A.P Heat

A uni-directional card is a card that has an intentional rotational asymmetry.  Some aspect of the pattern on the back of the card was designed so that when the card is rotated 180 degrees, the pattern after the rotation doesn't match the pattern of a card that has not been rotated.

According to this Wikipedia article , MGM Resorts International (MGM) is the second largest gaming company in the world.It owns and operates 15 properties in Nevada, Mississippi, and Michigan, and has 50% investments in four other properties in Nevada, Illinois and Macau.There is little doubt that the MGM casinos offer a wide

This survey was completed by an exhaustive search through CZR's “Table Game Finder” (see image below). Note that two casinos listed in 2012 no longer exist in 2013 (Imperial Palace, Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall). There is also a new casino in 2013 (The QUAD). In all, table games data for 34 casinos was available through this link.

According to this Wikipedia article , Caesars Entertainment Corporation (CEC), formerly known as Harrah's Entertainment, is the largest gaming company in the world, with over 50 casinos. The business model for CEC has long been to target the middle of the gaming segment.

I have been trying to get a sense of the landscape of casino proprietary table games across the United States. I’ve examined CEC’s database of table games in this post. I’ve done a casino-by-casino survey of Las Vegas casinos in this article.

Earlier this month I was in Las Vegas presenting my Advanced Advantage Play seminar with Bill Zender. The day before the seminar, I walked into severalcasinos on the Las Vegas strip. What immediately got my attention was a visually apparent increase in the number of table games. During the seminar, I asked the group if my observations had any merit.

The rumor of the death of table games has not been exaggerated, at least in Nevada. For many years the slow creep of slots into the real estate once held tightly by tables was barely noticeable. But, beginning in 2007, at the peak of the housing crash and beginning of the financial collapse, table games have taken a huge hit. The future of table games in unclear.

The High Tie blackjack side bet (HT) dates back at least to 2004, where it is mentioned in this article. I recently ran into this bet at a casino I was visiting. After all these years, it’s still around.

During a recent trip to Las Vegas, I saw a new (to me) blackjack side bet in a downtown casino called Golden 21 (G21). What struck me as immediately suspect were events listed in the pay table corresponding to the player getting an unsuited blackjack, a suited blackjack or a suited A/K. Wagers based around blackjacks are usually very vulnerable to card counting.

Back in 2012, I was very fortunate to be able to speak at the annual convention of the Casino Chip and Gaming Token Collectors Club. There was an expo associated with the convention, where people were selling casino collectibles of all sorts.

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.