The blonde Online Casino

[SuffolkPunch]

I don't have a problem with the promotion of table games, but at the end of the day it is your business and we are all (well, mostly) grown up enough to ignore any casino-type plugs or ads you may wish to put up. I don't think poker players can be too sniffy about the subject!

But the problem is solved anyway: by having this thread, Blonde has got all the advertising it will ever need for its casino table games..... result!

PS (I know this was not your intention)

[Sheriff Fatman]

surely the casino runs to a guaranteed win % like a fruit machine?

i cant believe that every number spun on roulette is totally random please correct me if im wrong

The 'guaranteed win %' comes through the inbuilt mathematical advantage to the house of the games you play.  However, like any probability exercise (e.g flipping coins) the results only approximate to the theoretical figure over a large number of trials.  That's why players can win over a short-term period (e.g. a few spins of the roulette wheel) from the short-term fluctuations.  The house, however, can sit back safe in the knowledge that the long-term results will follow the maths of the game.

Consequently, there is absolutely no need for them to 'rig' the random number generator in any way.  The maths will take care of itself in the long-run.

[kvnstv]

Blonde needs to fund itself or it will die, everybody understands this and also people who wish to play the table games will do somewhere so you might as well benefit from the house edge. Having said that I agree with the other posters that intentionally pushing the casino to blonde regulars will have a detrimental affect on the ethos of the site and is not such a good idea.

As for how much money you make from the table games, well its like the old saying you can shear a sheep many times but skin it only once. Most of the site regulars are reasonably low stakes players with bank rolls figuring in the hundreds rather than the thousands. The rake they earn per month if they are high volume players will be a significant proportion of there bank roll and if they are break even or small winners or losers this can carry on almost indefinitely. So 10% of a 600 dollar bankroll a month would work out at 60 X 12 a year for the life of the account. Where as if they blow that 600 in twenty minutes at black jack you might get 90% of the sum but they might never come back.


  

[RED-DOG]

If you do decide to spam the casino games, afterwards try closing your eyes, holding your breath, and taking a step backwards whilst clicking your fingers and shaking your head from side to side. (Well it works for me when I do something embarrassing)

[turny]

then my uderstanding is wrong.

have worked with the roulette machines in the betting shops and always seems that after a machine has had a good run it will then payout a few bob after to level its percentages up.maybe just co-incidence

[Sark79]

I made the mistake of clicking the blackjack icon one.  Think I had about $600 in my blonde account at the time.  10 minutes later it was $300.  Enjoy the bucks, but I won't be donating through the casino again

It is so easy to do isn't it Claire, lol.   I have done the same .  I start betting $1 and before I know it I am throwing in $50 bets, I left Party one night completely broke after having a nice poker BR earlier in the evening.

[kvnstv]

I made the mistake of clicking the blackjack icon one.  Think I had about $600 in my blonde account at the time.  10 minutes later it was $300.  Enjoy the bucks, but I won't be donating through the casino again

It is so easy to do isn't it Claire, lol.   I have done the same .  I start betting $1 and before I know it I am throwing in $50 bets, I left Party one night completely broke after having a nice poker BR earlier in the evening.

Did you ever go back?

[Sark79]

No,  I only play poker now.  I only play on sites with no casino games on offer .   Blackjack is a lot of fun sadly, but it is too damaging. At least with STT you only lose $5 bucks an hour,  Blackjack can wipe you out in 1 hour .

[kvnstv]

No,  I only play poker now.  I only play on sites with no casino games on offer .   Blackjack is a lot of fun sadly, but it is too damaging. At least with STT you only lose $5 bucks an hour,  Blackjack can wipe you out in 1 hour .

Did you ever reload on party poker? I blew 600 that took months to build up on UB in twenty minutes and have never been back. As I understand the practicalities of the blonde network (Ipoker) is that’s its shared by multiple skins so Blonde do not require a high number of players to keep reloading to fuel the tanks as it were as other sites will acquire new depositors and reloads. I might be wrong but it seems to me it’s better for Blonde to keep there players in action rather than on a bust/reload cycle. I get RB on a few sites and its significant proportion percentage wise of your bank roll.   

[Acidmouse]

Do we get points for playing them like rake in poker games?

I donked my chips in the League last night and had a dabble at the casino, thank god

[Sark79]

I went back and did the same again.  Then I realised that casino games are too much fun and were going to keep drawing me in.  I am lucky that I don't agree with betting on animals, so that has never been a problem outside the online world.  But the casino games may have the ability to pull me in again,  so I just stay away from them now and only play on stars.  Poker is my only form of gambling, although I may put a tenner on the next Tour de France .  I would like to play and support Blonde, but I know if I was on the verge of going broke, I would try my luck at the casino games on offer.

[ifm]

I think it's wrong to lump the casino software in with the card room software, not too long ago if you wanted to play house games you had to specifically look for an online casino, e.g. Pacific Poker has 888.com.
These days it's integrated with links within the poker software, this (IMO) is exploitative and rather sad.
If folks go to a poker site it should have poker only.
This (for my mind) applies to sportsbooks too, having your bankroll one click away from the sickness that gambling can be to some folks is a sickness in itself.

The roulette thing is interesting as within a casino with a live dealer you can predict the area where the ball will go to a certain degree, i know that mathmatically it is a perfect game housewise but some can glean a slight improvement of the odds that way.
Also a sympathetic dealer (and a good one) can hit within a very narrow section, there was a guy somewhere in Birmingham that would do this for a cut.

[TightEnd]

I know of an ex-croupier..probably why he is an ex-croupier, that swears blind he could land the ball in a 5 number section!

Anyway, the tricky thing here is that when we switched to ipoker the casino suite of games (6 currently) was a mandatory take for all skins, so to an extent all of them are grappling with the same issues we are here

Personally I struggle a bit with the casino games in the sense that I find them difficult to resist. Manage to control this most of the time but somehow I find them far more tempting online than when in a bricks and mortar casino where I can walk past straight to the poker room and not feel the lure at all.

I have rationalised this as a boredom factor when at home online.

Personally again, I struggle with the ethics of us as a business (given our communtiy feel.ethos) promoting such games actively


Most people will not have seen, but we now carry a responsible gambling statement link on the front page. I will copy it across in a minute. I wrote it. Given this, this thread has a lot of food for thought for me

[TightEnd]

http://www.blondepoker.com/index.php?q=node/8452

[Sheriff Fatman]

The roulette thing is interesting as within a casino with a live dealer you can predict the area where the ball will go to a certain degree, i know that mathmatically it is a perfect game housewise but some can glean a slight improvement of the odds that way.
Also a sympathetic dealer (and a good one) can hit within a very narrow section, there was a guy somewhere in Birmingham that would do this for a cut.

All casino games are open to cheating/collusion of this sort (rigged wheels, loaded dice, etc).  You hear many scare stories about online games being rigged but any site worth its salt will have its RNG generator subject to some form of audit procedure.  Cheating of the nature described above needs some sort of 'inside' human intervention to achieve it so is likely to be more prevalent in a B&M casino than at a reputable online site, although I suspect it would be very difficult to convince the majority of players that this is the case as there is a natural 'mistrust' of online gaming, particularly amongst the long-time players.  This 'mistrust' extends to online poker too, although there's a far greater chance of cheating being detected in an online game (where hand histories are available) than in a live game.

then my uderstanding is wrong.

have worked with the roulette machines in the betting shops and always seems that after a machine has had a good run it will then payout a few bob after to level its percentages up.maybe just co-incidence

All you're describing there is the natural variance in the game.  The casino industry exists and flourishes because millions of people misunderstand the basic maths of the games and the laws of probability (if they did, no-one would play them other than for fun).  Just consider the number of people who have some sort of 'system' for beating games which are mathematically impossible to beat over the long run.  Assuming the game isn't rigged in some way then no system in the world will let you beat a roulette wheel, but many people are convinced that they can.

The one exception to this is card counting in blackjack.  Funnily enough, the casinos consider this to be cheating (when in fact its actually being exceptionally good at understanding the game and the maths) and will ban anyone they suspect of doing it.  When was the last time you heard of anyone being banned for using their roulette 'system'?

The sequence of events you've just described on the roulette machines is just the natural variance occuring in the fall of the numbers, exactly the same as if you get 5 heads in a row if you flipped a coin.  Contrary to popular belief the coin-flips don't carry a 'memory' of previous events but as you increase the sample size the numbers will 'even out' in the long run.  This is because, over time, you'll get the same number of 5 tails in a row sequences occuring as you did for the heads, but it will take longer than any person can play the game for to spot this.  Consequently, players are naturally focussed on the recent sequences they see occurring and base their superstitions/systems on this.  The casinos milk this for all its worth on roulette by displaying the last few numbers hit on the board and giving people sheets of paper to log them on.