OK, so maybe my November Nine prediction didn’t quite come out the way I would’ve liked. At least I got 2nd place right! On the PokerBRB forum, I asked some of the Danish players there why Eastgate didn’t crack a smile after he won. After all, if I’d won $9.1 million, I’d be doing cartwheels! When they explained the Danish tax situation to me, and how he’d fork over about 70% of his winnings to SKAT (the Danish IRS — a fitting acronym for a tax agency), I can see how his elation can turn to disappointment. That tax money will buy a lot of cheese- and cherry-filled pastries! (Get it?)

Anyway, now that the ‘08 WSOP is (FINALLY!) in the books, it’s time to look forward to the coming holidays and the promise of a new year as well as a (hopefully) more poker-friendly new administration. On a personal note, I’ll be starting the new year (or at least mid-January) trying to hit as many Vegas poker rooms as I can.

I’ve already played at the poker palaces like Bellagio and Venetian, but there are still a few of the high-end rooms I’d like to try.

Some of the poker areas on the Strip don’t qualify as rooms (the fenced-off area at the Flamingo immedately springs to mind), but I’d still like to check out the play at some of the smaller Strip casinos — maybe the action will make up for the lack of atmosphere.

Even a few of the Downtown rooms, despite their seedy exteriors, have great play on the inside. On my first visit to Binion’s, I made the final three at a small daily tournament. I can say, with absolute truth, that I made a final table at Binion’s!

Here are the top five poker rooms in Vegas I want to visit!

5. Mirage. The Mirage and its sister properties, TI and Bellagio, have been attracting poker players since they opened. While Bellagio hosts the WPT Championship, the Mirage typically hosts the season opener. Also, if I take a bad beat, I can just throw myself into the volcano!

4. Golden Nugget. Calling the Golden Nugget the nicest place to play downtown may be like calling a junked-out ‘57 Chevy the nicest car on the scrap heap.  While their poker room has only ten tables, the atmosphere in the room carries both a rich history as well as 21st century amenities. In photos, the room comes across as a “mini-Venetian” — comfortable, but scaled down.

3. Wynn. I’m not sure I have enough money to breathe the same air as most of the people that stay at the Wynn. I only hope that they don’t laugh at me too much for only playing $4/$8. Even their street sign says, “I’m richer than God!”

2. Hard Rock. For a room with only eighteen tables, the Hard Rock is going all out to make its “Poker Lounge” seem like the coolest place to play. Of course, an out-of-shape math nerd like me will stand out there like John McCain at an ACORN meeting.

1. Caesars Palace. Not only does Caesars have one of the best rooms in town, it has two! It’s the only place on the Strip that has separate rooms for tourneys and cash games. If you don’t want the loud rookie at the $3/$6 table to bother you during the money bubble of a tourney, no problem!

Of course, if you have any other rooms you’d like to recommend, either for the action or the atmosphere, then drop a comment here. Also, if you’d like to learn more about some of my strategic writing on no-limit hold’em, you can check my posts at www.pokerbankrollblog.com.

The sudden, startling downturn in the US economy has affected almost every business arena. Poker, specifically live casino poker, is no exception. This deep recession will impact your live poker experience in several ways:

Travel Expenses: With rising prices for both gasoline and jet fuel, along with a tighter money supply, traveling to the major poker rooms in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and elsewhere around the country will become prohibitively expensive. Instead of a fun weekend excursion or a summer-long tour of your favorite casinos, your poker trips will take a back seat to paying your rising household bills with your shrinking (or non-existent) paycheck.

Closing Poker Rooms: Last year, the Las Vegas Hilton closed their poker room. This year, Planet Hollywood shut down their popular poker room and replaced it with a high-limit gaming area. In this economy, casinos are seeking to improve their profit margins wherever they can. Until the recent boom, poker barely rated as an afterthought in the minds of casino executives. Loss-leading areas like poker will be among the first amenities to feel the budget axe.

No more ‘aquariums’: Another consequence of this widespread belt-tightening is that fewer and fewer new players will put their hard-earned money down on the table. With a thinner supply of ‘fish’ in the sea, the ‘sharks’ will have no choice but to turn on each other. For those professional players on the margins of the game (i.e. those not on the tournament trail or without web site endorsement deals), their primary source of income will quickly dry up. Even top-level touring pros will feel the impact in smaller tournament fields and diminished prize pools.

As we’re seeing now, any artificially inflated economic bubble cannot be sustained. Whether the fuel for that bubble comes from buying stocks on credit, investing in junk bonds, overvaluing dot-com public offerings or bundling sub-prime mortgages, that bubble inevitably bursts with catastrophic and far-reaching consequences.

Does such a catastrophe truly sound the death-knell for the poker boom? As with any boom, this one will eventually go bust. However, such events should not be interpreted as the funeral march for poker itself. The game has survived bad times and bad people, depressions and recessions, a civil war and two world wars. As long as people have cards, chips and cash, poker will survive in one form or another.

In fact, this recession may present some wonderful opportunities to open up this great game to new arenas. In Part II, we will explore some of the silver linings available in these dark financial clouds.

With bar league tournaments under intense scrutiny, home games becoming victims of robberies, and private games raided by police , many Texas players are taking a trip across the Sabine River to the numerous riverboat casinos in Louisiana. If you were to visit any casino poker room in Louisiana, you’re likely to hear as many Texas twangs at the tables as you’ll hear Cajun accents.

Of course, many players are familiar with Harrah’s New Orleans from their World Series of Poker Circuit televised tournaments of the last few years. While Harrah’s holds their tournaments in their spacious theater, cash games are another story. The poker area (only a low rail separates the poker tables from the casino floor) holds twenty-five tables crowded closely together. For no-limit cash games, the house takes a six-dollar rake from each player every half-hour instead of raking the pot for each hand. Just to add to the adverse conditions, a genuine (and genuinely loud) New Orleans brass band parades through the casino every hour. Just try reading your opponent after hearing “When The Saints Go Marchin’ In” for the sixth time!

One of the better casinos in Louisiana is Coushatta Casino Resort near Kinder, LA. Their recently renovated poker room features twenty-three tables, numerous cash games and a variety of weekly and monthly tournaments. At noon on the last Saturday of every month, they have a “Half-and-Half” tournament: alternating rounds of no-limit hold’em and pot-limit Omaha. Coushatta is one of the few casinos in the country to offer this type of tournament. Also, on the last Sunday of the month, Coushatta holds U.S. Poker Tour tournaments. Winners can earn points toward their National Points Championship.

Less than a half-hour from the Texas line in Lake Charles, LA, is the local franchise of the Isle of Capri chain. This room holds twenty-five tables and takes up the entire third deck of one of the two docked riverboats. While the scenery and accommodations may leave something to be desired (unless you happen to like staying next to a chemical plant), the poker action is fast and furious. From $3/$6/$12 limit hold’em to $25/$50 pot-limit Omaha, the cash games at Capri Lake Charles are loud, loose and lots of fun!

So put away the chicken fried steak and pick up some jambalaya, we’re going to play some Louisiana Hold’em!

The European wheel has thirty-seven slots that are numbered zero to thirty-six making the house edge 2.63%. The American wheel has thirty-eight slots because it features a double zero slot which ups the house edge to 5.26%. Not a great game for the player, but here are the bets and the odds.

When you buy into a roulette table you have to get special roulette chips. Each player at the table receives a different color so there are no arguments about who placed which chip where. It also allows players to bet on the same numbers because everyone has his or her own color. These chips are only good at the table you buy them. When you’re done playing you have to cash them out at the table and be given regular casino chips.

Each table has a minimum and maximum bet, and you can’t combine the two to make the table minimum. If the table is a $5.00 minimum, you must place five dollars on the inside and the outside for a $10.00 total.

Inside Bets:

1.) Straight up - wager on a single number (pays 35 to 1)

2.) Split bet- wager on two numbers (pays 17 to 1)

3.) Street bet - wager on all the numbers in a straight row (pays 11 to 1)

4.) Quad bet - wager on four numbers in a square (pays 8 to 1)

5.) Basket bet - wager on 00, 0, 1, 2, 3 (pays 6 to 1 and the worse bet)

6.) Double Street bet - is a wager on six numbers (pays 5 to 1)

Outside Bets:

1.) Red, Black, Odd, Even - wager is placed on corresponding spot on the table (pays even odds)

2.) Dozens bet - a wager placed on twelve consecutive numbers 1-12, 13-24, or 25-36 (pays 2 to 1 but if zero or double zero comes up — you lose)

3.) Column bets - also a 12 number bet, but in vertical columns not consecutively (pays 2 to 1)

As you walk through a casino, the loudest area of the room will be where the craps tables are located. Craps is one of the most high-paced, exciting, and energetic games in the casino, and players really get into the game. They aren’t afraid to let their emotions show with whooping, hollering, and slapping each other high fives. Because of how fast the game moves, the crowds it draws, and how much noise it generates, it can be quite an intimidating table to walk up to, especially if you’ve never played it before.

In fact, craps is a really easy game to learn and one of the gambling games with the best odds in a casino. In reality there are over forty bets you can place on a crap table, but you only need to know two. With the other thirty-eight the odds are against you even more, so I never really play them. Why bother, when you’re almost guaranteed to lose.

The first bet you need to know is the Passline Bet. The passline bet is when you place your bet on the passline before a new shooter comes out. The Shooter rolls two dice, and if the total of the dice equals either a seven or an eleven, you win. If they roll a two, three, or twelve — you lose. If the Shooter rolls anything else it’s the point number. Your money stays on the table, and the Shooter has to roll that number again before a seven is rolled. If that happens, you win even money. If it doesn’t and they roll a seven first, you lose.

The other bet is called an Odds Bet. An odds bet is made after the Shooter has rolled the dice and gotten a point number. Then if the Shooter rolls the point number again before the seven, you win.

Now you can confidently be a part of the rowdiest game in the casino. Let’s roll.

The world of online poker took a very large hit within the last year when the U.S. government passed banking laws that made it impossible for many poker rooms to allow U.S. players to play. U.S. players were left to scramble around to find places that would allow them to play. One of the great online card rooms that sprang up was RiverFlop, based out of Panama.

RiverFlop welcomes U.S. based players (as well as players from every other part of the globe) to play for free or for real money. They have a great, stable downloadable software package that is easy to install. Their user interface is easy and graphically appealing (check out the screen shot to the right). They offer a variety of games for players to play and stakes that match anyone’s bankroll. There site also has an active forum for players to discuss poker and playing at RiverFlop.

For the U.S. player that wants to find action online, they need to check out RiverFlop.

Almost everyone has played some form of a lottery. If it is picking three digit numbers for a state lottery or picking a set of numbers for some Mega payoff lottery, everyone has taken their chance with a lottery. But how about a completely free online lottery? Well we have found one of those for you in GuessLotto.

GuessLotto is a straightforward site where you get to make a guess of a number between 1 and 1,000,000 and if your guess matches the secret number you win the cash jackpot! To keep the contest fair, they only allow contestants to make 10 guesses per day.

So if you want to win money by playing a free online lottery, you need to visit GuessLotto today!

The number of online casinos has exploded over the last 10 years. But the question is which one should you play at? Which ones are the most reliable and the easiest to use? Which ones offer the best bonuses or rewards programs? These are the questions to ask and the answers are all found at Top-Internet-Casinos.

Top-Internet-Casinos is a guide to all forms of online gambling including online poker, Internet bingo, and no-download casinos. They offer clear, accurate reviews of the top online casinos in the industry. Their reviews are written by their team of actual players; so you get real reviews from real people. They offer valuable information about each Internet casino, covering everything from its game offerings to the reputation it has with players. They also have categorized lists of online casinos so that you can find exactly what you are looking for. And because the Web is an international arena, they have sections for Portuguese, Spanish, Asian, and US players - each in the appropriate language. All of this means you can find the best gambling online information at Top-Internet-Casinos.

The bottom line is that no matter what your gambling experience or what game you like to play online, Top-Internet-Casinos should be your source for reliable information.

VC Casino is celebrating the renewal of its sponsorship deal with football club Fulham FC by offering players a special new promotion. The UK online gambling firm has just launched a series of attractive promotions designed to benefit casino and football fans alike. This latest offer is guaranteed to have Fulham fans flocking to the pitch for a chance to win £100,000 - the largest instant cash prize to be offered by VC Casino and their casino games.

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VC Casino’s “Crack the Code” promotion will be held prior to each match before the premier league match between Fulham and Birmingham scheduled for May 3rd. The promotion will finish earlier than this date if the code is successfully cracked beforehand.

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