‘The American Dream’ is intimately connected with the evil spirit of gambling. The casinos machines are built in such a way that 80-90% of the winning numbers go to the patron. The chance to win there is minimal but the attraction to make money without work is very high.
Gambling is bad for your health If the file has been modified from its original state, some details such as the timestamp may not fully reflect those of the original file.Nonetheless, knowing these phrases is very important, as gamblers rely them constantly while playing in a poker game, whether they are beginners or professionals. In summary, gambling is bad economics; gambling is bad public policy; and gambling does not improve the quality of life.” The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has a long history of opposition to all forms of gambling as an abdication of stewardship.
- Gambling can be a bit of fun, but if it becomes compulsive or involves significant loss of money or property, it is considered an addiction and a mental health problem. After diagnosis, treatment.
- Gambling Good for your Brain HealthStatus Team 4 3 0 As we get older we stop using parts of our brain and these areas become weaker and can lead to faster senility, but there are things that can help slow down this process and kelp keep your brain strong well into the latter years of your life.
I’ve written a few articles in the past that included advice that said you should never take insurance when you play blackjack. I stand by this advice because, for over 90% of the players who read my articles, the advice is 100% correct.
But I also need to present the other side of the argument to give you a complete understanding of insurance. The truth is that insurance is the correct play in a few specific situations. Most of these situations only become apparent to professional card counters, and because counting pros spend most of their time beating the casinos and not reading my articles, my advice of never taking insurance is correct for everyone else.
So why am I writing an article about taking insurance?
As you’re getting ready to learn, there are a few situations while playing blackjack when clearly it seems that taking insurance is a good bet. The odds are good that these situations are going to surprise you because they’re not why most players take insurance.
The Argument Against Insurance
The reason why taking insurance is a bad decision most of the time can be explained using simple math. But, as you’re going to see in the next section, this same simple math is used to show in a few situations that insurance is a good bet.
When the dealer has an ace, he or she offers insurance to the payers at the table. Insurance costs half of your original wager and pays 2 to 1 when the dealer has a natural blackjack. The only way the dealer has a natural blackjack is when his or her down card is worth 10 points.
The odds of the face down card being worth 10 points are 9 to 4 against. This is a percentage chance of 30.77% that the dealer has a blackjack. The reason why the odds are 9 to 4 is because of the 13 total card ranks, four of them are worth 10 points, and the other nine aren’t. The four 10-point value ranks are the face cards and the 10s.
When you compare 9 to 4 against the payout of 2 to 1, the casino has an edge. For the bet to be fair, the chances of the dealer having a blackjack need to be the same as the payout. The payout of 2 to 1 means that the percentage chance of the dealer having a blackjack needs to be 33.33%.
In any situation where the chance the dealer has a blackjack is over 33.33%, the insurance wager is a good bet.
The problem is that most of the time, the dealer doesn’t have a 33.33% or higher chance to have a blackjack. This goes back to how you compute the dealer’s percentage, or odds, based on the normal makeup of a deck of cards.
Determining the odds or percentages based on a normal distribution of cards in the deck sounds correct, but it assumes you don’t know the value of any cards. This is the safe way to do it, especially in a shoe game because a single card doesn’t change the odds or percentages much.
But what happens if you take the knowledge of cards played and remaining available in the deck or shoe into account?
Is there a way to use this information to determine when taking insurance is a good bet?
When You Should Take Insurance
Now that you understand how the math behind the insurance bet works, let’s look at a specific example where the bet changes from bad to good.
You’re playing in a single deck blackjack game.
Is Gambling Bad For Your Heart Attack
- On the first round of hands, you see the value of 14 cards. Only one of them is worth 10 points, so the remaining cards have 15 cards valued at 10. With 14 cards played, the deck has a total of 38 cards.
- The second round of hands is dealt, and the dealer has an ace face up. You haven’t seen the value of the other player’s cards at this point, and you have a king in your hand. Now you’ve seen the values of 17 cards when you include the two in your hand and the dealer’s ace.
- The remaining unseen cards total 35 and 14 of them are worth 10 points. This means that the odds of the dealer having a 10-point value down card are 21 to 14 or 3 to 2 against. In other words, 40% of the time the dealer is going to have a natural blackjack.
A winning insurance wager pays 2 to 1, so the odds are better than that in this hand. The 2 to 1 payout means that the chance of a dealer blackjack needs to be at least 33.3%, and in this example, the chance is 40%.
While this example is an extreme one to show when insurance is a good bet, you can also learn something from it. Now that you know that the chances of the dealer having a natural blackjack need to be 33.3% or higher, you can use this information in any single deck blackjack game. You can even use it in a double deck game if you do a good job of tracking cards.
This is much like card counting in that you don’t have to memorize every single card that’s been played. All you need to do is keep track of the ratio of total cards played to 10-point value cards. This even works in shoe games, but the truth is if you’re able to keep track of this ratio in shoe games, you should be counting cards.
How Important Is This Knowledge?
While it’s important to recognize and use every small advantage you can find, the truth is that the opportunity to take insurance with an edge is rare. If you play in single and double deck games often, it’s something that you should watch for.
But you should only concern yourself with profitable insurance opportunities after you do a few other things to lower the house edge. The first thing you should do is find blackjack games with good rules. The next thing every blackjack player should do is use basic strategy. It’s a waste of time and energy to worry about insurance before you do these two things.
Once you learn about the rules and learn how to use perfect strategy, then you can start looking for opportunities to take advantage of insurance. But even in this situation, I recommend looking for insurance opportunities as an introduction to learning more about counting cards.
When you start tracking card ratios, which is at the heart of determining when taking insurance is a good bet, you’re starting to use the same techniques card counters use. And the fact is that most popular card counting systems include a breakpoint where players start taking insurance.
In other words, a good counting system already has the insurance wager built in, so you know when to take it and when not to take it.
If you’re looking for every possible edge at the blackjack table, understanding how insurance works and when you should take it is important. But if you don’t want to do the extra work, then stick with good rules and proper strategy. By declining insurance every time, you’re not going to make a mistake often. When you do, it’s only going to cost you a small amount over time.
It’s a much more costly mistake to take insurance when you shouldn’t than to miss an opportunity to take insurance every once in a while, when it’s the correct play.
Conclusion
Taking insurance at the blackjack table is a bad bet most of the time. If you’re a basic strategy player or a seat of your pants player and don’t count cards, your best play is to always decline blackjack insurance. But as you can see from the numbers included in this article, there are certain situations when insurance goes from a bad bet to a good one.
Once you master basic blackjack strategy, start looking for opportunities where insurance is a good bet. When you start recognizing these opportunities, it’s a good sign that you’re ready to investigate card counting. It’s a small step from understanding and using what you learned above to become a successful card counter.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Sometimes we wonder if what we see in the movies is actually true or just a bunch of bologna put out by Hollywood to entertain. If you’ve ever seen any poker movie ever made, you’ve seen them going nuts about “tells” and a lot of times trying to see the heart rate of their opponent. In a recent home game thanks to a generous wife, I accidentally found myself the subject of an experiment into the validity of this Hollywood stigma.
I play poker monthly at a solid home game in my neighborhood. We’ve been playing together for a little over a year now and it is a great group of guys. I enjoy getting to play with them every chance that I get.
A couple of months ago, I happened to be wearing an activity tracker that tracked heart rate along with steps, etc. My wife had given it to me recently as a gift and I had been wearing it for a couple of weeks. I wore it 24/7 since it also tracked sleep patterns. When it came time to play poker, I didn’t even think twice about the fact that I was wearing it. However, I learned a valuable lesson from the data captured on the device that evening.
It wasn’t until the next day that I realized I had something really cool. In reviewing a chart that showed my heart rate for the last 24 hours, I noticed some things from the time of the poker game that caught my eye. What I saw got me digging deeper to learn more.
On my chart showing my heart rate for the last 24 hours, I found two key things. First, I noticed that my heart rate was elevated for nearly the entire poker game. Secondly, I found large spikes in my heart rate at different points.
I have a normal resting heart rate of about 60 beats per minute. Your resting heart rate is defined as the heart rate that your body has when it is at rest. It is often found while you have been relaxing for quite a while (like watching a movie on the couch) or while you are asleep. Basically, your resting heart rate is roughly where your heart rate should be when you are not exerting or stressing yourself in some form.
While I played poker that night, I did not notice a feeling of being overly stressed. I definitely recall some highs and lows (as with any poker game), but I didn’t walk out of there feeling like I had been stressed out. However, looking at my heart rate chart, you would have thought otherwise. My average heart rate throughout the entire game was around 120 beats per minute which is more than double my resting heart rate.
I was amazed to see that my heart rate had been elevated that high for the entire game. You can see the moment the game started and the moment when I was knocked out at the final table. Before and after that, my heart rate was in a normal range.
The other thing that I noticed from the data was that there were spikes at a couple of points. At its peak, my heart rate briefly reached 151 beats per minute. Looking at the time that occurred, it was apparent to me that spike coincided with when I flopped the nut flush early on in the game. Internally, I was super excited and apparently so was my body. There were a few other spikes that evening as well that look to have happened when I was bluffing, scared, or excited. It was very cool to have this data.
After coming across this data, I did some more research on my own to see how I could use this data to improve my game. Clearly, there must be something that I can take away from this data. Below, I’ll help you understand what I learned so that you too can improve your poker game by avoiding this physical tell.
Why Is Gambling Bad
Why You Should Care About Your Heart Rate
A player’s heart rate can be a physical tell to their competition at the poker table. Players looking for this tell will try to look at your neck to gauge the player’s pulse. An accelerated heart rate could mean that the player is bluffing or that he is on a major hand.
A player’s heart rate could increase when he has made a bluff and is scared of a looming call. On the converse, a player’s heart rate could be accelerated when he’s on a big hand and is excited on the inside. Either way, if your heart rate is accelerated, it is giving potential information to your competition and it is, therefore, worth understanding how you can both track and better control your heart rate moving forward.
How to Track Your Heart Rate
You are able to track your heart rate either via an actual heart rate strap of some form of a device that has heart rate tracking built into it. I’ll cover both in more detail below.
Is Gambling Bad For Your Heart Video
When it comes to heart rate straps, there are two forms at this time. First, the classic heart rate strap is one that is mainly used by athletes. It is about an inch wide and it goes around your entire chest sitting just below your heart. These straps can be easily concealed under your shirt without your competitors ever knowing that you’re wearing one.
Brand names such as Garmin, Polar, and Wahoo Fitness all make these traditional heart rate straps that you can wear around your chest. They tend to retail for roughly $40-$100 and they will pair with apps on your phone so that you can get the heart rate data.
The latest trend in heart rate monitor straps is optical heart rate. Optical heart rate straps do not have to go around your chest and can be used in places like your arm or wrist. Instead of listening for your heart beat like a standard heart rate monitor, optical heart rate monitors use light to gauge your heart rate through your skin.
The best known and most accurate standalone optical heart rate monitor on the market at the time of this review is the Scosche RHYTHM+. It can be worn on the arm or the wrist and it retails for $79.99. It comes with a variety of band colors.
No matter what type of heart rate strap that you are using, you should be able to use an app on your phone to tap into the data. Many apps offer real-time data so you could check in on how your heart rate is doing while you are still in the game. It would not look any different than you checking your phone for a text message.
With the development of optical heart rate technology, manufacturers have also been able to build optical heart rate sensors into devices such as run watches and activity trackers. Major brands like Garmin, Fitbit, and Polar all offer devices that have optical heart rate included. I was wearing one of these devices that have optical heart rate on the night of my poker game.
If you’re looking for an activity tracker with optical heart rate included, you might consider the Fitbit Alta HR or the Garmin Vivosmart HR. If you’re a runner, watches such as the Garmin 735xt or the Suunto Spartan Sport HR offer optical heart rate on the device. There are many options of devices out there that offer optical heart rate built in so you should be able to find the one that is the right fit for you.
How to Control Your Heart Rate
If you’re concerned about your heart rate being a physical tell at the poker table, there are a few things that you can do to better control your heart rate in the future. The first thing that players can do is making sure to breathe well throughout the entire game. Many players (myself included), often tend to hold their breath in moments of big hands and big bluffs. Doing so will only work to increase your heart rate. If breathing is an issue for you during your game, make a conscious effort to breathe steadily during every game through every hand regardless of how big or small of a hand you’re on at that time.
The second thing you can do to help better control your heart rate during a game is to simply gain more experience. More time at the table playing poker can allow your body the chance to overcome fearful moments encountered during poker. Playing more will allow you more chances to make big bluffs and experience monster hands so that you’re more used to the occurrences. As both scenarios become more routine, your body will become less stressed during your games which will lower your heart rate.
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Lastly, players could benefit by getting exercise on a more regular basis. The more often that you exercise, your heart rate (both resting and elevated) will become lower with time. By exercising more, you will improve your heart rate which is good for both poker as well as your general health and wellbeing.
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