Today's Casinos

12 December 2024

By Royal Flushes

CINDY: Are the games better now than ever before? Or have they gotten worse?

ABBY: In general, I think they are not as good as the past. The casinos are better, many of them actually gleam, but the games are certainly not what they were ever before. I think young people have not really learned how to play the games properly.

CINDY: I have noticed that but I have also noticed I tend to be judgmental of the youth shall we say.

ABBY: You old fart!

CINDY: I think you take a look at the central games, let us say blackjack, roulette, craps, mini-baccarat, video poker, and slots; and you will see that with the exception of craps they have gone downhill. Some noticeably, others just a little.

ABBY: Blackjack has gone down the most I think. You will rarely find a single-deck game that doesn’t have the 6-to-5 payout for a blackjack. Rules within those single-deck games are somewhat different too. You are limited in your doubles and splits and doubles after splits. It seems the casinos are trying to squeeze the money out of you.

CINDY: Not all casinos do that with all the options but some certainly do.

ABBY: Most casinos have the dealer hitting the soft 17 – which is Ace-6. This is beneficial to the casino. You can actually play six and eight-deck games where they hit soft 17. That didn’t happen in days long past.

CINDY: There are more continuous shuffle machines where the dealer never gets to actually shuffle the cards. This increases the number of hands by about 20 percent and that is not good for the players. I think you find these at some of the high-end casinos.

ABBY: Without question, craps is a better game – if you make it a better game by your betting – than ever before. You have triple odds on up to 10 and sometimes 20 times odds.

CINDY: Well, too many craps players make the worst bets at the game. It’s always been that way since I began playing it. I guess the casinos didn’t really have to tinker with it much. They have also added a bunch of side bets too. You make a few of those and goodbye money.

ABBY: So, you have options for a far, far better game but there are traps, some new ones too. These traps basically trap most players.

CINDY: That’s why they are called traps!

ABBY: Okay, look at roulette’s new game – the triple-zero wheel. Now that is a bad, bad game.

CINDY: Just awful. The house edges at roulette go from 2.70 percent on the single-zero wheel to 5.26 percent on the double-zero wheel to 7.69 percent on the triple-zero wheel.

ABBY: Some casinos advertise that game as one where you can get more comps.

CINDY: That’s because you are losing more money! Comps are determined by how much the casino figures you will lose playing the way you play.

ABBY: Now we both know that casinos have to have edges on their games. That’s a given but you see how those edges have changed. Not to the players’ benefit unfortunately.

CINDY: With video-poker there are rarely any of the 100 percent payback machines – I haven’t seen one in years. Slot machines eat as much money as they always have. Mini-baccarat is so fast it sets a land-speed record.

ABBY: But casinos are attractive places to gamble. That is still the sense of things. We are a gambling culture.

CINDY: True, so true.

ABBY: So, I guess we just deal with what we have.

CINDY: Absolutely.