Golden Touch Craps

I am very tolerant…well, most times…well, occasionally; oh, okay, okay, I’ve lost all my tolerance to tell you the truth. I’ve gotten grumpy in the last few decades. Things that never bothered me now bother me.

Maybe it has to do with the fact that I was expecting global freezing in the 21^st century based on the books I read in the 1960s such as Future Shock which speculated that we’d better get our long johns ready for a long, brutally cold future and now Al Gore and his zealous crew are telling us that we are all about to fry due to global warming!

Now that can make even the most tolerant of us lose a large part of our tolerance, can’t it? By the way, I have an attic filled with long johns that I will sell to you for a few bucks.

It’s no different in gambling. Certain things now drive me crazy. In the past I could sniff and disdainfully dismiss these things with a smirk and a chuckle. Now I rant. So here goes.

"See a horn bet a horn." Aaarrrrgggghhhh! This craps strategy, the ploppy who created it who now claims he never created it, never said it, never taught it, never played it at a casino even though this ploppy constantly brags about how great he is doing when seeing horns and betting horns in the casinos when he flings the dice, is the product of a highly deficient mind.

Yeah, I know, the saying doesn’t make sense to me either since the horn bet at craps has a 12.5 percent edge. Your expectation is to lose $12.50 for every $100 you bet on this ploppy strategy. It’s total nonsense! But most idiocies don’t make any sense to normal people, even grumpy normal people such as me. This strategy is almost the dumbest strategy at craps second only to the "I love betting the Any Seven" suicide attack at the game.

"Hot machines stay hot; cold machines stay cold." What? What the heck? Heaven help me! All traditional slot machines lose more spins than win more spins. That’s a part of hit frequency. It’s all random too. There is no predictability to slot machines. There is only pure or impure, blind or dumb luck involved. So it’s luck, luck, and good or bad luck for the players and math, math, and more math for the casinos. Hot machines can stay hot; they can get cold. Who knows what they’ll do? Even the machine doesn’t know what it will do until it does it! Yes, cold machines can stay cold or get hot. Again who the heck knows? But the slot-nuts think they have it all figured out. So how come they lose just as much money as the rest of us who haven’t got it all figured out? Because we really do have it figured out and they don’t.

"Always figure a dealer has a 10 card in the hole in blackjack." Okay, let’s not let them get away with this one – the most common myth in all of blackjack – because this one can get me to crawl the walls.

Take a deck of 52 cards. How many 10-valued cards are in the deck? Yes, a mere 16 – the 10, jack, queen and king. That means there are 36 cards of values other than 10. So only about 31 percent of the cards in a deck are 10-valued cards. Now, is it more likely the dealer will have a 10-value in the hole or a non-10-value? Come on, come on, I’m waiting. Okay, the probability favors a NON-10 in the hole! So next time you hear someone who thinks he or she knows blackjack say that a dealer probably has a 10 in the hole kick him or her in the you-know-what or tell him or her to marry the ploppy who believes if you see a horn you should bet a horn.

"The new games give the players a good chance to win." No, folks, the new games give the casino a better shot at your money because the games have two to three percent house edges, have many more decisions than older games with much smaller house edges, and often have multiple bets that can also drain your bankroll.

I don’t deny these games can be fun but they have not been introduced to help the players. The casinos are hoping that players jump from the traditional games to play the "carnival games" as these are called and you know what carnival barkers call their patrons, right? A hint – one of them is born every minute.

Okay, I’ve gotten it all off my chest. Now I await the cooling or heating of the earth. Thank heavens casinos have heating and air-conditioning. Then I really don’t have to worry about the weather.