Wild Swings for a Lone Gambler
Casino tournaments have always exercised a special attraction on me. You’re no longer alone against the “edgy” house. You get to compete against your fellow citizen for a while. Nice change for a lone gambler.
Anyway, the idea is to amass the most hugest gigantesque stack of chips you can during ninety minutes of play. The game is Texas Holdem Bonus Poker, a casino variation of the game they teach us in kindergarten, Texas Holdem. The buy-in is $25 and the winner cashes in $3,000 – quite a tempting proposition.
You start out with 1,000 chips. A total of twelve places are paid, and before I entered the competition, player number twelve had a little more than 3,000 chips, which I set as my primary goal. From that platform we can then attack the leader and his 17,000 chips with confidence.
Texas Holdem Bonus Poker is a casino game. It is reasonable to presume that the dealer has an edge over the player and I won’t even bother trying to find a winning strategy. So how are you supposed to build a decent chip stack? Well, the trick is to turn the variance to your advantage. You lose some, but you also win some – it’s called variance, or swings, and by maximizing the swings you increase your chances of ending the game with a large pile of chips.
Of course, you also increase the chances of busting quickly. On the other hand, if you play with small swings, there’s almost no way your stack will climb above, say, 1,100 chips or so. In this game you may get lucky once or twice, and then you’d better win large chunks of chips and you’re in the game.
To maximize your swings in Texas Holdem Bonus Poker, you should put in a $200 ante, make a $400 flop bet and follow up with $200 bets on the turn and river. You’re all in on the first hand, no matter what cards you have. Remember, the dealer never folds so you’re chances are about 50-50. You may win 1,800 or 2,000 depending on the quality of your hand. If you can do this a couple of times, you are “in the money”.
Or you may lose it all and go on with your life.
I picked up an ace with a low card, not bad against a random hand. The board gave me a pair to my low card, a very nice hand under the circumstances. But, what do you know; the dealer’s 9-4 hits two pair on the river. I’m out of the tournament. But hey, did I have great swings.
/Spinner
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August 31st, 2006 at 7:07 pm
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