As for the promotion side of the equation, the tip of the hat goes to Harrah's not online casinos. The casino offers random "hot seat" giveaways nine times a day at its blackjack games where players can win 500 bonus reward player's club credits. They also have bi-weekly $3,000 Wild Wednesday Blackjack Tournaments starting at 7:00 p.m. with the winner earning $1,500 cash. Interested players can register anytime throughout the month with a table games representative. Registration is limited to the first 60 sign-ups.

When I got home from that trip, I began to study the games. I read every book I could find on the subject of gambling. I studied system after system. Some of them I tried out at the kitchen table and on the living room floor, dealing cards to myself, rolling dice and tossing coins well into the night, learning about the games and the probabilities that went with them. I even sent away for some of those mail-order systems that promised big wins on the slots or at the roulette tables. Sometimes, I went into the casinos and tried these systems out for real, losing real money on them. Along the way, I learned a lot about what not to do in a casino. 

The intense mainstream press interest in U.S. land casinos ambitions toward online casinos gambling possibilities continued last week Reuters and other wire service reports examining the delicate online casinos situation. Online casinos have sometimes been seen as a threat to land based casinos and other times online casinos have been examined as a gift to the future profitability of the gambling industry in general. Clearly, land based casinos have taken a turn and now support online casinos more than ever before.

Earlier, comments by the AGA and by major U.S. land casinos companies suggested a growing interest in gaining access to the growing universe of gamblers at online casinos, although companies emphasized that they are not losing customers to foreign operators that offer wagering at online casinos.

Speaking about online casinos, Alan Feldman, the spokesman for the United States land based MGM Mirage said, "It represents an enormous opportunity." The spokesman for the world’s second largest gaming operator also added, “And it is an opportunity that is being completely handed to foreign companies right now."

Standing in the way of this potential online casinos and land based casinos windfall is a 1961 federal law that forbids interstate telephone betting that the U.S. Justice Department has said also applies to online casinos, claiming that it is illegal for U.S. companies to offer online casinos.

Worldwide revenue from online casinos increased to about $12 billion last year from $3.1 billion in 2001 and is expected to hit $24.5 billion by 2010, according to estimates from Christiansen Capital Advisors. U.S. residents now make up about half of the online casinos market.

The number of Americans who placed bets at online casinos doubled in 2005 to about 4 percent of the adult population, or about 8 million people, according to a survey by the American Gaming Association, an industry group that represents U.S. casinos and related companies.

"It is a new place for people to gamble," said Eugene Christiansen, a consultant with Christiansen Capital. "These are big businesses."

MGM Mirage launched an Internet gambling site branded PlayMGMMirage.com in 2001, but shut the Web site down in 2003, as it was not allowed to serve U.S. residents. "There is no business if you keep out everyone from the United States," Feldman said.

"Some of our companies would think of it as a missed opportunity," AGA Chief Executive Frank Fahrenkopf said.

"Most of our companies view Internet gambling as possibly another profit center." Companies such as MGM Mirage and Harrah's Entertainment would almost certainly start Web sites if Internet gambling were legalized in the United States, Fahrenkopf said.

Still, he added that U.S. gaming companies did not see Internet gambling as a threat to their business, as more than half of their revenue now comes from non-gaming activities that could not be replicated.

"I would not be surprised if there were some compromise passed within the next two Congresses," said Harold Krent, dean of the Chicago-Kent College of Law.

I also learned a few things about what to do to get the most bang for the buck. I learned how to count cards and how to get away with it. I learned how a small bettor can play the comp game and win. I discovered some great sites on the Internet, such as Stanford Wong's bj21 site, Michael Dalton's BJRnet and, of course, Rolling Good Times itself. It has paid off for me. For the last seven years, my wife and I have enjoyed great vacations online casinos and weekend getaways, all at the expense of the casinos. Each one of those years has ended in a profit at the tables on top of all the goodies and freebies. We are having a ball. 

I'll be passing along what I have learned from my online casinos experiences here. It's not an expert opinion and I can be as wrongheaded as anybody every now and then. That said, if you want to hear about the games from a player's point of view, from a fellow who likes to get in the trenches and slug it out with the casinos and who scores the occasional knock-out punch, then I hope you'll stop in for a visit. I'll put on the coffee and maybe you can stay awhile. 

I don't know about you but whenever I play a version of Jacks or Better Video Poker it seems like those low pair hands show up with an uncanny frequency and with the same uncanny frequency seem to seldom lead to anything fruitful. Yet, when I look at strategy tables they seem to rank right up there with four card straights and three card straight flushes. That is to say, the strategy tables tell us that a low pair is a decent hand. It sure never feels like that to me. Let's take a closer look.

There are 2,598,560 ways to deal a five card hand from a 52-card deck. If you want to see how one arrives at such a number you can go into the archives and look for my article Hey New York, Bring Back those Big Dippers or better still you can refer to my new book The Lottery Book, The Truth Behind the Numbers, available from Huntington Press (1-800-244-2224), Payone Press (1-800-944-0406), Barnes and Noble, or Amazon.

If you think of a deck of cards as consisting of 13 packets of 4 equally ranked cards each, then nine of these packets contain low cards. The number of ways to select one of these is obviously 9 and then there are 6 ways to choose a pair of cards from the chosen packet. In other words, there are 9 x 6 or 54 ways to choose a pair of low cards. This done we select any three of the remaining twelve packets (220 ways) and select one card from each (64 ways). Altogether, then, there are 54 x 220 x 64 or 760,320 ways to select a five-card hand consisting of a low pair. Dividing this into 2,598,960 we obtain approximately 3.42 so that on average we should see a low pair every 3.42 hands. Well that explains why we get so many of them. What happens when we do?

If we toss the three strays and keep the pair, then our remaining deck contains 47 cards consisting of a pair matching the two in our hand, three packets of three cards each corresponding to the three we tossed (9 cards), and nine packets of four equally ranked cards (36 cards).

There are 16,215 ways of dealing three cards from a 47-card deck. How many of these will give us a final hand of two pair? The answer is that we can either choose one of the four-card packets (9 ways), choose two cards from it (6 ways) and then choose one of the remaining 41 cards (we don't want to pick cards matching our original pair or the two just picked), or we can pick one of the three-card packets (3 ways), choose two from it (3 ways), and select any of the 42 remaining cards (the 36 cards in the four card packets and the six cards in the remaining two three-card packets). Hence there are 9 x 6 x 41 + 3 x 3 x 42 or 2,592 hands with two pairs. Dividing this into 16,215 we find that we will have two pair once in every 6.26 draws or about 29.25% of the time we draw to a low pair.
One of the newer gambling products on the market is the computer program Frugal Video Poker developed by Jim Wolf and highly recommended and marketed by Jean Scott. Jean, as many of you know, is the author of the popular books The Frugal Gambler and More Frugal Gambling, both published by Huntington Press of Las Vegas. I recently saw Jean in Tunica, Mississippi where we were both on the program at Frank Scoblete's Gambler's Jamboree. Jean was kind enough to give me a copy of her Video Poker program to look over and I am glad that she did for I think it is a dandy program.

First of all it has the usual graphics and sound of a tutor program, with a plethora of different versions of Video Poker that one can play, the ability of the user to define a game, warnings when an incorrect play is made, and statistical records of one's play. There is one feature, however, that sets this program apart from other fine Video Poker programs. To adequately explain it I'll need a bit of history.

;In 1992 Lenny Frome published Americas National Game of Chance - Video Poker; his coauthor was Maryann Guberman. This, to the best of my knowledge, was the first book ever written on the subject. The following year Lenny published Winning Strategies for Video Poker. This second book was a collection of strategy tables that provided near optimum strategy for over 50 video poker machines. Let me define what I mean by a strategy table. It is a linear ordering of one, two, three, four, and five-card hands in order of their expected value (EV) in terms of holding them for the draw. For example, in 9/6 Jacks or Better, a 4-card flush is a stronger hand than a 3-card royal, so it appears above the 3-card royal in the list of hands. Thus if we were dealt AH, QH, TH, 6C, 4H the table would tell us that holding the AH, QH, TH, 4H is a better play than holding AH, QH, TH.

Notice in the above paragraph I used the words "near optimum." This is because it is, in general, impossible to linearly order video poker hands. Let me illustrate this with an example. Suppose that in 10/7 Double Bonus Poker we are dealt KH, QH, 3H, 8D, 6C. Should we hold the 2-card royal or the 3-card flush with two high cards? It turns out that with 5 coins played the 2-card royal has an EV of 2.8252 coins and the 3-card flush has an EV of 2.8168 coins; we should hold the 2-card royal. Thus it would seem that KQ royal should appear higher in our strategy table than the 3-card flush with two high cards. 
As some of you may be aware, my book The Lottery Book: The Truth Behind the Numbers has finally been released and is now available from the publisher, Bonus Books, as well as from Huntington Press, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Wal-Mart, and other booksellers. I want to take this opportunity to publicly thank Frank Scoblete for writing a very entertaining foreword to the book and for helping me throughout the writing. One of the things I advise lottery players in the book is to not buy so-called winning schemes for playing lotteries - there are none. The fact is, however, that as far back as there is recorded history there have always been snake oil salesmen or their equivalent and the same is true today. One of my readers, Maxine Nelson from Tampa Florida (who is acknowledged in my book for her inquiry about anonymity of winners), recently wrote to tell me about a scheme for playing called The Bell Curve. Here is the story.

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