Many of you know that my radio co-host for six months was Richard Munchkin. He writes interesting things for his website and a couple of months ago posted Advice to New Advantage Players. I liked his title so much I stole it! And I’m going to be referring back to what he wrote, so I suggest you read that first.
Munchkin’s advice is to table game players. He basically knows squat about video poker and doesn’t see that that makes his life incomplete in any respect. But much of the advice he gives to table game players applies equally well to video poker.
1. Study hard and have friends — Munch gives an anecdote about walking through a casino with me and I pointed out some slot machines and told him they were beatable. I didn’t tell him how I knew that. He didn’t choose to follow up on this. But he could have. And I would have given him a small advantage play.
Similarly, by sharing 10-or-so dinners with Richard before or after radio shows, I gained quite a bit of insight into playing table games with an advantage. If I decided I wanted to learn more about those, I could have told him: “I’m interested in pursuing this. What background work do I need to do before I can do well at this?” He might have said, “Learn chapters x, y, and z of Grosjean’s book (Beyond Counting: Exhibit CAA) and get back to me.” If video poker were totally drying up for me, I just might have done that. I still might — but not yet.
I have a number of friends who sometimes tell me about plays — and I sometimes tell them some stuff as well. Frequently I’m the most experienced gambler there, but even then sometimes my first instincts are off the mark. When somebody else tells me her idea, sometimes I recognize it as better than my own.
2. Read — For me, hosting the radio show has opened my eyes to a number of gambling opportunities. If a guest on the show has written something, I usually read that before the interview. And frequently I would not have done so were I not in the “radio host” mode. The lesson for you might be to put yourself into the same mode and read what knowledgeable people have written.
The head of the MIT Blackjack Team once told me about which books of his were dog-eared from reading them so much. Almost any gambling book I mentioned to Munchkin while we were hosting together he had already read — and he remembered what it was about!
Some people tell me they have no time to read. I tell them I have no time not to read.
3. Write — This is as important as reading. Unless you can put down your theories into complete sentences, you don’t have complete theories. You don’t need to polish your grammar, spelling, and punctuation unless you’re actually going to publish, but many of the best players are also writers.
4. Ignore much of what you read on the Internet — There are forums where anybody can post their ideas. The people who post the most frequently have more time than knowledge. Reading the forums you’ll learn that hitting a royal flush on 6-5 Bonus Poker is an exciting thing. (It’s actually an awful thing that anybody was even playing such a bad game. But say this on the forums and you’ll be criticized for being anti-social.)
5. Learn the games well — To have a chance at video poker you need to play at virtually the 100% accuracy level. The edge you have, at best, is pretty small. Only playing at the 99% accuracy level gives up most if not all of your edge. If you can’t learn the advanced strategies, perhaps you don’t have what it takes to be an advantage player. Many people don’t.
Shirley often tells me not to write stuff like that. She believes in staying positive and encouraging everybody. In some contexts that makes a lot of sense. But when it comes to advantage gambling, far less than 1% of the population can be successful at it. There are many paths to being in that 1% — but intelligence and hard work are a major part of most of those paths.
6. Learning how to think is the most important thing — A student of mine came up to me and said they had read all of my books except the novels. “Too racy for you?” I surmised. “No,” he answered. “I have no problem with that. It’s just that the situations you wrote about happened 10 years ago. It doesn’t do me any good to learn what you did 10 years ago.”
Wrong! The approach to beating the games has evolved somewhat, but many of the basics remain the same. A lot of the techniques used are somewhat sneaky. Many people can’t come up with sneaky ideas by themselves, but when explained they can learn from them and apply them to similar situations down the road.
Same thing with many of my columns on this site. My goal in them is to teach you how to think about promotions. I know many people want to be able to follow a cookie-cutter approach but advantage gambling isn’t like that. The casinos actively try to shut down the easy opportunities. They do NOT want to support professional players. You need to be able to devise new strategies to outfox them.
7. I like the way Munchkin ends his column. When you find a great play, remember who your friends are!