Speed Kills

22 February 2024

By Royal Flushes

ABBY: It’s about fast speed, folks; fast, fast speed.

CINDY: You’re driving over 100 miles per hour. You’re not even drunk but you are stupid and you slam into a brick wall head first. You are squished so that the rescuers have to scrap you from various parts of the car and there are many parts of the car and smears of you, squished all over the wall and road.

ABBY: You’re a baseball player in the 1970s, popping speed before a game, and by the end of the season you have something of a hollow look. You pass away in your 50s. Or you are the teenage kid who finds pop’s bills and swallows a lot of them. You die. Or you are a member of a heavy metal band on the road and up all hours of all hours of the night and day and speed lets you do almost superhuman performances until you drop dead right there in front of your rapid fans.

CINDY: You are a casino player, a happy casino player at that, and you love playing fast games. That’s your thing. You have been getting clobbered for years and if you keep this pace up, you will be getting clobbered for decades.

ABBY: The three above examples show you that speed as in movement and speed as in a drug that pumps you up and speed in a casino game can have rotten outcomes. The three examples are factual.

CINDY: No one wants to drive a hundred-miles-per-hour into a brick wall and no one wants to lose and lose and lose quickly at any casino game. Yet, there are fools who drive extremely fast and there are casino players who play too fast for their own good. For their own bankrolls’ good.

ABBY: There are some games that are just too fast and some games that can be fast if you are playing one-against-one against the dealer.

CINDY: Perhaps, the fastest table game right now is mini-baccarat where the player can face up to 150 decisions per hour. The player who plays two hands is playing fast into a brick wall at 100 miles per hour. The house edge at mini-baccarat on its two best bets is close to one percent. That’s great. But speed? Not so great. You want to play that game? Then play less than half the decisions and stock up on water so you can take plenty of bathroom breaks.

ABBY: If you play blackjack head-to-head against the dealer you will be over 100 hands per hour (or thereabouts). Blackjack is a great game but too much speed makes it not such a great game. Play at crowded tables and only play real “basic strategy” and not some strategy created by folks who do not know the correct strategy.

CINDY: Here is another thing that is a kind of speed – the number of bets you make per decision. If you are playing craps and making many bets per decision then you are asking for trouble. That is the equivalent of the heavy metal musician burning the midnight oil at any time of the day or night. It’s dangerous and can lead to many losses over even a short period of time.

ABBY: The same holds true for any game that has multiple betting opportunities.

CINDY: And what about the favorite game of all in the casino, slots? The faster you play the worse it will be for you – unless you are immensely luck.

ABBY: But most people do not have the luck necessary to overcome the fast speed of games!