| Alison
Green says of her visit to Puerto Rico in 1982: I
was never present when the casino opened, but I doubt
if the cards were spread before the first shuffle
of the day. At one table, the first two shoes produced
running counts of -20 and -25 with a deck to go. I
sat out the next shoe to count aces and separate ten-valued
ranks. The four decks were shuffled, three of them
were dealt out, and I counted 22 queens! Meanwhile
a friend was observing an excess of small cards at
his table.
Don Schlesinger says: I was a bit perplexed over Alison
Green's inferences about the less-than-pure motives
of the casino in Puerto Rico. Should not she have
been pleased to find 22 queens in the first three
decks of a four-deck shoe? There might have been a
few more queens in the remaining deck! Such a situation
would suit me just fine. Why complain? |
| Even
though almost all Internet cardrooms give you at least
20 seconds to act on your hand, you don't need that
long for most decisions. If you consistently slow
the game down, you may find that the players you most
want at the table-the action gamblers-get up and leave.
The next rule is: Don't abuse the all-in function.
Because players sometimes must rush away from their
computers in mid-hand (a baby might start crying,
someone could come to the door, a child could injure
himself), most cardrooms allow players who are still
connected one or two "all-ins" when they
fail to act on their hand. Rather than folding the
hand of someone who has chips in the pot, the system
treats the player as if he is all-in. He is eligible
to win only the part of the pot he has contested and
a side pot develops for the remaining bets.
Occasionally, an unscrupulous player will take unfair
advantage of this. For example, if someone has a weak
drawing hand like an inside straight draw, he might
just sit there and fail to call a bet on the turn.
The system treats him as all-in. If he makes his straight,
he collects the pot, but if he doesn't, he hasn't
had to invest a big bet to draw to it. |
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