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There have been many changes within the gaming environment inside my home city of Sheffield over the years. The three casinos inside that City have each been top dog at some stage in the past. Back in 1990, it was Napoleans that was the number one spot in the City with Grosvenor and Bonapartes bringing up the rear.

Then in 1996, the A&S Leisure Group moved their Bonapartes Casino to a brand new location in Sheffield and a brand new casino. This was far bigger and more plush than the other two and suddenly the new Bonapartes became top dog and jumped from 3rd to 1st with Grosvenor being demoted to third behind Napoleans.

The landscape has changed again and the new G-Casino (former Grosvenor) has just opened and even though I have yet to go personally, I have spoked with many people who have. Apparently it can blow the other two out of the water and is by far and away the best casino in Sheffield.

This now makes the 1990-1996 top dog Napoleans bringing up the rear and this will be a blow for A&S Leisure in Sheffield. Years ago the Sheffield Grosvenor casino was considered the weak link in Grosvenor’s chain and there was talk afoot at one stage that it would be bought out by the Staki’s Group (who went on to be Gala) and that the location was to be moved.

I can’t really say that I will get to see the new G-Casino since they will more than likely be aware of my history although I don’t know what they think that I am going to do. I am actually quite happy about the situation though and I quite like the thought of Grosvenor being top dog.

See you soon

Carl

There is a special type of buzz when you enter a casino with the intention of taking money from them. Casinos at the end of the day are businesses and any business is concentrating on making money and not on losing it.

But at the end of the day they are providing entertainment. They don’t mind people winning money as long as winning money is all that they are doing. There is of course a world of difference between winning money and earning money. When you are earning money then you have a positive long term expectation.

You are no longer winning money by getting lucky like a normal punter but slowly extracting money from the casino. It is possible that some card counters could be allowed to ply their trade if the casino was gaining in some other way.

For instance I once knew of a gaming manager who allowed a winning small-stakes counter to ply his trade simply because he didn’t want to risk upsetting the big hitting roulette players that he came in with who were his friends.

It is when you know that the casino don’t know what you are doing that creates the biggest buzz. This is something that a lifetime of online poker cannot replicate. This constant cat and mouse game is in itself quite a thrill.

Alas of course, it is very difficult to make blackjack a career. This is why I was playing online poker just a few years later. Just like with online poker where you are struggling to find profitable games, it is often better to play semi-professionally or as a serious amateur than to try and go full-time.

I certainly do recommend though that you try and play blackjack in a live setting because it will be well worth it.

See you soon

Carl
Or alternatively why not come and play blackjack on bwin online casino

Several hundred years ago, the Caribbean was the centre for piracy on the high seas when people like Blackbeard was feared all around that area. The word “Caribbean” also applies to the casino version of poker as well where the players get dealt five cards that have to beat those of the dealer.

I explained a little about how this game worked yesterday but there are numerous poker cheating moves that are available on this game in live play. Of course if you read any poker material on cheating then a fair number of the moves would involve the dealer.

In the case of CSP then this does not apply obviously as the dealer is working for the casino and despite the thoughts of some, casinos do not cheat. They have no reason to in the overwhelming number of cases so lets put that particular view to bed right now and move on.

But……one such move that is cheating and that is for players to inform other players of their cards. This would certainly not be allowed in real poker but I have worked in several casinos where the players were allowed to blatantly look at each others cards.

Let us say that a table full of CSP players discussed their hands or had a series of hidden signals to determine certain cards. Each player gets dealt five cards and in those thirty five cards that were dealt to the players, all four kings were out and three of the aces.

The dealer had an ace showing, now not only do the players know that the dealer cannot make a qualifying A-K hand to beat their non-pair hands, they also know that the dealer cannot make a pair of aces. This then means that to qualify then they must make a pair out of their remaining unseen four cards and not five.

This is far more difficult to do so in this instance the players could play whatever hands they had. This is one form of cheating but I will be expanding on other forms in later posts.

See you soon

Carl

Back when I worked in gaming, one of the weakest spots or the most vulnerable when it came to cheating was Casino Stud Poker or to call it by its other name…..Caribbean Stud Poker.

In this game the players are dealt five cards and so is the dealer. You have already placed what is called an “ante”. If you have placed say $5 on the ante box and you look at your hand, you then have to decide if you want to play the hand or not.

If you do then you must place double the ante on the “bet” box behind it and so you would have to place $10 in this example. If you don’t want to play the hand then you must concede the $5 ante and lose it.

The kicker behind this is in the odds that you get paid for the hands that you make. But in a real live casino setting, there are several players sitting within a very close proximity to each other.

This presents the casino with several security issues and the main one is in not letting players have the opportunity to take cards out of play. This is easily checked simply by the dealer checking the number of cards that are remaining.

But there are far weightier problems as well and I have seen players actually place stronger hands on the boxes of players to their left or right who had bet more money. This can be difficult to spot when done quickly and using mis-direction.

Also card marking has been a problem as well in recent years although casinos tend to try to combat this problem by checking the cards every hour. This though presents the problem of them having to wait a full hour before the pit boss or manager can inspect the cards.

In my opinion though, many of the card marking techniques that are in operation today would get by an average pit boss and I will be looking at some of these in further posts.

See you soon

Carl

You recall me talking about “The Salmon”…..if anyone does not understand what I am talking about here then see my previous post. The next instance of me seeing him on roulette occurred a few days later.

I recognised him instantly because of his looks and also because of what he had done on roulette a few days earlier. This time I was watching him like a hawk but I was more concerned in allowing him the opportunity to bet so I could observe him more.

What I didn’t want to do was to blow him away from the table by dealing aggressively and also speeding up the wheel to a ridiculous level. So I kept the wheel at the same speed which was quite slow and before long he was buying in for a £5 stack of colour chips.

He watched my spin for a few minutes and then started to bet. His first few spins missed but each of them was not far away and he was unfortunate enough to have three spins where the ball landed next to his number.

He lost his initial £5 but he then bought some more colour chips and started to spread his bets more. Within thirty minutes he proceeded to win back the money that he had lost and about another £50 on top.

I also noticed that when I left the table for a break……so did he. This got me thinking that there was obviously something about my spin that he liked. I became intensely fascinated by what he was doing and he almost seemed unbeatable. It could just have all been luck so I then decided to track the amount of money that he was winning.

I already knew that he was about £650 ahead over the two sessions that I had seen him. Over the next few months, I managed to watch him an awful lot without him knowing both when he was on my table and also adjoining tables that I could observe clearly.

I kept a running total of bets that I could see. I expanded this by bringing in someone else to help me watch him. We both had a keen interest in controlling a roulette ball and visual prediction. The following three months was alarming, out of a total of 44 sessions, “The Salmon” lost just 7 times and each loss was only in the region of about £20-£50 but when he won he would win anywhere from £50-£150.

These were figures which the casino never bothered to clock but his total over that period was that he was ahead in the region of about £2500……now I was really taking notice.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
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I had someone e-mail me a few days ago who wanted to ask me about becoming a croupier and how easy it was. They had read my blackjack book which kind of painted a somewhat negative picture of life as a croupier.

Despite what I said in that book, there are many advantages to becoming a croupier. Firstly it is something where a person can create a very respectable career without having loads of qualifications. Anyone can be a croupier almost, as long as you don’t have a criminal record or maybe visible tattoos then you should be able to train as a croupier.

There are probably other factors that prohibit someone from becoming a croupier as well but not having qualifications isn’t one of them. The natural career path in the UK used to be a six week training course followed by doing the actual job for real.

Then anyone with at least 18 months experience as a dealer would be considered for promotion to Inspector. Then there were further career advancements to Pit Boss and then Manager followed by General Manager.

So a person could end up with a very good job if they showed the proper initiative and attitude. The money at that time wasn’t great but then again I am referring to the area where I worked and I am going back to 1998.

There is always the possibility for croupiers to work abroad and many follow that option and see exotic places whilst getting paid to do so. I never personally had that option because I had a family at the time but it can be a far better career for single people in many aspects.

Working night shifts isn’t for everyone but I didn’t mind it as I always liked to get out of bed whenever I wanted rather than having to be forced to get out of bed first thing in a morning. So all I can say is that the career has different appeal to different people depending on individual circumstances so do not be put off or swayed by anything that I have said either in this post or in the past.

see you soon

Carl
Play blackjack online at bwin

Over the years, I have encountered more than my fair share of roulette wheels. From the older high profile wheels to the new John Huxley “Saturn” design with built in bias detection software and electronic readouts.

In my experience, whilst every possible precaution is made by the actual manufacturers themselves to make the wheels unbiased, bias is actually inevitable. Some years ago I was exploring the possibility of bias appearing intermittently and then disappearing again.

I felt that certain atmospheric conditions could contribute towards bias in some instances but I have never been able to properly fathom why this could be the case. Wheels are moved frequently so in the process of moving them then bias can appear.

On several wheels that I have worked on in the past, the diamond shaped canoes have become loose or in some instances the metal pocket dividers that separate the actual numbers have become loose. What happens in these instances is that when the roulette ball makes contact with metal that is loose then the movement of the metal absorbs the energy of the moving roulette ball.

What this means is that the ball is then attracted to a certain area of the wheel and is less likely to be thrown into another area. This type of reaction may seem trivial but when you consider that the house edge at single zero roulette is a mere 1.35% then you can see the effect of a bias and how that can possibly lead to advantages being secured in certain types of situation where you can perhaps ascertain that certain numbers will not arrive on a certain spin.

Think about this for a moment because if you know for instance that given the dynamics of the situation that two numbers will not arrive during this spin then what this means in essence is that you could in theory back all the other 35 numbers where the pay-off is 35-1.

This means that you would return 36 chips and win 1 chip at whatever the chip denomination was. It gets a little more technical than this but this is how you can manufacture an edge at roulette and take advantage of it.

Carl

I must confess that before I started working with bwin, I was unaware as to how big and just how varied their markets really were. Coming to the site is worth it just for the extensive football betting and bwin live betting and streaming service by itself. If all that doesn’t grab your attention then you can get yourself across to their poker room which is one of the best on the net and with some great bonuses to boot.

You can also get access to some great poker material as well on the poker blog section with some great features and news. I think for me personally one of the outstanding features that any gambling site can have is variety and daily content. But there are millions of people who are turning to the online casino experience these days.

In fact I was only having this exact same conversation with a professional colleague of mine the other day. We discussed how land based casinos were starting to veer down the electronic gaming avenue. This is certainly the case in the UK. We have electronic blackjack, electronic roulette and all the rest of the electronic games that are sprouting up like mushrooms.

They are entering dangerous ground in my opinion because what they are starting to offer in a gaming sense is starting to merge with what online casinos offer. So in future, where will the incentive be for punters to leave their own home to gamble on blackjack or roulette etc when everything can all be got from their very own computer? There are always those who fear cyber crime of course by these days sites like bwin employ some of the best experts in the world to thwart these people.

In my mind the threat is no more real than getting mugged outside a casino (which almost happened to me once). I can also say that numerous people have had their cars broken in to whilst being inside a land based casino and I have even heard of big winners being followed home and then robbed at home. Land based casinos are also a haven for thieves and pick pockets so if you think by avoiding online casinos that you are safer then you had better think again.

I really do think that you are safer both physically and financially playing online casino gambling and this is from someone who has done both on numerous occasions.

see you soon

Carl

My recent family issues seem to be behind me now, my father has been ill recently so that has been taking up my time. Thankfully he is now OK and I went on my usual Friday night casino trip.

I would rather not say where it was for the reason being that I don’t want anyone to make the connection between me and what I have done in the past. It would just be my rotten luck that someone from the casino or that company read this blog

Anyway, I spent my time watching the dealers and I couldn’t believe how bad they were. I could never understand this years ago, I mean the job of a croupier can be considered professional.

It is not a job where you can walk straight in off the street and do it. You first have to have six weeks basic training but even after that six week period then you are not much good to the casino and have to be supervised very closely.

You would never be able to get a job at another casino with just six weeks training behind you. So even then you wouldn’t really be able to do much. Most casinos wouldn’t touch a dealer with much less than six months experience.

So what this means is that for a croupier to be of real use to a casino then they really need to have some considerable experience behind them. So why then do land based casino chains (especially in the UK) pay their staff so little compared to the job that they do and the profits that they make?

It is no wonder why so many staff leave casinos, a combination of poor to mediocre pay, anti-social working hours and often…..ill treatment from casino managers who think that they can talk to grown men and women like they are school children.

If these criteria were different then there wouldn’t be as much need for training schools and becoming a croupier would be far more difficult than what it really is.

I am actually starting to see the role of an online casino in a completely different light recently and they certainly rightfully take their place in the casino world there is no doubt about that.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
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The difference between online casino gambling and live casino gambling is akin to online poker and live poker in my opinion. By that I mean that there are many similarities but also numerous differences.

For instance in online blackjack there is no facility to card count or shuffle track. But then again in live blackjack with shuffling machines then you do not have the facility to be able to do that anyway.

But with online casinos then you do have numerous other advantages that live casinos simply do not offer. You do not get financial incentives or bonuses in live casinos for becoming a member.

You also don’t have the luxury of being able to play in your own home without having to travel in order to do it. But of course live casinos do offer the ability for interaction.

But then again maybe you don’t want interaction. Maybe you don’t want friends and family knowing that you gamble. But in my mind, the differences with live blackjack and online casino blackjack are becoming less and less.

This is rapidly becoming the case with roulette as well. Live casinos are now featuring electronic roulette more and more or using one single centralised wheel like I have seen in numerous casinos.

The fact of the matter is that the old timers like me will not like this form of roulette but the new kids will not know anything else but the Internet version.

So I can see online casino games really starting to expand as the live casinos won’t be offering much different to what the online casinos will be offering from a purely gaming sense.

In my experience, there have been no casinos in the UK who have provided new members with money when they join. This is where the online casinos really have the edge.

But most people incorrectly view gaming anyway. It is merely entertainment and nothing more and no different to watching a movie or going out. It is merely an alternative form of entertainment and should be seen as such.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson