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The Unofficial Guide to Casino Gambling
by Basil Nestor
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Basil Nestor incorporates decades of gambling knowledge to give the reader insight into probability, common gambling mistakes, and winning strategies in his popular book, The Unofficial Guide to Casino Gambling.  Covering all the bases of casino gambling including machine games (slots and video poker), table games (blackjack, roulette, craps, baccarat, poker), and waiting games (keno and sports betting) the book also has sections on how to get casino comps, gambling systems, a history of gambling in the US, and much more.
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Quick Wins or Losses and Introducting the Vig

What if you can afford only 100 bets for slots, or 25 bets for table games? Ideally, you should lower the amount of your base bet to fit the size of your session bankroll. If you don’t wantBasil NestorBasil Nestor is the author of the new Playboy Complete Guide to Casino Gambling. This wonderful book teaches players how to avoid sucker bets and win more when playing gambling games.  He is also the author of The Smarter Bet Guide series for video poker, slots, craps, and many other books about gambling.  Basil's website is www.smarterbet.com  to do that, then just accept the fact that you may go bust in an hour or less, unless you hit a lucky streak.

What if you can afford 250 bets for one session, but not 1,000 bets for four sessions (or whatever you need for the length of your trip)? Happily, you will win sometimes, especially if you use optimal strategy and a rolling stop-loss. Let’s say you begin with a trip bankroll of 750 bets. You may find that it’s enough to cover four or even five sessions. But if you want to be sure that you can play the entire time, then play fewer sessions, or lower the amount of your base bet.

What if you want to play longer than two to three hours? That’s okay, but take a break and begin a new session (with a new bankroll) when you return.

What happens if your session bankrolls consistently disappear too quickly? Stop playing, and start thinking about your game. You’re either not correctly using optimal strategy, or you’re not funding the bankrolls correctly. Think things through before you take more money from your main bankroll to fund another session (we’ll talk more about strategies for your main bankroll in Part 5 of this book).

What if you hit a big jackpot? What do you do with the windfall? Same advice as above. Stop playing, and start thinking about your game. Set aside some of the money (for spending and such), and use the balance to fund your main bankroll. Now you can increase the size of your bets and shoot for bigger wins. However, before you bet bigger, you’ve got to think about the vig.

What is the Vig?

Vig is short for vigorish. It’s a fee that a casino charges for providing betting services (the venue, machines, drinks, and so forth), and it’s synonymous with the house edge. The vig for most gambling games is subtracted from the payback. For example, slots pay back only a portion of the money put into them. But in some games, such as craps and baccarat, the vig is a separate fee.

Either way, the vig eats into your bankroll, unless your luck is consistently above average, or you eliminate the house edge.

If you’re playing against a vig, then you are depending on luck to some degree, and nobody has good luck forever. The amounts I suggest for session bankrolls are meant to keep you comfortably ahead of the vig, and to give you a good chance to hit some wins. But when it comes time to calculate the size of your main bankroll, then you must accept the fact that you usually will be putting money in and rarely pulling money out, unless you erase the vig with optimal strategy.

Remember that a house edge, or a player edge, is an average amount over time. In the short run (a few dozen or a few hundred decisions) you might be a big winner, or the casino may be far ahead, regardless of who has the edge. It sometimes takes thousands of decisions before net results closely match the expected edge. But one way or another, the edge eventually appears.

Would you like to erase the casino’s advantage when you’re playing video poker, blackjack, craps, and other contests? Get optimal strategies for all your favorite games in Basil Nestor’s book The Unofficial Guide to Casino Gambling.

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