Online Gambling

Intertops has a prop bet on the value of the tenths digit of the Dow Jones Industrial Average at market close. It’s certainly not a very attractive prop bet, with each selection 0 through 9 returning only 8-1. But it got me wondering — do the values 0 through 9 appear approximately equally often as the tenths digit of the Dow close?

As you may or may not know, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a weighted average of 30 stocks. The 30 stocks that comprise the Dow are changed every once in a while, but have not changed since June 8, 2009. Looking at the daily close of the Dow beginning with that date (you can use Yahoo! Finance if you are interested in these data), we have the following:

One would expect that each digit should have appeared approximately 29 times over the course of the 290 closes starting June 8, 2009. But the 9 has appeared 41 times! Now, I have no idea what factors may influence the value of the tenths digit, I am simply interested if the data suggest that some values appear more often than others. To do this, a Chi-Square statistical test can be run on the data; OpenOffice.org Calc and other spreadsheets can do this for you.

The resulting chi-square statistic has a probability of 0.09, meaning that if you randomly picked values from 0 through 9 290 times, the probability that you would get a distribution similar to the one shown in the table above is only 9%. That’s fairly rare, but not overly so.

But, if you were going to make this prop bet, pick the 9.

As reported in yesterday’s The Wall Street Journal, the House Financial Services Committee voted 41-22 to approve legislation that would regulate many forms of online gambling, including poker and bingo, while specifically banning betting on major US sports leagues like the MLB, NFL, NBA, and others.

Other news articles point out that the legislation also would deny licenses to any online site that has allowed, or currently does allow, US players to gamble online. Looking ahead, this would appear to effect PokerStars, FullTilt, and other online poker rooms that have continued to serve US players despite the UIGEA of 2006.

Other key elements of the legislation include player loss limits, rigorous age verification systems and frequent testing thereof, and allowing states to opt out of this legislation and ban its citizens from online gambling.

And the legislation that was passed does not cover how the industry is to be taxed — that’s covered in a separate bill that hasn’t made it out of the House Ways and Means Committee.

It is unlikely that this legislation will be voted on before the current Congressional Session expires in September. The scheduling is simply too tight. If it is not voted on, the process will need to start again next session. Perhaps it will be attached to some other legislation, as was the UIGEA of 2006. Even so, if the legislation is approved, it still would need to be signed by Obama.

We are still years away from any comprehensive online gambling policy in the United States. Need proof? The UIGEA of 2006 took nearly 4 years before it actually went into effect this past June 1 — and there are still plenty of loopholes in that legislation that allow US players to fund and withdraw money from their online gambling accounts… or so I’ve heard.

Ten of the sixteen most popular online gambling software vendors deal Tens or Better Online Video Poker. The house percentage on these games ranges from a worse of 3.74% at Parlay Entertainment sites to a best of 0.87% at Microgaming, Rival, Vegas Tech, Grand Virtual, Boss, and Playsafe sites. (I prefer Rival online casinos over the others, because it also offers the best odds on other varieties of video poker.)

Play Tens or Better at these top-rated Rival gaming sites.

Joker Poker online video poker is video poker played with a standard 52-card deck plus a Joker. The minimum paying hand is a pair of Kings or Better, as opposed to a pair of Jacks or Better that is most often the minimum paying hand for video poker games without a Joker. What makes Joker Poker so appealing is that paytables do exist that offer an advantage to the player — if played optimally, of course.

While there is no Joker Poker offered online that has a player edge (also referred to as a +EV, for “positive expected value”), Bodog.com online casino comes close at 99.97%.

For a complete analysis of all forms of online video poker, see my online video poker page.

Deuces Wild (DW) online video poker is an exciting variant of video poker in which 2s are wild. Your bankroll will experience a lot of ups and downs relative to other forms of video poker because your return is based more on higher paying hands than in, for example, plain old generic Jacks or Better.

Optimal play in Deuces Wild will often dictate that you throw away all 5 dealt cards, so be prepared to simply “try again” on a fair number of hands in order to try for the all-power wild cards. For example, when dealt a hand that excludes 2s, a pair, a four-flush

The vast majority of online gambling sites offer Deuces Wild video poker, but not all of them offer a decent payout to players. Grand Virtual offers the best return to players at a whopping 99.72%, but not all players from all regions are accepted at Grand Virtual online casinos; for example, U.S. players are excluded, as are players from other countries. The next-best choices are the Rival Gaming online casinos, offering a 99.37% return. The download version of the BetUS.com Casino is a Rival Gaming casino, and BetUS.com Casino (unlike other Rival Gaming casinos) accepts players from all 50 US states.

For a complete analysis of all forms of online video poker, see my online video poker page.

Jacks or Better (JoB) video poker is the game that started the video poker craze. Every online gambling software vendor that deals any form of video poker deals Jacks or Better. The best odds on JoB are found at what is called a “9/6″ machine — 9 for a Full House, 6 for a Flush — and has a 0.46% house edge at optimal play. Compare this to “8/6″, “8/5″, and even “6/5″ machines that offer increasingly worse odds for the player.

Online “9/6″ Jacks or Better is easy to find, so where you decide to play is mainly about customer service, bonuses, and speed of payout. The top-rated site that offers “9/6″ Jacks or Better and that accepts players from most regions in the world — including all US states — is the download version of BetUs.com Casino. Another good choice is BoDog, where you can practice for free without having to download or register.

For a complete analysis of all forms of online video poker, see my online video poker page.

Four online casino software providers deal Double Double Bonus Jacks or Better online video poker: Microgaming Casino (MGS), Realtime Gaming (RTG), Grand Virtual (GV), and Bodog Casino (Bodog). Here are the paytables and house edge offered by each.

Unfortunately, Grand Virtual online casinos do not accept US-based real money players. And Microgaming has stopped accepted new US-based real money players (although players that had an account prior to approximately October 2006 can still play). The best option for US-based real-money players that want the best return on this variety of video poker should go with Bodog. All players are welcome to practice for free with no download and no registration needed.

I recently completed an analysis of 14 popular varieties of online video poker, inlcuding Jacks or Better, Deuces Wild, Joker Poker, and more. The analysis covers over 200 online gambling sites that run 16 popular versions of online gambling software from vendors like Microgaming, Realtime Gaming, Rival, Bodog, and others.

I’ve published the paytables and house edge (calculated using this excellent analyzer at Wizard of Odds) for each variety of online video poker. You can use this information to determine the best online gambling site to play your favorite variety of online video poker.Some interesting tidbits that I discovered in conducting this analysis:

• Of all the online video poker games analyzed, Bodog had the lowest house edge of any game from any vendor — they deal Joker Poker with a 0.03 house edge.
• Aces and Faces video poker appears to be the same no matter where you play it — the paytables from all 6 vendors that deal Aces and Faces video poker are identical.
• For some games, there is a huge difference in the house edge. For example, there is a more than 7% difference between the best and worst Deuces Wild video poker games that you can find at online gambling sites. (For the record, Rival Gaming casinos like BetUS offers the best Deuces Wild video poker with a 0.63 house edge.)

Today, I updated my online keno article, adding my analysis of the online keno game offered at Top Game casinos. In short, the online keno game at Top Game casinos is a 15-spot game with payouts identical to the ones offered at Rival, Microgaming, Total E Soft casinos.

The overall payout percentage that you can expect from the keno game at Top Game online casinos is better than most land-based keno games that you will find. So, if you like keno, I encourage you to give it a try at US-Blackjack.com, a 5-star rated Top Game casino. While the name US-Blackjack.com suggests that they offer only blackjack, they do, in fact, offer all kinds of casino games, including keno.

New players at US-Blackjack.com can use their 100% initial deposit bonus to play keno, with each dollar wagered at keno counting as one dollar toward meeting the 12 x (deposit + bonus) playthrough requirement associated with the initial deposit bonus. See their T&Cs for complete details.

If you like to bet totals in MLB baseball, be sure to bookmark my page about MLB umpires and their impact on totals betting. The referenced page provides a current analysis of the umpires that show a bias toward calling games that are under/over more often than not.