The Lucky Donut

There are no bad beats in Blackjack – one of the reasons I’ve been enjoying playing it so much lately.  What’s the worst that’s going to happen?  You’ve made a 20 and the dealer shows  a 6.  Two hits later he’s got 21 and you lose.  It sucks, but he’s going to beat you about 10% of the time here.

So it has to be a particularly lucky or unlucky streak to make it worth talking about, let alone posting a hand history – something I never thought I’d be doing.

I signed up a new account to William Hill Casino in a friend’s name.  This is a trusting friend who isn’t exactly up to speed with where I’m gambling on their behalf, but it’s an arrangement that works great for me – I need more friends like that!

This gave me another go at their £50 signup bonus before it finishes at the end of this month – apparently to be replaced by a new and improved monthly bonus, which we’ll have to wait and see but I would expect it means one of the easiest casino signup bonuses is not going to be around much longer.

So this series of hands (raw hand history here) is the first ten hands I played using that account.  Every single one of them lost.  Bad karma for cheating the system perhaps, but it definitely demonstrates that there’s no such thing as "new depositors’ luck" at this site.

No casino operator with a clue and the ability to rig things even slightly would want a new player’s first experience to be ten losing hands of blackjack.  The odds are about 700-1 against.

Hand 1:
I’m dealt 17 and stand.  Dealer shows a 4, turns over another 4, then hits an 8 and then a 2 making 18.

Hand 2:
I stand on 18.  Dealer shows a 2, turns over a 3, then hits a ten and a 5 for a winning 20.

Hand 3: Another 17.  Dealer shown 8 and obviously has a ten in the hole.

Hand 4: With Q, 2 and dealer showing an ace I have to hit my 12.  I draw a ten to bust.

Hand 5: Dealer shows another ace and I bust after hitting my T, 6 and drawing a 9.

Hand 6: With a dealt 7, 3 at least I can’t bust with a single hit.  Best I can do though is another 7, which isn’t nearly enough to beat the dealer’s J, K for 20.

Hand 7: Perhaps 18 can win this time with my T, 8 against a dealer’s upcard 3.  Nope.  He’s got a 9 under there, makes it a promising 15 and pulls a miracle 5 for yet another 20.

Hand 8:  I have to double down on my 4, 5 against the dealer’s 4 and only manage to muster a 3.  Twelve doesn’t beat much, let alone the dealer’s piss-taking 21.

Hand 9: Soft 18 is a stand against the dealer’s 2.  Can he beat it?  Yes he can: K in the hole, and 8 makes 20.

Hand 10: Can’t split a pair of 7s when the dealer shows a ten, so I hit it.  At least the 4 doesn’t bust me, but 18 isn’t enough.  A 3 in the hole is promising at first, then he hits a 2 and 4 for 19.  Of course.

Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents’ cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose.

— David Sklansky’s Fundamental Theorem of Poker

It’s now pretty much a certainty that at least one player on Absolute Poker has been able to play real money games while being able to see all of his opponents’ hole cards. 

Absolute are saying publicly "this never actually happened" but privately "oh shit, we’re fucked".  I’m speculating, obviously, but it seems likely.   This is a poker site that used to dominate the BonusWhores.com newsletter with their almost-daily reload offers, but now they are top of their blacklisted sites list.  PocketFives.com have also stopped taking their advertising money, and I’m sure this is only the beginning.  Nobody with any sense will ever play there again for an amount of money that matters.

If you want to see the damning evidence and don’t want to trawl through many very long forum threads, jump straight to the latest updates on 2+2 or read this excellent summary on Nat Arem’s blog.

Or you could just hit play on this video.  Thanks to an administrative cock-up of gigantic proportions, Absolute have given out a master hand history that shows player POTRIPPER winning a $1000 buy-in tournament while playing just about every hand perfectly.  It really is just like he can see what everyone else is holding, over and over again.

This is just part 1.  Get parts 2 to 4 here.

Sure, he gets sucked out on a couple of big pots, but it’s exactly like Sklansky says: if you can see everyone’s cards, you’re going to win money. 

The basic strategy is to see a flop with any two cards, and then:

– If your opponent has a huge hand, just check and fold.
– If there is any hand you can represent to scare your opponent, bet or raise.
– If you have a monster or your opponent has nothing, let them catch up or give them chance to bluff.

The chances of this playing style being legitimate are as close to zero as you could possibly imagine.

This was only a temporary blip after I left four tables simultanously, but it was still a WTF moment.

I’m not sure which I like more:

The fact that for a moment I apparently owed the iPoker network over ninety two quadrillion dollars, and that because they can handle a such a large negative number they must also have designed their systems to be able to deal with the same order of magnitude in a positive balance.  I’m looking forward to watching the $2bn/$4bn game.

Or the whole "minus minus two billion and something dollars point minus eight" thing.  There are just so many ways that it’s not even a number…

Although Party Poker’s reload bonuses are useless these days, there’s still value to be had at Empire Poker.  The two sites are the same, it’s the same players at the same tables, the only things that are different are the colour schemes and the loyalty point schemes.  So becuse Empire doesn’t have Party Points, the bonuses still are awarded based on you having to play a specific number of raked hands.

This weekend’s bonus was $100, with 1000 raked hands required to release.  Or, I noticed, the alternative was to cycle $1000 through blackjack.  Quite a difference from the last Party bonus I was offered, which would have required $120,000 in action!  As there’s still very few full ring limit tables to grind this out on, using blackjack to collect my free money was an easy decision.

I’ve actually been playing a lot of blackjack lately, as I’ve rekindled my interest in exploiting casino welcome bonuses.  The last time I did this on any great scale was over six years ago, at a time where the play requirements were much less strict and you could often deposit, play and cash out a reasonable bonus in under an hour.

My strategy was to just blitz as many different casinos as possible, banking whatever small profit was forthcoming and moving onto the next casino.  It was very effective, and I even wrote a foolproof beat-the-casino system based on it.  It sold a handful of copies –  maybe as many as five…

Back then, it only felt right to take my ill-gotten gains to Las Vegas and give them back to the casino industry, which I happily did.  This time I still intend to take the money to Vegas, but my mission doesn’t involve blowing a chunk of cash – instead I’m going to earn enough to pay for the house rental for next summer, which will be $2000-3000.  My incentive for doing well is to ensure we can get a place with a pool again!

Today, the play requirements on casino bonuses are much tougher, with many casinos excluding some or all forms of blackjack from the promotion entirely.  If you have to wager thousands on slots for your bonus, you’re probably not going to come out a winner.  But if you can clock up the play using blackjack, even with a 20x or higher release restriction, you still have a big edge on that game.

To find the house edge, you can plug the exact rules into the Wizard of Odds House Edge Calculator.  In the Empire game (8 decks, dealer hits soft 17, double after split, double on any two cards, split pairs up to 4 hands, cannot resplit aces, cannot hit split aces, dealer checks for blackjack, late surrender available) the house edge with optimal play is 0.57%, and with realistic play 0.66%.

Therefore after $1000 in play, the house should expect to win $6.60, leaving you with $93.40 of your $100 bonus for yourself.  Even if there was a 20x or 30x play through required, there’d still be plenty of bonus left over.  10x is very generous indeed.

The last time I played a Party Poker bonus for the same amount, it took up six hours of my life playing 4-6 tables of poker and I paid about $35 in rake, so effectively they paid me about $11/hr to be there before any wins or losses are taken into account.

Playing the bonus on blackjack took me just 2.5 hours to churn through 1000 hands at $1 each, for a theoretical hourly rate of $37.  In fact, for the results oriented, I also won $27 on top of the $100 bonus!

Blackjack has its advantages over poker when it comes to racking up bonus play.  The game is available around the clock without you having to contend with a waiting list, or wait for enough players to fill a new table.  To find 4-6 tables of limit running, you can only play at peak times.

It also doesn’t really matter whether you play $1/$2 or $5/10 or higher, you’ll only earn slightly more raked hands as you increase stakes.  The only way to clear the bonus faster is to open up more tables.  With blackjack, however, if you want to get through your bonus quicker, you can just bet more per hand.  You trade a higher chance of wiping out for the higher hourly rate, but your expectation on the bonus remains the same as long as you’re prepared to deposit more money to finish it off if necessary.

Most importantly, you absolutely don’t have to put your life on hold to play casino bonuses.  Take a break whenever you like, there’s no panic if the doorbell rings in the middle of a hand, and no need to wait for the blinds to come round on every table if you need a dump.  I even managed to run through this bonus while I was four-tabling poker for another site’s bonus at the same time… multiple whorage!

The only thing I’m missing with blackjack is the four colour deck… why won’t somebody make that an option?