Betting styles

13 January 2019

By John Grochowski

Readers’ tales of big wins almost always come from slot players, with video poker players making up a substantial minority. Rarely do they come from table players.

That’s normal given the nature of the games. A huge win on the slots can strike in a single spin. When table players have winning sessions, it usually means grinding out more wins than losses over extended play.

Still, table players give me a rare email surprise with big-win stories, including these two.

BLAKE: I’d been playing blackjack for a couple of years and knew basic strategy, but I was pretty timid as a bettor. It was strictly $5 a hand and if I lost $50 I was out of there. My biggest winning session was maybe $20.

Then I heard about betting progressions and decided to try. I still was going to limit by losses to $50, but at least if I was going to make bigger bets, it would be with money I won.

I bet $5, and stayed at $5 after one win. After two wins, I raised to $10, then $15, $20, $25, $35, $50. So I had to have won seven in a row to get to $50. Any loss took me back down to $5.

I got lucky – really lucky. At the start, it was just a normal session. Win a hand or two, lose a hand or two, so no raises. But then I went on a streak. At the $20 bet, I got a blackjack, so instead of $25 I went to $30, then $40, then $50.

At $50, I was dealt a 7 and a 4 and the dealer had a 4. Until that day, I’d never bet more than $5 on a hand, and now I was going to double down and have $100 on the table. I was sweating bullets and my heart was pounding, believe me.

When I got a 10 on my double, it was an electric shock. I’d just won $100.

I couldn’t bring myself to raise again. I stayed at $50, won one more hand and lost one. I stayed for another half hour and never had another streak, but I did win a little more. In all, I won $250 for the session, more than 10 times as much as I’d ever won before.

I colored up to leave and they gave me two $100 chips and two $25s. I showed my wife who was at the slots, and my hand was shaking. It was unbelievable.

JEANNIE: It was my birthday and I was playing roulette with $1 chips. My birthday is the 20th, so I was betting $1 on 20 and surrounding it with $1 on each of the four corners around it.

I was doing OK. A couple of the corner numbers hit. I got an 18 on one spin and a 23 on the next. Finally, the 20 came up. I won the 35-1 on 20 and 8-1 on the corners, so a total of $67.
I added $5 to my bets, so two chips on 20 and two on each corner. The 20 came up again! I won $134 right as my husband came up behind me. He said, “Go for it,” and I did. I put $5 on 20 and $5 on each corner. It won again!

Now I was up more than $500! I decided good things come in threes, and I cashed out and never looked back. I still don’t know what number came next, but I had a nice birthday haul.

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