Interactive Studio Management (ISM) will host its third annual Invitational Charity Poker Tournament alongside the 2009 Game Developers Conference (GDC 2009), with all proceeds benefiting the Starlight Children’s Foundation. Running from March 23rd to 27th, GDC 2009 will take place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Registration for the poker tournament will be open to all GDC attendees. …

“Beatable” casino games

With proper strategy, a smart player can create a positive mathematical expectation.

• Poker (Also recognised as a game of skill)
• Blackjack — with card counting
• Video poker — with proper pay table and/or progressive jackpot
• Pai Gow Poker and Tiles — player-dealt
• Sports betting
• Horse racing (parimutuel)
• Slot machines — only linked, multi-player jackpots whose prizes have reached a certain point

“Unbeatable” casino games

These have a negative expectation, players as a group will lose in the long run (unless they cheat).

• Baccarat
• Craps
• Roulette (unless physical prediction is used)
• Keno
• Casino war
• Faro (All but extinct)
• Pachinko
• Sic Bo
• Let It Ride
• -card Poker
-card poker
• Red Dog
• Pyramid Poker
• Caribbean Stud Poker
• Spanish 21 — without counting

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Shane McCubbin. PLAYING poker has taught Shane McCubbin a lot about body language. “One night I could see a woman’s heartbeat in her throat and I could tell she had a good hand.

In poker, a hole cam is a camera that displays a player’s hole cards (face-down cards) to television viewers. It was patented by Harry Orenstein in 1997.

The hole cam became popular when the Late Night Poker program first began using it in televised tournements. It picked up further popularity after the World Poker Tour began airing in 2003 on the Travel Channel.

call

To match the current bet amount, maintaining one’s interest in the pot.

calling station

A weak player who frequently checks and calls, but rarely raises.

cap

A limit on the number of raises allowed in a betting round. Typically three or four (in addition the opening bet). In most casinos, the cap is removed if there are only two players remaining either (1) at the beginning of the betting round, or (2) at the time that what would have otherwise been the last raise is made.

Also, term for the chip, token, or object placed atop one’s cards to show continued involvement with a hand.

cards speak

1. Describing a split-pot game, one without a declaration.
2. A common house rule stating that properly shown hands at showdown may be read by anyone, and need not be announced.

case card

The last available card of a certain description (typically a rank). The only way I can win is to catch the case king., meaning the only king remaining in the deck.

catch

To receive needed cards on a draw. I’m down 300–I can’t catch anything today. or Joe caught his flush early, but I caught the boat on seventh street to beat him. Often used with an adjective to further specify, for example “catch perfect”, “catch inside”, “catch smooth”.

catch up

To successfully complete a draw, thus defeating a player who previously had a better hand. I was sure I had Karen beat, but she caught up when that spade fell.

catch perfect

To catch the only two possible cards that will complete a hand and win the pot, usually those leading to a straight flush. Usually used in Texas Hold ‘Em.

cat-hop

In five-card draw, a longshot draw requiring two desired cards to make a hand, specifically drawing two cards to a straight or flush, or drawing two cards to a small pair and kicker to make a full house.

center pot

The main pot in a table stakes game where one or more players are all in.

chase

1. To continue to play a drawing hand over multiple betting rounds, especially one unlikely to succeed. Frank knew I made three nines on fourth street, but he chased that flush draw all the way to the river.
2. To continue playing with a hand that is not likely the best because one has already invested money in the pot.

check

1. To bet nothing.
2. A casino chip.

check out

To fold, in turn, even though there is no bet facing the player. In some games this is considered a breach of etiquette equivalent to folding out of turn. In others it is permitted, but frowned upon.

check-raise

To check, and then raise someone else’s open.

cheese

A poor hand. Throw that piece of cheese in the muck and move on to the next hand.

chip

A token representing money used for betting.

chip along

To bet or call the minimum required to stay in, often done with little or no reflection. See also “white check”.

chip declare

A method of declaring intent to play high or low in a split-pot game with declaration.

chip dumping

A form of collusion that happens during tournaments, especially in the early rounds. Two or more players decide to go all-in early. The winner gets a large amount of chips, which increases the player’s chance of cashing. The winnings are then split among the colluders.

chip race

In tournament play, the act of removing all the small chips from play by dealing random cards to players holding odd chips, and awarding a proportional number of larger chips to the highest-ranking cards.

chip up

To exchange lower-denomination chips for higher-denomination chips. In tournament play, the term means to remove all the small chips from play by rounding up any odd small chips to the nearest large denomination, rather than using a chip race.

chop

1. To split a pot because of a tie, split-pot game, or player agreement.
2. To play a game for a short time and cash out; see “hit and run”.
3. A request made by a player to a dealer after toking a large-denomination chip that he wishes the dealer to make change.
4. To chop blinds.

chop blinds

An agreement between neighboring players having posted blinds that if all other players fold to them, they will each retrieve their respective blind amounts and discard their hands rather than playing out the hand. This is done to avoid excessive charges by the casino for small pots. It is generally frowned upon by casinos, so it usually takes the form of the small blind folding, and then the player with the large blind refunding the small blind amount while the dealer isn’t looking. Agreement must be made ahead of time.

closed

1. Describing a betting round, the condition that no player is eligible to raise, either because the last raise was called by all players, or because the cap was reached.
2. Describing a poker game, one in which each player’s cards are concealed from all opponents.

cockroach

Euphemism for a player who frequently raises the pot in a blatant attempt to steal the antes or blinds.

coffeehouse

To make annoying smalltalk during a game, to make comments about a hand in progress, or to make deceptive comments about one’s own play.

cold

1. Consecutive, as in I caught three cold spades for the flush.
2. Unlucky, as in I’ve been cold all week.

cold call

To call an amount that represents a sum of bets or raises by more than one player. Alice opened for $10, Bob raised another $20, and Charlie cold called the $30.

cold deck

A deck previously arranged to produce a specific outcome, then surreptitiously switched into the game. Called “cold” because such a deck switched in during play will not have been warmed by the dealer’s hands. I can’t believe Jim got those four kings the same time I got four sixes–it was like being cold-decked. Also “ice”.

collusion

A form of cheating involving cooperation among two or more players.

color change, color up

To exchange small-denomination chips for larger ones.

combo, combination game

A casino table at which multiple forms of poker are played in rotation.

come bet, on the come

A bet or raise made with a drawing hand, building the pot in anticipation of filling the draw. Usually a weak “gambler’s” play, but occasionally correct with a very good draw and large pot or as a semi-bluff.

community card

A card dealt face-up to the center of the table (not to any one player’s hand), which can be used in some way by multiple players according to specific game rules.

completion

To raise a small bet up to the amount of what would be a normal-sized bet. For example, in a $2/$4 stud game with $1 bring-in, a player after the bring-in may raise it to $2, completing what would otherwise be a sub-minimum bet up to the normal minimum. Also in limit games, if one player raises all in for less than the normally required minimum, a later player might complete the raise to the normal minimum (depending on house rules).

connectors

Two or more cards of consecutive rank.

countdown

1. Especially in lowball, two hands very nearly tied that must be compared in detail to determine a winner, for example, 8-6-5-3-2 versus 8-6-5-3-A.
2. The act of counting the cards that remain in the stub after all cards have been dealt, done by a dealer to ensure that a complete deck is being used.

counterfeit

Most often used in community card games, a card appearing on the board that doesn’t change the value of one’s own hand, but that makes it much more likely for an opponent to tie or beat you, often because it duplicates what was previously a valuable card in your hand. Also “duplicate”.

cow

A player with whom one is sharing a buy-in, with the intent to split the result after play. To “go cow” is to make such an arrangement.

cowboy

A king. And he’s flopped a pair of cowboys

crack

To beat a better hand, mostly heard in reference to the best Hold em hole cards, AA. eg “My Aces were cracked again”

crowley

Folding your hand when the action to check is an option. “You could have checked, why did you pull a crowley.”

crying call

A call made reluctantly on the last betting round with the expectation of losing (but with some remote hope of catching a bluff).

cut

Take some of the cards off the top of a deck and move them to the bottom.

cutoff

The seat immediately to the right of the dealer button. Also “pone”.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Pennsylvania’s cash-strapped college students need urgent help paying their tuition bills, as Gov. Ed Rendell sees it, and he is calling on state lawmakers to deliver relief quickly by legalizing and taxing video poker playing.

Pennsylvania’s cash-strapped college students need urgent help paying their tuition bills, as Gov. Ed Rendell sees it, and he is calling on state lawmakers to deliver relief quickly by legalizing and taxing video poker playing.

Types of poker

While some tournaments offer a mix of games, like H.O.R.S.E. events which combine Hold’em, Omaha, Razz, Stud and Stud Eight or Better and Dealer’s Choice events, at which one may choose from a similar menu of games, most tournaments feature one form of stud or community card poker, such as seven-card stud, seven card high-low stud, Omaha Hold ‘em or Texas Hold ‘em. Both Omaha and Texas Hold’em tournaments are commonly offered in fixed-limit, pot limit, and no limit forms.

Tournament venues

Informal tournaments can be organized by a group of friends; for example, most colleges feature poker tournaments. Casinos and online gaming sites often offer daily tournaments.

However, these are not the only venues. Several World Poker Tour venues are cruise ships at sea. The 2005 World Series of Poker primarily took place in the conference hall of the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas.

Major tournaments

The two largest and most well-known tournaments are the World Poker Tour championship event and the World Series of Poker, held at Binion’s Horseshoe casino in Las Vegas. The World Series has traditionally been featured on ESPN.

The 2005 World Series of Poker was the first held outside of Binion’s Horseshoe Casino, though the final few days of the main event were held in the legendary Benny’s Bullpen. Future tournaments will be held at one of the Harrah’s Entertainment properties; 2005 saw the Rio as primary venue.

Arguably the most publicised European tournament is the Poker Million, which began in 2000 on Sky Sports, following on from the success of the Late Night Poker television show.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

CALGARY, ALBERTA — (Marketwire) — 02/06/09 — The Canadian Poker Tour, owned and operated by HeadsUp Entertainment International Inc. (PINK SHEETS: HDUP), has crowned a national champion at the CPT Invitational Finals held at the Ocean World Resort and Casino in the Dominican Republic.

In poker, a “live” game played with “real” chips and money, usually with no predetermined end time. Players may freely buy into or cash out of a ring game between hands.

In “no limit” poker ring games, there is normally a maximum buy-in for ring games that prevents players from buying a chip stack size advantage. In limit poker games, there is seldom a maximum buy-in because betting limits on each hand already limit the advantage of having a larger chip stack.

Contrast this to a poker tournament, which is played with tournament chips (worth nothing outside the tournament) with a definite end condition (usually, only one player left).

In a casino, rake is usually taken from a pot if the player is in a hand while a flop is shown.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

The secret behind playing small-ball poker isn’t so much in the hands you choose to play. It’s more about the amount you choose to bet with the hands you end up playing.

One of the easiest ways to cheat at poker is with a partner or many partners, called collusion. This is basically playing differently against one or more players than you do against others at the table (in contrast to mechanics, which is directly manipulating cards or chips in violation of the rules). The gravity of such cheating ranges from the subconscious to the conspiratorial. Some common forms of collusion are soft play, that is, failing to bet or raise in a situation that would normally merit it because of your opponent; whipsawing, where partners at opposite ends of the table raise and reraise each other to trap players in between; and dumping, or deliberately losing to a partner (perhaps someone you are backing financially or with whom you have traded a percentage stake). Signalling (that is, trading information between partners) is probably the most egregious example of such cheating, but all of these are considered bad play and should not be tolerated at any poker game.

In friendly games it is common to be playing against someone you know well. Perhaps your spouse may be playing at the game with the rest of your friends. Suddenly your luck turns for the worse. Subconsciously, you are less willing to take the money of the people you know or love. Perhaps one fellow has been getting bad hands all evening, and you know he has car payments to make, and this changes the game being played. The best advice is to leave friendship outside the poker game. Especially in tournament poker, soft-playing a friend is cheating all of the other players out of their chance to see you bust your friend, getting them closer to the prize money.

For this reason, there are laws in some U.S. states saying that a husband and wife cannot play poker at the same table. Perhaps the easiest way to exploit such a situation is to agree to split the profits (after all, couples often have shared bank accounts). Even without any explicit collusion during the game, this reduces the variance of the team as a whole.

It should come as no surprise that two people sharing information about their hands enjoy a great advantage over the other players. If you do not believe this, deal out a few poker hands, but deal yourself two. The idea is that these players signal one another and only play the better of the two hands. Signals can take many forms, from the placement of the chips on the cards to morse code tappings on the table. The key ingredient in all signaling systems is the ability to be repeated unobtrusively. In order for this advantage to make money it has to be done many times without someone realizing it. In a game where people (hopefully) are always watching each other, this can prove problematic. When a cheat is signaling the value of his hand to his partner, he is also signaling the value of his hand to everyone at the table. The result of a system of signals being figured out is nothing short of financial disaster. Some games are more susceptible to this kind of cheating than others: in Five-card stud and Lowball, for example, signalling the rank of just one card can give another player sufficient information to make many otherwise difficult decisions.

Collusion in online poker is relatively easy and much more difficult to spot if executed well. The main reason is that the cheaters can engage in instant messaging discussing their cards with no one looking at them. Sometimes the same person can be using two or more computers and playing under different aliases. This gives him an advantage that’s difficult to work against. However many poker rooms have imposed a maximum of one account per household, though a determined cheater can still bypass this by using multiple connections thus having different IP addresses. However, online poker sites keep records of every hand played, and collusion can often be detected by finding the appropriate pattern. Many sites also offer head-to-head (heads-up) games, where collusion is not useful.

Another concern in online poker is the use of software called “bots” (short for computer robots). These are programs that make decisions on behalf of the player based on odds etc. and also play on their behalf. Though their accuracy and ability has been questioned, it has nevertheless been seen as unfair practices by the poker room and has sought to ban them. With improvements in software and hardware it is expected that in the near future a bot that can beat a human consistently is a near certainity.

Should two people wanting to cheat be in close proximity, they might decide to hand-muck. That is, to switch hands or alter them in some way (though this particular form of cheating might be considered mechanics rather than collusion). A simple idea of this is to have two people sitting next to each other in a game of draw poker. While they receive two mediocre hands, they could switch certain cards between themselves in order to form a worthless hand and a winner. There are many sleight of hand methods to this. Hand-mucking is also a problem in blackjack.

Perhaps the most odious way of cheating with a partner is to have a weekly game at your house, agreeing with all your regular players that you split the profit from cheating a single player. This hot-seat game invites a new player every week, only to play against six players all working together. The mechanics are the same, players signal their hands, then play proceeds as to drive the hot-seat out, or to put all his money in the pot.

If you are at a poker game and you detect that your opponents are cheating, but are not very good at it, you can use this information to your advantage. You may be better off exploiting their inept cheating than leaving or turning them in. Dr. Frank R. Wallace wrote a book on this, in which he coined the term neocheating (He later developed a philosophy called Neo-Tech. The book consists of 2 parts easy to spot cheating techniques (marking the deck, crimping cards, false cuts, etc) and 5 parts philosophical content and stories.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Video: Poker Cheats

HARRISBURG – In a proposal that was met with instant criticism across the Capitol, the Rendell administration said yesterday it wanted to legalize video-poker machines at restaurants, private clubs and corner bars to help Pennsylvania students pay for college.

GREENSBURG, Pa. — A Westmoreland County judge says poker tournaments are illegal gambling under state law and has refused to dismiss charges against three men.

In poker, to bluff is to bet or raise with an inferior hand, or with a hand believed to be inferior. The term is also used as a noun: a bluff is the act of bluffing.

The bluff is an important part of the strategy of any poker game, though it will come into play more in some games than in others. This is because a bluff is intended to represent a strong hand. For example, bluffs are much stronger in pot-limit and no-limit games, because your opponent will have worse pot odds, in addition to the threat of larger bets in future betting rounds if there are any. On the other hand, bluffing is less common in limit Omaha, because it’s often likely that if you don’t have the hand you represent, one of your opponents does.

Strategy

Do not be predictable. If you always bluff in certain situations, your opponents will figure this out and start calling more. On the other hand, if you never bluff, they will figure that out too and stop calling your non-bluff bets, which is a bad thing—even though you might win the hand, you will fail to win the amount of their call. The exact ideal bluffing frequency in each game situation is a complicated exercise in game theory that you will not be able to solve at the table, so you may have to rely on rules of thumb, prior analysis, experience, and intuition.

General guidelines

• Bluffs are more successful with fewer people in the pot. Against only one or two opponents, your chances are often good that no one has a hand good enough to call. Against three or more opponents, at least one of them probably does, so bluffing is unlikely to succeed.
• Bluff much less in high-low split games—some very weak hands will call hoping for half the pot, and the likelihood of splitting the pot greatly reduces your pot odds in any case. In some games such as limit Omaha high-low, you would not be giving up much advantage if you never bluffed at all.
• In games with many betting rounds, bluffs are more often successful in early rounds rather than late ones. Once other players have put a lot of money into the pot, they are less likely to give up (this tendency is based on the false concept of being “pot-committed” and goes beyond the correct strategy of calling more often with higher pot odds. cf. sunk cost fallacy)
• Value bet your strong hands, consider bluffing with hands you are almost sure cannot win any other way, and check the ones in between: On the last betting round, if you have a hand that might be good but that is not very strong, you are probably better off checking and then calling a bet by your opponent rather than bluffing. A player with a worse hand will probably not call if you bet, but a check might induce your opponent to bluff, allowing your call to win more money. On the other hand, a player with a better hand than yours will almost certainly call, and may raise, costing you money. You also do not need the protection of a bet.
• A raise, and especially a check-raise, as a bluff is more psychologically intimidating than just opening. Of course it also risks more of your money and makes the pot bigger (and therefore more likely to be called), so it must be used with care.

Semi-bluffs

In games with multiple betting rounds, to bluff on one round with an inferior or drawing hand that might become a much better one by chance in a later round is often called a semi-bluff. Semi-bluffs thus afford a player two opportunities to win the pot: everyone may fold, or the player still might win the showdown if called.

For example, a player in a stud poker game with four spade-suited cards showing (but none among their downcards) on the penultimate round might raise, hoping that others believe they have a flush even though they do not. If their bluff fails and they are called, they still might be dealt a spade on the final card and win the showdown (or they might be dealt another non-spade and try their bluff again, in which case it is a pure bluff or stone-cold bluff on the final round rather than a semi-bluff).

Randomizing devices

In performing bluffs, it often helps to have a randomizing device: for example, if your analysis or experience leads you to believe that you should bluff half of the time in a certain situation, use a device such as the color of the last card dealt. Another strategy useful in short-handed games is to give yourself fake outs: if a jack is not a scare card, pretend that every jack is an out for you, even if it is not. This strategy has a mathematical basis in game theory.

Bluff (the game)

Bluff is an ancient predecessor of poker played in the 1800s, where only the cards from 10 to Ace were used, and straights and flushes hadn’t been invented yet.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Video: Varkonyi with an awesome bluff at the World Championships in Vegas