Bonus Bet 21" blackjack side bet. This wager is nearly extinct and there's a good reason for that. The first draft of the article is complete, but I need to double-check everything.

Though the game of baccarat appears quite safe to the untrained eye, there are many ways that APs attack baccarat. Some of these methods are targets of opportunity, for example dealers who expose the first card of the next round. Others occur because of perks for high rollers, like dead-chip or loss-rebate programs.

Lucky Ladies (LL) is a blackjack side bet that pays for any player 20, with premium payouts for suited or matched 20’s and a top pay for a pair of Queen of Hearts. I covered card counting the Lucky Ladies side bet in this blog post.

One of my first outings as a novice blackjack card counter was to Laughlin, Nevada, in the Spring of 1997. I recall seeing a wager on a six-deck shoe game called the Super Sevens (SUP7) side bet. It paid whenever the first card dealt was a seven, with higher payouts for two or three sevens and suited hands. This was my first experience with advantage play against a side bet.

In 2009, I made it my mission to visit every casino in the Las Vegas area and to take note of the proprietary table games and side bets they offered. One side bet (Lucky Lucky) in particular caught my eye, both because I had never seen it before and that it was now wide-spread. I decided to contact the distributors of the game and quickly got to know the young entrepreneurs.