We will be bringing you lots of new exciting advice and news in the new year - so watch this space.  I am really looking forward to sharing as many insider poker tips and news as we can. 

Here’s to 2009, may it be a great year and may all your wishes come true.

Chris

I believe that the accusations of rigged games are the last resort for players who just don’t get the basic theory of Gambler’s Fallacy. Explained in short terms, Gambler’s Fallacy is the belief that the odds of an event happening changes, based upon how many times it has happened before. This contradicts the basic calculus of probability.

In my opinion, you are more likely to run in to a fixed soccer game than a rigged poker table.

Popular online casino game Pai Gow Poker stems from a classical Chinese gambling game called Pai Kau. While Pai Gow Poker is played with cards, Pai Kau is played with tiles, much like mahjong. It can get pretty wild, with players and dealers making a lot of noise.

Casinos always keep an edge in the games they spread, that’s what pays the staff’s salaries and all other costs involved in running a big business. But the role of the house in Pai Kau betting may be a bit more involved than just scooping in the rake.

Math Professor R. Cowan at the University of Sydney gives a fascinating account of his visit to a Chinese casino in Macau. He describes how the game of Pai Kau is played, with players shouting and yelling and the dealer slamming tiles onto the table with such force that they occasionally break.

In Pai Kau, one player takes on the role as a banker against the rest of the players. The winners are paid out of his money, but of course he profits from the players who lose.

Even though a player acts as a bank in the hand, the house is still very much involved. First of all, they rake 4% out of each pot. Secondly, they guarantee the winnings of the players.

Meaning, if the player who is the banker cannot pay all winning players, the house steps in and secures their winnings. But only up to a certain fixed amount, called the house guarantee!

If a winning player has placed a big bet that the banker cannot meet, and if the win exceeds the house guarantee, he will not receive the whole amount that he won in that hand.

It’s this fact that has led Cowan to raise a warning finger regarding the role of the house in Pai Kau betting. It would seem that the house makes money not only from the official rake.

So next time you go to Macau to gamble, have a great time – but beware of the house in Pai Kau!

Video poker happens to be one of those games. If you employ perfect strategy on the right video poker games, your return is over 99 percent. In this case, the House has less than a one percent advantage over you. You’d be hard pressed to find better odds than that.

Proper Strategy in Video Poker

You can’t get that super low House edge by playing any way you want. You certainly can’t get it by chasing long shots. Video poker success requires optimal strategy.

In general, it’s necessary to keep a paying hand or draw to the easiest paying hand. When it comes to strategy, you’re in luck, since others have taken the guesswork out of it. Go online and find a basic video poker strategy chart to keep with you as you play.

Progressive Video Poker Strategy

Most video poker machines are progressive machines. If you hit a royal flush, you get whatever is in the progressive jackpot pool, usually a considerable amount of money.

Make sure you play the maximum amount of coins per deal that the game allows (usually five but it can be more). If you do not put in the full amount and hit a royal flush, you may cost yourself hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Pay Tables

Another critical idea for video poker success is finding full pay games. These are games with the most favorable pay tables. If you don’t have the best pay tables, you are not getting the best odds.

For the standard “Jacks or Better” video poker game, the standard pay table is a 9/6, meaning the game pays 6 coins for a flush and 9 coins for a full house. Other video poker games have different full pay tables. Do your research online before choosing a video poker game and putting your bankroll at risk.

This is often true but there’s an exception to these statements - Video Poker.

Video Poker can actually offer players positive expectation, which means that you’ll win in the long run. Some machines - far from all however - has rules that turns the percentages into the players’ favor. But there’s one catch: you must deploy the perfect video-poker strategy. Always!

In this blog I’ll investigate video poker on the Web and guide you to:

• The best video-poker machines
• The best video-poker strategy
• The best video poker bonuses

If you take these three things into consideration when looking for and playing the game, you have the chance to enjoy an edgeless casino game, or to be honest, the only edgeless casino game there is.