There’s no point in sitting with my eyes glued to the TV screen waiting to see if they open the stock exchange or whether they decide to sit out another bad day. I’ll open my laptop and spend a quiet day in an online casino. What shall I play in this frantic atmosphere? Perhaps a little 3-card poker to get my blood corpuscles up on their feet. 3-Card poker is just about the fastest game there is in an online casino, on a par with baccarat. Slots are fast of course, but they are completely brainless so it’s not quite the same thing. Not that baccarat is much better in terms of human intellect, but at least you have one decision to make – whether to bet on the player, the dealer or for a draw. The 3-card poker game in the online casino goes like this: you bet, you deal and you watch the result. The computer treats the whole thing as a joke, finishing a hand in a microsecond. Once you hit the ‘deal’ button you have one more chance to make a decision, and that is to play or to fold. I tied different methods of play. The first was to play only when I was dealt a picture card, meaning a jack, queen, king or ace. The results were good and my bankroll increased slowly but steadily. I also tried playing ‘blind’, meaning I clicked on ‘deal’ and ‘play’ continuously and at high speed. Result – my bankroll increased slowly but steadily, at about the same rate as when I was playing cautiously. At 11:00 am I checked once again to see what was happening on the stock exchange. It is open and trading. The powers that be have introduced a new safety measure, called a ‘circuit breaker’. This is an automatic ‘shut down’ switch which activates if the index drops below 12 percentage points. It sounds like the sort of safety measure some bad online gamblers could use – as soon as their losses hit a particular pre-decided amount, the circuit breaker will kick in and switch the computer off. Of course, Murphy’s Law being what it is, this will always happen just as the roulette ball falls into the chosen number, or the player is dealt a royal flush in a poker game. Posted on: December 27, 2008
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