| |
Bellagio Unveils Table Game Version of Texas Hold 'em
Published: 2005-04-26
 Bellagio Unveils Table Game Version of Texas Hold 'em
The company responsible for bringing the World Poker Tour to an estimated cable television audience of 5 million weekly viewers now wants to offer a variation of the popular Texas hold 'em game to casino patrons.
i-Newswire, 2005-04-26 - Bellagio began a 90-day field trial Friday of World Poker Tour All-In Hold 'em, which is played on a table similar to blackjack, but where players wager against the dealer and not each other.
The Strip resort has one game in its main casino. After three months, an analysis of play will be forwarded to Nevada gaming regulators.
Two Indian casinos, Agua Caliente and Sycuan in the San Diego area, and Casino Magic in Biloxi, Miss., have the game on their floors.
"This, of course, is the place test where the game needs to do well," said Jack Malisow, vice president of marketing for Lakes Entertainment, a Minnesota-based gaming company that is distributing the game. The company owns 64 percent of World Poker Enterprises, which produces the television series.
He said Nevada approval, which could take five months, will allow Lakes Entertainment to roll out the game on a wide scope.
"The World Poker Tour brand has tremendous appeal and name recognition," Malisow said. "This game gives players the opportunity to experience that action."
Lakes Entertainment, which manages nine tribal casinos and distributes other table games, believes the popularity of the World Poker Tour, which airs weekly on the Travel Channel, provides the game a ready-made market. The tables are decorated with the World Poker Tour's color scheme and have the game's ace of spades logo.
"This game appeals to several audiences, but mainly those people who are interested in playing poker and want the excitement but are a little intimidated by sitting down in a poker room," said David Sklansky, a Las Vegas-based poker player and gambling author who developed the game with Lakes Entertainment. "The idea is to give the player the same feeling of going 'all in' as they get when watching poker on television."
As in Texas hold 'em, players are dealt two cards and make their best poker hand with five community cards, but that's where similarities end.
All action is against the dealer, and players make a blind ante and have other betting options, including Bonus wagers on hole cards and final hand values. Once players see their hole cards, they can fold or raise their blind ante by betting five times the ante or going "all in," which is 10 times the initial bet.
Based on specific rules, dealers either fold and pay off the blind antes or call. If a dealer calls, the community cards -- the flop, river and turn -- are exposed and players try to make their best hands to beat the dealer.
Lakes Entertainment was able to roll out the test run during the World Poker Tour's championship event at the Bellagio, which ends Sunday.
New table game concepts have historically met a quick demise in casinos when competing with blackjack, craps, roulette and other traditional gambling activities.
Over the past decade, Caribbean Stud Poker from Progressive Gaming International ( formerly Mikohn ) and Let It Ride and 3 Card Poker from Shuffle Master Gaming have found their way into casinos in Las Vegas and worldwide.
"To us, the most important aspects are the dealers and the way the casinos deliver the product," Malisow said. "The brand has tremendous appeal. The keys are having dealers who understand the game and make it fun for the customers and the casinos giving the game great exposure."
The Sycuan casino in San Diego has offered World Poker Tour All In Hold 'em for almost a year in a pit near the poker room.
"It's popular with poker players who are waiting to get on a table," said Lisa Roehm, director of table games for Sycuan. "It's done well, but there seems to be so many versions of Texas hold 'em out there now. We're getting a lot of requests from vendors to try their games."
If you have questions regarding information in these press release contact the company listed below. Please do not contact us as we are unable to assist you with your inquiry. We disclaim any content contained in this press release.
Company Details
Las Vegas Gaming Wire
Press Release Date
2005-04-26
| |
Playing Poker - Poker Math
Published: 2005-04-26
 Playing Poker - Poker Math (26.04.2005)
Everyone is afraid of math. Teenagers hate algebra, checkout clerks shut down without a
calculator, politicians hire teams of “experts” to crunch their numbers, and poker players don’t
want to hear about odds and equity — or at least a lot of them don’t. The very idea that
mathematics is useful in poker brings out righteous indignation from a substantial number of
today’s playing population.
I’m not afraid of math, and I’m going to use the pages of this magazine to show that nobody else
should be afraid of math, either. I was a mathematics major at Yale University, but I definitely
don’t use complex analysis, differential equations, or algebraic topology at the poker table.
Trust me, most of the math that’s used in poker can be understood by anyone with a high school
education. There are people out there pursuing advanced game theory studies about poker, but we
won’t get into those. My purpose is to teach the average player everything he needs to know to be
wholly math-literate at the table.
Let’s start by looking at some of the most basic terms used in poker math:
1. Odds
Some gamblers might have heard this word over and over again without really knowing what it meant.
Odds are a cousin of probability. So, what’s probability? Probability is the chance that a given
event will take place. When the weatherman says there is a 25 percent chance of rain today, he is
expressing a probability. He is saying the probability that it will rain today is 25 percent. What
that means is that if today happened 100 times, 25 of those times it would rain, and 75 times it
wouldn’t. This brings us back to odds. Odds compare the number of times an event will happen to
the number of times it won’t. In our weatherman example, the odds against rain falling today would
be 75 to 25 — that is, for every 75 times that it would rain, it wouldn’t rain 25 times. We write
these odds, 75-25. It is equivalent to express these odds as 3-1, because we can see that for
every time it rains, it doesn’t rain three times (75 divided by 25 equals 3).
Let’s look at the probabilities and the odds for some different events.
Coin flip, heads: probability 50 percent, odds 1-1
Airline flight delayed: probability 12.5 percent (data from Bureau of Transportation Statistics),
Odds 7-1
Picking the As out of a deck: Probability 1/52 = 1.9 percent, Odds 51-1 (in this case, it’s easier
to do the odds)
2. Combinations
In a game like Texas hold’em, we are interested in questions like, “what are the odds against
completing a four-card flush draw after the flop?” This is a much harder question than, “What are
the odds against completing a four-card flush draw after the turn?” In the latter case, there is
only one card left to come. There are 46 unknown cards at that point (52 minus the two in our hand
and the four on the board). So, to calculate our odds of making a flush draw after the turn, we
just compare the number of unknown cards that don’t help us (37) to the number of unknown cards
that do (nine). The odds of making a flush draw after the turn, therefore, are 37-9, or about 4.1-
1.
After the flop, with two cards still to come, it’s not as straightforward. If we don’t make our
flush on the turn, we could still make it on the river. How do we account for this? We do it by
counting the different combinations of cards that could come. Say we hold the 9h 8h and the flop
is 10h 4h 2c. The turn and river could be Ah Ks. They could be Ah As. They could be 3h 3s. They
could be Jc Jd.
Each of these is a different combination of turn and river cards. Note that Jc Jd is the same
combination as Jd Jc, because they result in the same board. Now, instead of counting cards to
determine our odds, we count combinations. If you write down every last possible combination for
the turn and river in this hand, it turns out that there are 1,081. Then, if you look closely at
all of them, it turns out that 378 result in a flush for our hand. So, the odds against making a
four-card flush draw after the flop are 703-378 (because 1,081 minus 378 is 703), or about 1.86-1.
Just by learning these two terms, you now know how to calculate the odds against making any
hold’em hand after the flop, or after the turn. Cool, huh? It is cool, but it’s also a lot of work
to calculate your odds for every draw you might run into. Luckily, you don’t have to, as I’ll
explain.
3. Outs
Your outs are the number of cards in the deck that will improve your hand. The flush draw we held
above had nine outs. An open-end straight draw has eight outs. Two overcards have six outs. You
could go through the odds calculation for each of these draws — or you could just read the results
off the chart.
Notice that with 14 outs or more, we’re actually more likely than not to improve.
Again, it’s not important to know these exact numbers. In fact, there’s a useful trick called the
Rule of Four to help you. Multiply your number of outs by four, and that number is roughly your
percent chance of improving after the flop. So, with a flush draw on the flop, you have about a 9
times 4 = 36 percent chance of improving to a flush by the river (the actual number is 35
percent). Notice that this is the probability of improving, and not the odds against improving.
Here are some quick conversions:
25 percent = 3-1 against
33 percent = 2-1 against
40 percent = 3-2 against
50 percent = 1-1 against
If you understand what I’ve written, you understand everything you need to assess your chances of
improving in a hold’em hand. With enough practice, the numbers will become natural enough to you
so that you can focus on other things at the table.
Maybe you’re still one of those people who think math isn’t really useful in poker, that once you
know the basic odds, the rest of the skills you need have nothing to do with math. Stay tuned for
my next column, as I hope I can change your mind. Matt Matros
| | |
English
Deutsch
Español
Français
Italiano
Nederlands
Pусский
Svenska