BEWARE: "Wild Jack Casino"

[RavenSlay3r]

I found "Wild Jack Casino" by clicking on it's add on the main BlackJackinfo.com site. Their link is: http://www.wildjack.com/

They post no documentation so I went into "liveChat" support to find out what kind of a game they were dealing. First it took FOREVER to get into live chat even though I was only #4 then the guy was sloooow. It think he had to look up all these bullshit answers in a book, and then type with one finger cuz this chat took 20 min. Here's a transcript(below)!

Ok so I bluff here - I AM a programmer but I HAVEN'T written a blackjack program. I know it's not "complicated" though. Mikeaber and Ken will certainly know more about this, but I AM CONFIDENT THEY ARE NOT DEALING A "FAIR GAME" by anyone's standards, and I will never even consider playing there.

Best Regards all,
~ The Long Lost RavenSlayer ~


You are now chatting with: 'Albert'
Albert: Hello raven, welcome to Jackpot Factory’s Live Chat. How can we be of service?
You: hi
You: What are the rules for your blackjack tables?
You: I couldn't find them on the website
Albert: What do you want to know?
You: Is it dealer hit to 16 stand on ALL 17?
You: do you have insurance?
You: do you have surrender? early/late?
You: how often do you reshuffle and what kind of bet limits are there?
You: Is Double after Split allowed?
You: those are the main questions
Albert: I will answer one at a time,
You: oh - and how many decks?
You: kk
Albert: 1,YES
Albert: 2,YES
Albert: 3,NO
Albert: As the games are computer genertated there is no need to reshufle.
Albert: 5) Double after split is allowed
You: and the number of decks the program deals from?
Albert: 6 Again computer generated games do not require specific numbers of decks
You: so how does it know which card to give next?
You: is it randomly choosing one of the 52 possibilites for each card it deals, as it goes?
Albert: Along those lines, but significantly more complictated,
You: hmmm... as a programmer, every BlackJack program i've examined (cellphone aside..) deals from a fixed # of fair decks, very similar to how it's done with real cards, and they are in fact shuffled
You: shuffling can get complicated but overall it's usually not a complex problem
Albert: To help you to get to know these games, you should open a guest account and play around withthem
You: k
You: thanks for all your help

[KenSmith]

You got a real idiot on the phone. Unfortunately, with many of these online casinos, customer support would be better off handled by non-English speakers in many cases!

Wild Jack has the same set of games that all the other Microgaming casinos do, and there are quite a few varieties, ranging from single deck (bad rules) to 8 deck (ok rules). The best choice is the Vegas Strip blackjack, which I believe is 4 decks. I actually have a page halfway complete that will show the differences between all these myriad versions of blackjack at Microgaming.

As for the algorithm, the games are dealt just as one would expect. Just ignore what this guy said, he was completely clueless.

[Mikeaber]

With all of the BS (not Basic Strategy!) aside, the following is revealing IF the dude had a clue as to that which he spoke: (note that I am slapping this down very quickly and may have to revise it for accuracy...but the concept is there)

Albert: 6 Again computer generated games do not require specific numbers of decks
You: so how does it know which card to give next?
You: is it randomly choosing one of the 52 possibilites for each card it deals, as it goes?

If it is randomly choosing one of the 52 possibilities, it has to be single deck random selection after each dealt hand. In other words, it's like a CSM. The "deck" consists of eitehr one or two tables in the program. Very likely, each card is assigned a numeric value between 1 and 52. A random number is selected between 1 and 52 to denote the card selected. This is very likely what the person you were speaking to was trying to convey. This is also the algorithm that is used in the most basic blackjack games and reality be damned! Each hand is "redealt" using a completely random selection of cards and the ones that you got in the previous hand have as good a chance of showing up in the second hand as they did in the first!

However, if the programmer really wished to get fancy, another random number would be selected to represent the position in the deck that the first random number would be loaded into. This would be repeated until the "deck" was filled with numbers. The cards loaded into the top position of the second table would be the ones dealt. Still, after each hand is completed, the process is repeated thus emulating an unrealistic shuffle after each hand.

Usually, this is where the algorithm is stopped. After each dealt hand, the process is repeated. I've seen Texas Instruments calculators with programed BJ games set up this way (the first way described)...it's very VERY basic.

However, were I trying to emulate true table conditions, I would take it considerably further.

First, I would try to make the shuffle more consistant. I would start the game by "washing" the cards. To do this, the algorithm first described would be used to randomize the entire deck. "Washing" emulates what the dealers do with a new set of cards when they spread them out on the table and scramble them. They only do this one time when new cards are introduced to the table. On double deck games, this usually occurs every 2 or 4 hours.

Second (and this is the start of each shuffle), I would define another algorithm to "riffle" the cards. I would split the "deck" into two 26 card stacks and take 1 to 7 cards (randomly) off of each of the two half decks and create another deck. I would go through the deck twice doing this.

Third (or fourth) I would "strip" the deck by reversing the sequence of the cards in the output deck. Striping would involve randomly pulling 4 to 12 cards off the top of the deck and putting them on the bottom of a new stack thus building a new deck.

Finally, I would "riffle" the output deck one more time before burning the top card and beginning the game. I would then "cut" the deck and insert a dealer cut card to denote penetration.

The same process could be used with multiple decks using process previously described. Just recall when dealing with multiple decks, how dealers in various casinos handle hand shuffling the multiple deck games. Each casino has their own routine, but in general, they work the 6-deck stacks by handling basically 52 cards at a time. I have seen so many variations (even in double deck) of this routine that trying to document them all would be almost impossible!

Long ago, on the Commodore Vic-20 and C-64/128, I wrote some routines to shuffle cards in Basic. I am a mainframe programmer today, who has not kept up with the PC languages in use.....but symbolic logic remains consistant so I know that something similar to what I've described very likely takes place in the better simulations available today. At least, were I to develop such a routine, I'd follow that which I've outlined above.

[RavenSlay3r]

... Is sometimes worse than no customer service. As a corporation, they may have (maybe) gained a customer if they had written a simple, intelligent doc. instead of wasteing money on this fool.

Thanks for the insight - both of you. Kind of what I figured was going on but what a moron...

In the mean time I intend to avoid any "casino" that can't completely and competently disclose the rules of their games before one plays. It raises too many questions about their integrity and abilitly to run a casino. If THEY don't know what software THEIR casino is running - how do I know it is correctly configured and real money is backing their bets?


Thanks,
Raven