A. If you’re not an advantage player, electronic betting pads can increase your loss per hour because they speed up the game. When all payouts are automatic and the dealer doesn’t have to take time to pay winners and collect chips from losers, he or she can focus on dealing more hands per hour.

RFID chips don’t speed up the game, but they can change the distribution of comps, as can electronic betting pads. They can give the casino an accurate read on your bet size. Is that a good thing? It depends on your skill in playing the comp game.

If you’re an average player who’s not doing anything special to maximize comps, then you might benefit by the casino tracking your wagers with the same precision as the tracking of slot machine wagers. On the other hand, if you’re able to apply a little comp wizardry, you don’t want the casino to have too accurate a handle on your wagers.

As described by Max Rubin when his book "Comp City" was published in 1994, there’s an art to disguising your play so the pit supervisor thinks it’s bigger than it is. One simple play Rubin described was to make your big bets in the first few hands after your buy-in while the supervisor was likely to be watching. When the supervisor looks away and gets busy with other duties, it’s time to bring your bets down. If you’re a $10 player who can make it look like you’re betting $25 a hand, then maybe you’ll get comps based on the higher level.

Accurate bet tracking takes that out of play. If comps come out of a fixed budget, then perhaps a few dollars that would have gone to comp wizards will be distributed among other players. That leaves a net gain for the average guy, and a net loss for those who now play the comp game well.

There’s also the potential for card-reading shoes to affect comp distribution, depending on how they’re used. If they’re used in combination with analytical software to rate players’ ability, then casinos could adjust comp rates to the caliber of player. If you’re found to be a basic strategy player or better, the casino could lower your comp rate while increasing comps to lesser players.

So yes, any of the modern tracking equipment can affect comp rates. Whether it’s for better or for worse depends on your skill level.

A. I’ve seen Winning Streak Poker only in demo. WMS’ new video poker machines have debuted in casinos, but the new Winning Streak game hasn’t yet been approved. Expect to see it later this year.

Winning Streak is a new approach to multi-hand games. If you have a winning hand, it’s moved up a level, signifying a one-time pay table winner, and you’re dealt a second hand. Win again, and the second hand moves to the 1x slot, while the first moves up to 2x, where additional wins move it to 5x and 10x. You keep playing as long as the winning streak holds up.

In a way, it’s a game of opposites to Multi-Strike, where the big multipliers come on later hands. In Multi-Strike, early-hand decisions are designed to maximize frequency of wins at the cost of potential bigger-payers. You need to do that to move up the ladder for a chance at a big multiplier. In Winning Streak, the early hands have the chance at moving up the ladder. If you have a big winner on an early hand, then your strategy will change to trying to maximize frequency of wins on later hands to push that first hand up the multiplier scale.

A. Rejecting a random number to advance to another one is called a "secondary decision," and secondary decisions are illegal in all licensed casino jurisdictions in the United States. They were outlawed in Nevada in the early days of computerized slots, and other states have followed Nevada’s lead as they’ve come online with legalized gambling. Slot machines and video poker games in licensed casinos can’t reject one outcome and move onto another.

The ban came about because of a fuss over secondary decisions in the early days of computerized slots. Games manufactured by Universal selected an outcome from a pool of all possible winning outcomes, along with a weighted number of losers. If the outcome was a winner, that specific result was shown on the reels. If it was a loser, then a secondary decision was made to show which losing combination to show on the reels.

Nothing in that program was cheating players or changing the odds. Winning combinations were not rejected in favor of losers. Nonetheless, some people questioned the randomness of the games, and that led Nevada to ban secondary decisions. In turn, Inge Telnaes in 1984 developed the method for mapping symbols and spaces from a physical reel onto a virtual reel, with a random number generator determining which symbols or spaces we see. No substitutions of random numbers are made, or allowed to be made.