Despite the busy week leading up to the holiday here in the U.S., I managed to do some damage. I mostly hit sportsbook.com and made bets because I was too busy to sit and play this week having some person days off and family events. But I did roll in another $3,200 on baseball round robin parlays! The round robins are the best because you can get one or two bets wrong in your parlay (depending on the amount of teams) and still win. I rode the Yankees, Angles, and a few other teams to a homerun of my own! Again, we it comes to U.S. sports and most European sports, we have found Sportsbook.com to be the choice.

I did lose at a fair share back in blackjack though. Mostly at new casinos that I was asked to review for Gamblera.com. I dropped $800 all told, and finshed with a net gain of $2,400! Also, I've been asked by my superior here to start rounding off my numbers for the same of this blog, so you might notice some more cleanliness to my win/loss reporting going forward.

End of week:  $2,400 to $37,520

Dang. So the King of Pop is dead. Michael Jackson went down within 10 minutes of me winning $4,000 on a ridiculous run at Caribbean Stud in the Riverbelle Casino. The software was in payout mode and I was getting one huge hit after another. Four of Kinds, Full Houses, Straights, Trips, etc. I told you there were advantages to this, and Jay Reese wrote a great article that touches on this on Gamblera.com which you can check out at http://www.gamblera.com/features/online-casinos-rigged.shtml.

Anyway, I spent the rest of the week losing sports bets and poker games and still finished up $3,200!

End of week:  $3,177 to $35,120

I'm back in action after a nice vacation from gambling and work in general. OK, that's a bit of a lie. I did play for fun in Atlantic City one night. And what I remembered from the experience is how much more expensive it can be! Between a hotel, meals, a few drinks at the bar and some entertainment, casinos really hit your wallet hard if you don't win, and seriously dampen your winnings if you do win. Alcohol plays a part in that of course, and the idea that they never post a clock anywhere and you are like prisoner. When I play online at home I have enough other distractions to keep things at a more leisurely, sporting pace. Maybe I'm bitter because I did take a beating in AC and of course that was on my dime.

Anyway, I was back to work this week and hit up Casino Las Vegas for a good portion of the time with my focus on black jack and a few other table games. I held my own and then got up on some sports bets, and feel good about getting back in the swing of things.

End of week:  $890 to $31,943

Incidentally, I've been working (and gambling online) in a few countries in Europe for the most part since January. Call me a jetsetter I guess. Anway, I'm back in the United States for the a few months where you would think that playing online could be a bit of a challenge. But it's not so bad. We get a lot of questions on gamblera.com about where people in the U.S. can go to gamble online. We have an excellent guide on this topic at www.gamblera.com.gambling-in-the-us.shtml. But here's a shortlist of some of the sites I have included in my mix recently from the U.S.:
bodoglife.com
sportsbook.com
Online Vegas
Golden Casino
Go Casino

I specifically mention the sites above because that's where I played this past week. Despite my success in the past at all of these sites, I got roughed up a bit this week in the casinos, mainly on the chill Free Ride which I love in a relaxing playing while watching a movie sort of way and in Three Card Poker and Spanish 21. I dropped about a grand, which is nothing giving my lead!

End of week:  $1,087 to $31,053

By the way all, I need to stop and really take pause and admire my work so far in front of you all. I started in January with $10,000 and now I have $32,685! Tripled my money! I'm not a seasoned gambler necessarily (at least I wasn't when I started this gig in January) and I know people lose more often than they win when gambling, so this is all the more something to be proud of. Here's Murphy's Law though: If it was my money and I got to keep it all, I would probably have lost much more and only have like $1,000 left, if anything. But I think it goes to show that you need a little money to win some money. Just like they say it's easy to make money if you have money. I'm not saying people need to start with $10,000, but if you can play a bit larger some time and not worry about it, you can do pretty well. The other way to look at it though is that I only made $22,685 since I started in January and I'm probably now what you might call a gambling pro. If I play this out over a year at this rate I will have made about $55,000, which may or may not be a good salary depending on who you are or where you live, plus there would be no health or retirement benefits if you were on your own, so this pacing isn't as amazing as it seems for all the time I put it. Plus, there is a great chance of losing! I don't know what my point is except that I'm trying to decide how impressive my gambling has been going as I give you this glimpse into the experiences of a full time online gambler who is trying to share some tips and strategies and reviews of good places and games to play along the way. If you have anything specific you want me to try out, make your suggestion at feedback@gamblera.com and write "suggestion for Jay in the title."

Oh, and if you wondering why I am blabbing about everything buy my wins and losses this week, it's because I only had a few hours scheduled for "work" (gambling), so I lost $545 in Texas Hold'em and called it a week.

End of week:  $545 to $32,140

Yeah, I'm still playing around with some baseball bets because they are available daily and I love it, but you want to hear more about my luck in the online casinos I'm sure. Well, luck isn't quite the word to describe my week at the tables. I tried to work it at blackjack and never caught one good shoe. I had some hits on the match play with some decent change down, but overall it wasn't happening so I went to a new game: Free Ride. Now free ride is not the game to play when you are in bad need of stabalizing and increasing your odds to win as it's usually a slow and methodical loss (which was the case for me). But it is a world of fun, and easy to play while watching a movie and there's always the possiblity of a huge progressive hit. Of course, I was bouncing all over casinos and all across different games, but by the end of the week I moved on to casino hold'em, which is a table game version of Texas Hold'em but you play against the dealer only there is a progressive payout system attached like in Caribbean Stud or Free Ride. And afte getting down $5,500 from the early to the middle part of the week, I won back a few grand and closed out at negative $2,614. As John Cusak said in High Fidelity, who needs a drink?


End of week:  $2,614 to $32,685

Hi all. So I went back to sports betting this week, which doesn't help a lot of you I know, but it sure helped my bank roll. In the first few days of the week I hit three round robin baseball parlays for a total of $11,432 on a total of only $420 bet to accomplish that. I lost some bets as well ($1,000), but you play big to win big, and since I won my first bet, it was all found money anyway. I'm telling you, the round robin is the way to go. It's essentially bunch of parlays that are played in every combination just like a trifecta box in horse racing. Basically you pick up to 6 teams (at least on sportsbook.com where I made all of these bets because of the option and quick and reliable bet ratings and payments), and I did pick 6 teams on each bet. To simplify, let's say you do a five-team round robin. You place a dollar amount for the 5-team bet, as well as for each of the combinations of 4 team bets and 3 teams bets on down the line if you want. I bet $10 on the one 5-team option (that means all 5 teams I pick win), $10 on 4 teams option and $10 on 3 teams. Since there are only 5 teams, there is only one 5 team bet. But when you bet on 4 teams, there are 5 combinations of 4 out 5 teams to win, and at $10 per bet that's $50. I also bet on 3-team combinations, of which there are 10 ways for 3 teams out of 5 to win, so that's 10 bets at $10 which yields $100. When you add it all up, the bet costs $160 in total. That's $10 for the 6-game parlay $50 for the 4-team combinations, and $100 for the 3-team combinations. Now, depending how you structure it, if just 3 of your 5 teams win, you can get your money back. If 4 teams win, you will likely triple your bet at minimum. And if all 6 win, you win a lot...in this case, $5,000 on the $160 bet. Got it? Sure, a straight parlay pays out more than each of these bets individually, but then you can win so many more bets on the same teams and they add up. If all 5 teams win, you would have won 16 bets in total, which is what gets us to the $5,000 mark! And in baseball, where any team can win on any night, it's nice to know you can still win a lot even if one of your teams in the parlay loses.

End of week:  $9,720 to $35,299