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How can that be? How can you, the amateur player, the recreational poker aficionado, know more than someone who earns his living at the game? The truth is, you don’t know more than he does. But it’s also true that you did know enough to spot his error and analyze it. He didn’t see it. You did. Why did that happen?  Caribbean Stud is, along with Let It Ride, one of the few table games that have been able to claim a share of the increasingly small space casinos give to table games. Casinos prefer slots, because they don't require trained dealers, don't require quite as much close eye-in-the-sky supervision (although they need more than you might think, because casinos must remain alert for cheats who try to gimmick the machines), and don't encounter math professors figuring out ways to beat the casinos out of their god-given right to vacuum clean the pockets of every visitor. Caribbean Stud is loosely based on the classic American poker game, 5-card stud, although it requires none of the skills that let Edgar G. Robinson, as "The Man," Lancey Howard, defeat Steve "The Kid" McQueen in "The Cincinnati Kid." If you know poker hand values, you can play Caribbean Stud, and you really don't even need to know that a flush beats a straight. If you know enough about poker to realize that you HAVE a flush, you know almost everything you need to know to sit down at a Caribbean Stud table, almost. When you first sit down to play Caribbean Stud, you will be asked to make an "ante" bet, and this bet is what creates much of the house edge. You have to make the bet before you see any of your cards. You're also given the option of dropping a dollar in a slot to make you eligible for a progressive jackpot. This progressive jackpot bet is where most of the rest of the house edge comes from. For the progressive jackpot to be a good gamble, it needs to get upwards of $400,000, and the gambler in me says that no one reading this column has ever seen it climb that high. Still, just as with Let It Ride, many players drop the dollar anyway, figuring it's only a dollar, and fearing the nightmare that they might hit a five-card royal flush and not have played the progressive jackpot. Let's keep the math simple and say that you could play Caribbean stud four hours a day, five days a week, for the rest of your life, and you'd still be a HUGE underdog to catch that five-card royal. Just relax and play the game without the dollar. online casino Back to casino news