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A different kind of eclipse26 June 2001On the longest day of the year, blackjack players at StanleyAcropolis.com took advantage of an unusual promotion that offered two-to-one payouts on blackjack, instead of the normal three to two. The 24-hour promotion last Thursday attracted a significant number of players who couldn’t believe the unbelievable bonuses. Savvy gamblers were the players who benefited the most from the promotion. According to experts, the change in the odds enables a player who follows the “basic strategy” for blackjack a 2 percent edge against the house, whereas, with the normal three-to-two payout for blackjacks, the typical game gives the house an edge of 0.5 percent against the basic strategy player. “It does give an edge, but you’ve still got to play well to benefit from that,” Andy Mace, casino manager at Stanley Leisure Online. “Basically we just saw it as a way of drawing some attention to ourselves and trying to get some players to come and visit the site and see what we’re all about. “ Explaining the reasoning behind the promotion, Mace said, “Every now and again we like to just give a little back.” The casino attracted so much traffic that it crashed on a number of occasions. “A couple of times we fell over from the sheer weight of transactions and activity on the sites,” said Mace. “From about 7 o’clock EST last night, we were pretty much full, at the bursting point, to be honest,” he continued. Although the promotion also ran simultaneously at two other Stanley Leisure sites – AvalonCasinos.com and AcropolisCasinos.com, despite crashes which lasted upto 30 minutes a time, StanleyAcropolis drew about 50 percent of the traffic while the other two sites split the rest. |