The Mystic Gambler

Playing only nickel Four Card Keno I would regularly win between $800  and $1,700.00. During lucky streaks and playing quarters it was thousands! The Case For Playing Four Card Keno My venture into gambling didn’t start with playing Four Card Keno. Most gambling books that I read plainly said that Video Poker and Blackjack were really the only games that gamblers could expect to win at consistently - over the long haul. And, often in the same book or article, I would read that Keno had the worst odds in the casino. So my wife and I became a semi-professional video poker player team. We played for several years were happy to travel from Phoenix to Las Vegas or Laughlin on weekends. As traveling became more difficult, my wife and I found ourselves frequently visiting local Indian casinos and playing ‘short’ video poker machines. ‘Short’ being games with pay tables that had less than a positive expected return.  That’s frowned upon in the video poker world. One day I com...

It hasn't been all that long ago when I would sometimes find myself on an Indian reservation either to buy smokes or just passing through while out for a Sunday ride on my motorcycle. Back then, you could tell that they didn't have it so good on the reservation. Dirt roads, broken down mobile homes, garbage piled up and old rusty vehicles is what I remember. Indian casino gambling has changed much of that by splitting a potion of the profits with the community by providing more social services and by directly paying tribal members a share of casino take. And for some tribes, those payments - to each adult - can be big bucks. Even a million dollars! When I heard that I immediately signed up at ancestry.com to see if I had any Indian blood in my past This article by Timothy Williams not only takes a look at what casinos are paying the tribes but also the unintended consequences of paying a whole group of people a great salary for doing ...

Several years ago, my wife and I were having dinner after a 'not so good' session of Video Poker. Looking over at me, in between bites of her steak, she said something like, "I just love playing this game so much. It doesn't really matter if I lose - I would play it anyway." Being that we're both advantage players and have been for several years - I thought it a strange statement. At first. But then I remembered the days before we discovered video poker and the thousand of dollars and endless hours we spent in front of slot machines. What were we thinking? A study, reported by Ron Sylvester  for VegasInc.com , reveals that what we were probably thinking may have been - well, - nothing!