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PLO (Pot Limit Omaha) has become a phenomenon in the world of online poker. As players get tired of Texas Hold’em, they have slowly begun to transition into the Omaha games. Much of the popularity of Omaha stems from the constant high stakes games that can often be found at Full Tilt Poker. Some of the biggest names in the poker world can be found with hundreds of thousands of dollars at the Omaha tables. Texas Hold’em certainly remains very popular, especially in live games, but Omaha has gained a major following over the past few years.

There is a variety of reasons why Omaha has blown up. Some poker players like the gambling aspect that you will find in Omaha. There is a lot of gamble in any form of poker, but Omaha is notorious for the never ending coin flips and suck outs. Bad beats are a rarity in Omaha, if only because they are always expected. It is tough to get your money in as a big favorite in Omaha. Even if you start with a complete trash hand, there is usually a decent chance that you can and will catch up. Some players hate this added element, but other players crave the action.

Richard Marcus, by his own admission, was a born gambler. Even as a small boy growing up in New York, he reminisces about betting baseball cards on what color car was going to come around the corner. He recalls, “I woke up gambling and went to sleep gambling.”

FIRST TRIP TO VEGAS

He was barely old enough to gamble when he arrived in Las Vegas in 1976, but for a natural born gambler this was home. After saving up between $20,000 and $30,000 from betting trifectas at the racetrack, he was ready to flip that cash in Vegas. Baccarat was one of his favorite games, and he turned that first investment into about $100,000, and in a couple nights, it was gone. He was thrown out of his luxury hotel room and found himself on the streets, homeless. Marcus did not give up, though. He cleaned himself up and got a job.

The only experience he had was at the tables, so he enrolled in dealer school, worked the graveyard shift at a casino, and honed his skills. Marcus got a job dealing baccarat and blackjack at the 4 Queens Casino and from this unique vantage point, he began to see how dealers could be exploited for his own personal gain.

MARCUS FINDS A MENTOR

In 1977, while dealing at Caesars Palace, Marcus was approached by Joe Classon. Classon was a class act and also from New York, and they soon were fast friends. Marcus recalls that he automatically trusted Classon upon first meeting him. Classon said he’d been watching Marcus and noticed that he never cheated or stole from the players or the casino. Where many dealers would pocket chips here and there, Marcus didn’t. Marcus replied that maybe he was just waiting for the right moment, as he didn’t have an answer to Classon’s question.

Ken Uston was not the first person to count cards or create a blackjack team, but he is the man who influenced and educated more blackjack players to win the most money.

Uston was born in New York with the name, Kenneth Senzo Usui, on January 12, 1935. He changed his name to Uston because he found it difficult to have a Japanese name as child during World War II. (Later in life he regretted this decision because he knew that it hurt his father, who he loved very much). After the war, the Usui family moved to New Haven, Connecticut. They found out early on that Uston had a high IQ and was also a child prodigy on piano. He loved music and excelled in all his school work. Uston attended Yale University and graduated at the age of 20, Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude. He continued his graduate work at Harvard University where he earned an MBA in Finance.

Uston soon married and had three children. By the time he was in his early 30s, Uston was moving up in the corporate world, living in fashionable Marin County, California and Senior Vice President of the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange. Unfortunately, this left him feeling empty. He was at the top of the ladder but he hated the corporate world. He felt trapped.

Keith Taft is a legendary pioneer in the world of blackjack and way ahead of his time. He built the worlds’ first microcomputer and other genius devices that have since moved legislation in the state of Nevada and caused quite an uproar of the past 40 years.

It all started in 1969 on a family camping trip to Nevada. Taft, his wife, and four children, decided to stop and visit Harrah’s Auto Museum. He saw the cars and received some “lucky buck coupons” for the casino. Not really knowing how to play, he asked someone in the casino the basic fundamentals of blackjack. He won $3.50 and was hooked. He remembered the book “Beat The Dealer” by Ed Thorp, went to the library, and picked up every book on the topic. He read them all and learned to count cards; however, he was not successful and this got his wheels turning.

Creating the Computer

In 1969, the size of a computers was huge (like as big as an elephant), and punch cards were used for programming. Taft knew that Texas Instruments had come out with a 4-bit ALU (arithmetic logic unit) that would be the heart of the next generation of computers. From that he designed a 16-bit machine that would power down when it wasn’t making any calculations to conserve battery power, since it would have to run on batteries. He was building some memory chips that were solid-state memory. They were small enough and dense enough that they would serve as the random access memory. As it would turn out, there just so happened to be programmable memory devices out there which would allow a thousand bytes of instructions to be hard wired into the machine. It took two years to build the computer and Taft named it George.

While at least 80% of Americans, and probably about the same percentage of other countries use playing cards on a regular basis, or at least have a deck or two in their homes, but this staple of our global culture is more than just a means to a game. What follows is more information than you’ll ever need to know about cards, but those who love to play card games will appreciate it.

HISTORY OF THE CARD

Playing cards date back to somewhere between 800 AD and 1100 AD. An ancient Chinese dictionary references cards and claims they originated during the reign of Emporer Seun-Ho around 1120. As legend goes, Seun-Ho used them to amuse and entertain himself and the people he lived with. In India and Egypt they were used for fortune telling.

Despite our lack of knowledge concerning exactly how playing card came to Europe, what is generally accepted is that in the late 1300s, the Mamelukes of Egypt introduced their style of cards to Europe. A pack of Mameluke cards consisted of four “suits,” each of which contained 13 cards, just like modern day playing cards. These suits were called cups, swords, coins, and polo sticks. Each suit consisted of 10 numbered cards and three court cards, the King, the Vice-King, and the Second Vice-King.