Archive for February 8th, 2010

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If you’re willing to actually do a tiny bit of work on your direct mail business then you’re well on your way to be a master. All that’s needed to succeed are the secrets, a little intestinal fortitude and keeping your finger on the pulse. Okay, let’s talk about certain things about direct mail

Here are 10 facts you need to learn about direct mail

1. It is possible to begin a direct mail business with £20. If you do a small mailing of 40 one week to a good list, you are likely to obtain at least one order, which will pay for your further slightly larger mailing. And so on until you’ve generated enough to arrange bigger and more beneficial mailings.

2. It is also possible to begin a direct mail business by obtaining email addresses and emailing the copy and order form to them. However, the first contact must be a friendly letter asking them if they’d like more information.

3. There are three ways to create a output. You can pay someone to write or produce it for you. You can buy the resell rights to a output. Or you may write it yourself. All are just as good as each other.

4. The same applies for sales letters for the output. You can pay somebody to do it or get a sales letter with the resell rights or you can write your own.

5. People buy what they are buying. So before you select a product you must get on a mailing list for that peculiar market and check out what’s on the market, what combinations, what similarities. The more exposure you have to a market the better your choice of product will be.

6. No product is ideal. You can vastly increase on a selling product and/or give it a unique twist and make a fortune.

7. When a market is saturated by a product, the market then wants a product of superior quality. This is true of all markets.

8. The most appropriate way to sell a product is to write the sales letter before you make the product. Imagine if you wrote a fifty paged book and then couldn’t find any beneficial properties to the book. The least risky variants is to write a sales letter that you would love to get first and then craft a book around the advantages in the sales letter. So pay attention to it when you send out cards.

9. When you’re sellinga plenty of product, a rough rule of thumb to work out what you take from the business is to take a third of the product’s sale cost multiplied by the number of sales.

10. A secret of the rich is that they only pay themselves what they need and invest the rest.

There is no doubt a lot more to direct mail than the above but those ten facts are universal facts and are used in all successful direct mail businesses.

Roulette is the game with the spinning wheel that sucks in nearly all the money bet, steadily and predictably. In reality, it is not quite that bad, and roulette has a certain use. If you play Roulette you are giving the house a big 5.26 percent advantage.

The best way to play Roulette as in land casino as in online casino is to shut your eyes and throw a chip onto the layout! That’s a fact, not a joke, because any bet you can make (except one) gives the same 5.26 percent advantage to the house. The wheel has 38 numbers on it, 1 through 36 plus 0 and 00. The numbers alternate red and black: the even numbers are red, the odd numbers black. The 0 and 00 are green. The table has the same corresponding numbers on the layout. A player places his cheques on the layout in the spot that defines his bet.
The dealer spins the wheel in one direction, and then the ball in the other, and wherever the ball finally lands denotes the winning number, section, and color.

A player buys in from the Roulette dealer, who gives him cheques of a certain color and then makes a mark to indicate their worth. That player determines the value of the chips. Example: for $20 the chips could be worth $1 each, 50 cents each, or 25 cents each, depending on the arrangement between the dealer and player, and that value applies to all chips of that color. In some casinos the players may also use regular casino cheques, but this is frowned upon or even forbidden if the game is crowded (it is very confusing for the dealer). Each player may place any number of bets with each spin of the ball, such as a bet on red, a straight up bet on 14, and a section bet on the first twelve numbers.

Players may bet until the ball starts to drop, when the dealer announces “No more bets.”

The casino derives its edge from the 0 and 00. On all even money bets the casino wins everything if 0 or 00 comes up. The casino wins every time 0 or 00 comes up unless a player has made a bet covering them. There are only three ways a player can bet these numbers: straight up, i.e., a single number (0), two numbers (0 and 00), and a five number bet (0, 00, 1, 2, 3). Curiously, this five number bet is the only one that changes the odds against the player: 7.89 percent in favor of the casino.

Here is the math behind the casino edge. There are 38 numbers (1 through 36, 0, and 00). The correct payoff should thus be 37 to 1 for a single number bet. The casino payoff is 35 to 1, giving the casino a big 5.26% edge over the player (except the five number bet, when its edge increases as mentioned). All the other payoffs work the same way. Anyone who says he has a betting system for beating the “wheel” should not be allowed to drive!

Cheating in Roulette is not easy. The same rule applies for online roulett. The cameras are usually filming the game at all times. One reason the cameras constantly film these games and not Blackjack is that there are only a few Roulette and Craps games compared to Blackjack. The simplest way to cheat the game is to have the dealer overpay a winning bet. However, this is a Catch-22 situation. If the chips are worth only a dollar, the dealer and player cannot make enough money to make it worth their time, and if the player is betting $25 chips the game will be watched more closely

Past posting was and still is a useful method to cheat at Roulette. It’s easy to win if you make your bet after the ball lands in a number slot! A past poster waits until the ball has landed and then uses some type of distraction to make the bet. This is done on a busy game with a dealer who is new at dealing Roulette. Roulette is not easy to deal and if the regular dealer is sick a backup dealer will have to deal the game, and less experience makes the sub more vulnerable.

Enter high tech, and wishful thinking. Cheaters have developed computers that attempt to predict the number upon which the ball will land. This prediction is based on limited data in a fast-moving situation, but supposedly gives the cheaters an advantage that overcomes the house’s 5.26% built-in edge. In tackling such a project, problems arise. The computer must be miniaturized so it can be taken into the casino, and such a computer must be much more complex than the simple number-cruncher used in coolers.

The second problem is that until a miniature laser-radar works reliably, it takes human judgment to estimate velocities, and that is subject to error. And finally there is the old nemesis: greed. If the other two problems could be overcome then you have a method that could in theory make you unlimited amounts of money, but you cannot beat the Roulette games for thousands of dollars on a consistent basis or you will be barred. Don’t count on that computer being available at your local electronics outlet, and don’t get conned into investing in one.

Yet.
Roulette is not worthless to the cheater. If you’re in a casino and sense that the heat is on, one way to become “Joe from Plainfield” is to waste a few dollars playing Roulette. No surveillance inspector or pit boss would expect a professional to play that loser’s game, so you’ll rapidly take the heat off.