Sorry to hear that you lost your bets, but that is the way of combi bets. One single bet can ruin our whole predictions, that is why I try to avoid them as much as possible, or only combine two or three bets the most. It's nice what kind of odds you get from combi bets, while also increasing the risk considerably. With your bets you ended up at odds of 10.36, which is very high in my opinion, these bets should fail more often than you win them. I usually only go for 2 or 3x bets. Making a 10x return is nice, but is not going to happen to often. We should keep that in mind and prepare ourselves for the worst possible outcomes. That is why I always like to take out some part of my winnings and not reinvest all of my money in the next bet. There  can always go something wrong with a bet and if we lose all our money from previous bets it is sad. Also the problem with losing all our money in a single bet is that we will have trouble to recover again. Splitting up our money and saving some makes sure that we can cover a losing streak more easily.

What do you mean with the crypto balloon is popped? The bitcoin price dropped below 17k USD and now everything is over? I don't think so, this was only a minor setback and the market will recover soon again. I can understand your frustration about the short term traders and speculators that make the bitcoin price so volatile. Unfortunately I don't see any chance for them to leave the market. Prices could fall back to 3000 USD and many investors would be hurt, but with such a low price investors would start buying heavily again to bring the price back up. A stable bitcoin market would make many things much easier, it just doesn't seem very realistic at the moment. The big problem is also that many people bought their coins above 20k USD, so if the price would ever drop below 10k USD I am sure that many people would never consider selling. Personally I would rather keep my coins until eternity and leave them to my family than to sell them at such low levels.

Sorry to hear this buddy, we are facing very difficult times right now and losing our job and main source of income is terribly. Hopefully you will find something new quickly. I have thought about possible opportunities during recessions myself and to be honest with you, I didn't come up with a great plan. Becoming rich during a recession seems nearly impossible in my opinion. Almost all prices feel this year, it was very hard to find something that didn't drop double digits so far. The only way for us to profit of it would have been to short the market, but this seems to late now. Prices are already low and going short into the market now can lead to big losses when the recovery picks up. The same is for selling our assets for cash and wait for prices to fall more to rebuy them cheaper. Right now I wouldn't be selling though, this should have happened at the start of the year when Russia invaded Ukraine. Also without a job you need to be more careful with your investment, maybe you need money in the future and could be forced to sell some investments at a bad price.

Nice to see another poker analysis from our @PokerPlayer here on the forum.

First of all it's another 6-max game which are pretty common these days, it's also the regular tables I like to play. All of the players have pretty healthy stacks and BB is our chip leader at the table. We should always keep that in mind when raising or trying to steal the blinds of him, because the pots can become very large quickly and he might be more inclined to call our bets.

Pre-Flop: Our hero gets 85s dealt, which is a decent hand to be played on a 6-max table. You have chances to hit a straight, flush or even two pairs and it also makes it harder for your opponents to put you on a hand. There is no action before him so in the button spot he has to make a raise here. The 2.4x bet is pretty standard and I would do the exact same here to put pressure on the SB and BB and maybe even steal their blinds here. BB now makes a reraise to 10 BB already signalling to us he has a strong hand. In most cases defending my big blind I would rather call than to reraise large. Now comes the second reraise from our Hero to 23 BB, which is insane in my opinion. We know that the BB has already something and for him it's only  13 BB to see the flop. I don't like the reraise because it makes the pot even bigger and we didn't even see the Flop yet. If we really want to see the flop and represent a monster hand we need to raise bigger or even go allin. Same goes for the BB, he only calls the reraise and doesn't push us allin. In case he had AA or KK he would have likely reraised us allin preflop. In my opinion our hand is too weak for the reraise and we should rather have called to see the Flop and hope to improve there, right now it seems that our Hero is behind.

Flop: Now comes the flop which gives us middle pair. It's not a great flop and also not a very bad one, we should keep playing here. The chances of the BB to have flopped a straight or at least a draw are there and we need to take them into account. Same goes for expecting some kind of poker pair from him raising&calling preflop. The BB checks the action back to us which is pretty normal again, since we where the last raiser preflop. Now the Hero bet 19 BB which is not a good idea in my opinion. Our hand is not that strong to go to showdown, for that the bet is not big enough to get the BB out of the hand. The BB has only to pay 19BB into a 65.4 BB pot to see the Turn. The potodds for the BB are too good to pass on this hand, any single diamond card would likely make the call here. I would have rather checked back here. Also the raise from our Hero makes the pot even larger and gives the BB another chance to act. At this point the BB pushes us allin which seems a bit of trap to me. Now we know he really has a strong hand and we got into a very bad spot for all our chips quickly. This is nolimit poker at it's finest, with any hand you can find yourself be playing for all your chips. We don't have any additional information on the two players, so we don't know if they play more tight or lose in general. Reacting quickly and making a decision in this spot is hard, but given that we only have middle pair with a gutshot straight draw I don't think I would have called here.

My pick for the BB hand: Pocket Queens It feels like the BB had a pretty strong hand to begin with any let our Hero happily bet into him.

Good Luck to all

Accepting a wider range of crypto currency is a great way to be more open towards the crypto community. It should always be the standard that casinos accept all the popular coins out there. If you are looking for a new feature that distinguishes you from other casinos than I would try to make your chat room more interactive. The big difference between physical casinos and online casinos is that we rarely engage with our fellow gamblers. The atmosphere is very special when you enter a crowded physical casino, you will see so many different people having a good time. And noticing a big win on your table spreads positive energy that makes a lot of fun to witness. So if we could have more chat rooms while gambling online it would be nice. Maybe with a feature where you can share your big bets, so other gamblers see who else is winning big.

I agree with you, don't sell your coins during a panic. Right now BTC is at 17,222 USD, it's the worst possible timing to sell at an 52 week low price. We need to have the stomach to sit through this dip and wait for prices to recover. The best strategy would of course be to HODL and not sell any coins at all. It's a nice position you are in to be part of the Bitcoin community for so long and never have sold a single coin yet. I am also not going to sell any of my coins any time soon, only if I really needed to, due to some family problems. Right now is the best time to buy, the idea is to buy low and sell high. People are selling right now doing the exact opposite, and what for? Are they really hoping BTC is going to fall considerably more to make it an attractive trade? If BTC is just going to linger around the 17k level than you are going to buy back your coins at pretty much the same level and only to have paid transaction fees in the process. And the big risk is always when you sell all your coins to miss out on the next rally.     

I do like to keep my private life as much as possible private, which doesn't mean that will lie about my gambling habits. When it comes to strangers I will not tell on my own that I like to gamble a lot, but if the topic ever comes up in a conversation I try to be honest as much as possible. With my friends and family it's a different story, they know about my passion ever since it started. Actually it was one of my best friends who brought me into Poker more than 10 years ago and since then we have played a lot together. Switching into other casino games over the years was the natural evolution and I tell my friends about any bigger winnings or losses. With my family I am not going into too much detail, they know I like to gamble and they are fine with it. For me there is a big difference between actively hiding my gambling habit and not oversharing it. Only at work I feel uncomfortable talking about gambling, I will only talk to my colleagues about it during a beer after work, but never at my job and not to my boss directly. I feel like this could lead to negative consequences.  

I fully agree with you that Europe is doomed, the Euro is going to lose a lot of more value in 2023 and whoever has the chance to diversify out of Euro denominated assets should be doing so. Crisis management has always been a bad thing in Europe, politicians over here talk too much and need way too long to react and get anything done. Together with the double digit inflation rates which will likely stay high next year, there is not much we can expect from the Euro. Gold doesn't seem like a good alternative right now which leaves crypto currencies as the main inflation hedge together with real estate investments. The problem is that people are afraid of inflation, but don't react to it. So far most people sold any risky assets in 2022 and didn't reinvest. The cash levels are very high in Europe right now, among my friends most of them have 50-70% cash levels in their portfolio. Which is insane to be honest, because you lose so much value with cash during high inflation times.  

What a major this has been so far, after many of the favourites got knocked out early, now NaVi is out against Furia. Luckily I had only a small bet on NaVi, but what happened there. It looked like a sure win for NaVi before and then they lost 2 maps in a row without even overtime. Simple had a really bad day, he couldn't make his plays work with the lowest ADR of the team. Even during the first map which NaVi won Simple only had a 68 ADR, which is way too low for the top player of the team. Nothing I can do now, only move on and prepare for two more good games today. After knocking out NaVi, I think that Furia is hyped for the tournament win and is going to beat Heroic today. Heroic played very well this Major so far and only lost against Cloud9, but to beating a hyped Brazilian team is very hard. This always reminds of the Coldzera/Fallen era. The second match today with Mouz vs Outsiders is going to be closer, I am a fan of Mouz and would love for them to reach the finals. They are also hyped after knocking out Cloud9, but they played Outsiders before on Monday and lost 2-0. Outsiders so far lost only one match against Heroic during the tournaments. The payout for Mouz to win is good, so I am going to place a very small bet on them, it's definitely going to be a hard match for them. Realistically the final tomorrow is going to be Furia vs Outsiders.

While cash transaction are great for making purchases or sales with a lot of anonymity the security aspect of cash if not great in my opinion. Most people will be reluctant to engage in larger size cash transaction, because they afraid to carry around it. The risk of getting rob is too high in my opinion. That is why I only have small bills and not a lot of cash with me when I go to the city. Also we should be aware that cash transaction don't offer 100% anonymity anymore, whenever we use cash we need to physically meet other people and this can be seen by others too. CCTV and facial recognition became very popular over the last 10 years and it's hard to avoid it in many countries today. Just take London for example, all of the major places are fully covered by CCTV. So whenever you meet someone to make a transaction with large sums of money, this could be recorded. Not that this is a bad thing, it provides a lot of security, but also takes away the anonymity in public places. Bitcoin and other crypto currencies seem like the best way to make transactions that are secure and outside of the banking industry.

I rarely copy bets from other people, if it's strangers or not I still want to make up my own mind. What I do like to do is getting inspirations and see what other people bet on, but after that I will try and figure out why they bet like this and if it makes sense. During university we had a football betting group, where 6 guys were pooling their money and one friend of mine placed the bets. He was spending a lot of time reading about the different leagues and had a good edge on making profitable bets. This only worked for me because I knew him well and I could trust him. Otherwise I would not put my money down on someone elses bet. A few weeks ago we had another thread here about celebrities like Drake sharing their betting slips publicly and of we should follow his bets. I think it only makes sense to place small bets on someone else's idea.

I agree with you, trading based on a hunch or your gut feeling is not a idea. You might make a few short term profits because you are lucky, longterm however this is not going to work. When it comes to trading and investing we need consistency to make a profit, without we are just going to lose most of our money eventually. Technical analysis is a great tool to help us make the right trading decisions. When I first started out with stock trading I attended some courses for trend analysis and which momentum indicators to use during which market phases. Even though the stuff is quite old by now it's still helpful and can be used for crypto currencies as well. Experience and skill are going to build up over time and we can only get better at it, if we are actually trading and taking risks.

That's a really difficult question to answer because the world is so divided when it comes to cash and using credit cards. When I look at my grandmother who is above 90 I don't see any chance to remove cash for her. She only uses cash which my uncle withdraws from the bank for her, she never even made a bank transfer, everything is done for her by either the bank clerk or in our family. For her there is only cash, very similar to my parents. They do have bank cards, but rarely use them. It's hard to keep track of their finances they say and want to stick to cash. We even had online banking setup for them in the past, but they kept forgetting their login details and never use. So based on my own family I can tell there is no way that cash could disappear in the next 30 years. Any political party that would start removing cash from the economy will be gone by the next ejections. After 30 years things could be different, once our generations are in retirement age I am use we could live without cash.

I have been using my username many times by now. It comes from gaming, ever since I started playing Battlefield 1 when it came out, it became my absolute favourite shooter. It's so much better than the last two Battlefield games. By now I have more than 2000 hours in the game, and my most used weapon is still Gewehr 98. It's such a reliable and great rifle in the game that you don't need anything else. As I also like history I read a lot about the rifle, it's a Prussian made rifle 1898  that basically became the standard infantry rifle by many nations back in the day. And the manufacturer was called Mauser, which became my username. Today the company doesn't exist anymore on it's own, they are now part of Rheinmetall and hopefully don't mind I took their name  .

Really hard to imagine such a thing happening in reality. Betting 10k USD on a single number is a bit insane, if one of my friends would try to do such a thing I would try to stop him. The risk is way too big and who knows if he is thinking clearly. When a friend would tell me about his plan, or I see him with large sums of money walking towards the roulette table I would say anything to convince him to be cautious with his money. But once the money is in the table I don't think I would Touch it and move it to a different bet. Is that even allowed? Like if I was in that position and placed my bet, can't I just say I didn't change the bet and I want my winnings? How does the dealer know if my friend is allowed to place a different bet for me or not? In the end the casino could ask the 10k from my friend, but would have to pay me 350,000 USD. With these kinds of sums of money friendship stops. If the money was lost I would feel bad every time I see my friend, how do you come back from it?

Buying a house with debt is normal in my country, I haven't heard of anybody who was able to buy a house without having a loan. House prices have risen drastically in the last 10 years, whereas wages are not keeping up. The percentage of rent or loan repayments from the monthly salary is rising every year and it becomes harder to maintain the sane living standards. Still owning your home one day is the number one goal of young adults, they would rather give up on a nice car and vacations to afford their own house one day. Here it's normal to have 20% equity and get the rest from the bank. The problem for me is that many people view their own home as an asset, even though it doesn't generate income as they are living it themselves. In my opinion your own house should be rather a liability if its not modern or füllt renovated. Friends of mine bought their own house 5 years ago, only to find out now that the government regulations are changing and they are required to fully renovate it by 2030 to meet new energy efficiency standards. Their dream project almost ruined them.

Why not, this is a good idea to build some portfolio for your kids at a very young age. If you are buying bitcoins for yourself, why not do so for you kids as well? At the moment banks are offering a lot of new savings schemes that are designed for young parents and grand parents. My parents where offered multiple savings accounts that lock you in for 18 years and then will be paid out to the child when it becomes of age. These schemes are designed to be able to pay for a new car, or university later. The big problem I have with them is that they cost a lot of commission today and offer almost no good interest rate in the long run. So why do you need the bank in the first place? To me it seems much better that you take care of the saving yourself and don't pay the bank for it. This gives us a lot of flexibility and we are not limited to save in only one account. When it comes to long periods of time I would recommend to invest in more risky assets. Putting some of the money in crypto currencies is a great idea, same goes for investment and real estate funds. Over 18 years all these products are going to offer better returns than a savings account. 

What a crazy major this has been so far, both FaZe (rank #2 in the world) and Vitality (rank #1 in the world after winning ESL Pro League 16) are out already.  The world ranking is going to complete change after the major is over, we can already see being the best 3 month ago is no more guarantee for future success. My bet sizes have small so far as I am trying to build a second bankroll for the Worldcup starting in 2 weeks. Today are the last 3 matches in the playoff stage, with ENCE vs Mouz, BiG playing against NaVi, and Team Liquid facing Team Spirit. I am a huge fan of BiG and they played well this tournament, but I don't see any chance of them winning against NaVi. This is going to be a sure win for NaVi in my opinion. I will also bet on MOUZ for today, it's going to be the closest match today as they very equally skilled teams. Still after defeating Vitality they must be really hyped to reach the champion stage. As for the last match I would expect Team Liquid to pull through. On Thursday the champion stage is going to start with some nice CSGO matches this weekend.

This is a good philosophy many traders should follow it, keep your losses as small as possible while trying to maximise our profits. When it comes to trading, losses are not always lost money. As long as we are confident in a coin we can keep holding it and wait for the market to turn around. The general market risk in the crypto markets is very large, when bitcoin is falling in price than it will pull down most of the alt coins with it. As long as we make a higher profit when the prices are recovering than we are in a good position. It also can have benefits to sell coins at a loss, we won't have to pay taxes and reduce our tax liabilities in another trade. Losing is always part of trading and investment, but who is not trying and doesnt join the market has a 0% chance of making a profit.

I think it also depends on the deposit method we choose, if there are fees involved for the casino which don't make it profitable to deposit only $1 or $5, then the casino shouldn't offer it. I understand that money is always relative, and some people can't afford more money to gamble with. If we have more money at the casino we might be encouraged to gamble more than we should. But this is on us, we need to have our emotions under control and set a certain limit with which we only gamble. The same goes allowing withdrawals only after a certain threshold, this is for the casino to save fees and have gamblers leave some more money at the casino. We need to have ourselves under control and remain disciplined. There is also a positive thing about depositing larger amounts, we can take more advantage of promotions. Especially first time deposit bonuses are very nice to have and we should deposit as much as possible to get the full benefit.