Gaming Gurus: LatestFrom Our Strategy Experts

Slot Players Are Different

Blackjack players, craps players, roulette players, Pai Gow Poker players and video-poker players (and players amongst most of the other games) all know or should know the established house edges on all of their bets. I do realize that some players do not know any of this information but it is all there to learn.Smart players know what they are getting into when they play those games...read more

Top 10 things to expect from poker in 2023

The interest in poker has drastically increased in the last two years, and online operators are expected to do everything possible to keep that trend alive.While it is really hard to guess what the year will bring us, we love to speculate on it, so here we share 10 things we think we can expect to see from the poker industry in 2023.10...read more

What Happened to the Royal Flush?

QUESTION: I was playing 9-5 Triple Double Bonus Poker. Not the top of the line pay table, I know, but not too bad for nickel Five Play game.Four Aces with a low kicker brings 4,000 coins for a five-coin bet. It's as much as you'd get for a royal flush.I was wondering, do you get the Aces and kicker more or less often than royals? It seems like the 4,000-coin jackpots would come a lot more often than in other games...read more

Mom and Daughter Penny Slots

QUESTION: My 80-year-old mom loves the slots and she's been giving broad hints that she'd love a mother-daughter day at the casino. I used to go with her on park district bus trips, but our parks don't do that anymore.The result is that I haven't played in a few years, and I'm wondering what kind of budget I need if I'm going...read more

Fixing Something

Recently a reader (Norman) asked about a strange video poker game he had seen in Biloxi. He is a disciplined and skilled player. He generally plays jacks or better if a decent pay table is present. If not, he checks for a decent bonus poker game.As he was scouting the games in this particular casino, he came upon a game that did not make sense to him.The game was labelled “Bonus Poker,” but when he checked the pay table, all four-of-a-kind hands paid the same amount...read more

Casino City’s Friday Five: Massachusetts sports betting launch edition

Next Tuesday, 31 January, Massachusetts retail sports betting will officially go live as Encore Boston Harbor, MGM Springfield and Plainridge Park Casino will start accepting wagers with Wynn Sportsbook and BetMGM Sportsbook beginning at 10 a.m...read more

Encore Boston Harbor primed for Massachusetts sports betting launch

For New England sports bettors it’s felt like running a marathon to be able to place a legal wager in their backyard. However, for the staffs at Encore Boston Harbor just outside of the Boston city limits, MGM Springfield, and Plainridge Park Casino in Plainville it’s felt more like a mad dash.Regardless of what camp you reside in though, the finish line is finally in sight as retail sports betting in Massachusetts opens for business on Tuesday, 31 January at all three locations, just in time for the Super Bowl on 12 February...read more

Video Poker: Tradeoffs

CINDY: I think of video poker as the poor relative of slot machines. I know there are many video-poker players and maybe there are as many video-poker players as craps and roulette players.ABBY: Or maybe as many as blackjack players. But I agree; to me, as I walk around casinos, I find that video poker is the poorer relative to slot machines as you have said...read more

Ask the Slot Expert: Slot payouts in dollars or credits

A few months ago, I received an email asking for my help in a slot payment dispute. Here are some key details from the email: It was a penny slot machine. I was playing $.10 (ten cents) so 10 Xs the denomination. I won $94 in a free games bonus round. The payout should have been $940. I have a photo of the total payout along with my bet. The gaming commission employee took photos and my information and was supposed to investigate...read more

In and Out and In Some More

Slot machines are simple, really; I mean really, really simple. More money goes in them than comes out of them. That’s it, really simple, a very simple game. In and out on occasion for the player, while it is in and in many more times for the casinos.The casino is the really “in” thing when it comes to playing the slot machines.Now, yes, very smart people have developed these machines (which used to be lovingly called “the one-armed bandits” because players had to pull a lever to activate the machine and that lever was considered a type of gun to “kill” the player’s bankroll) and computers now run them and run the RNG (the random-number generator – which is actually a pseudo-random-number generator) that determines which symbols will come up on the screens.In short, a computer program determines when the winning and losing “numbers” will appear...read more