As I promised, I’ll now reveal my favorite gambling movie. There are a few “classics” that I haven’t seen, but I doubt that they can supplant my favorite.
Category: Advantage Play
Seeking Out Unfair Games
Many times I’ve written about video poker games that I consider fair. And what I mean by “fair” is that every unseen card has an equal chance of appearing next.
Most people seem to accept my definition — or at least understand what I am talking about.
However, I recently received an email at [email protected] from someone who calls himself “Reno Master.” The email read as follows: Continue reading Seeking Out Unfair Games
“Doctor, it hurts when I do THIS”
“Well don’t do that!” the good doctor quips. I have always found this joke entertaining, not so much for the wisecracking humor, but for the subtle wisdom therein. Note that the doctor’s advice is not “I’ll prescribe some medical marijuana for you,” or “You need to learn to live with the pain,” or “You need a thicker skin.” Steeling oneself to endure pain is an unhealthy practice (pain is a message to you), and yet suffering card counters constantly prescribe this regimen to each other.
The Best Gambling Movie of All Time–Not!
A friend recently forced me to watch the movie “Casino” for the first time. You may be shocked that a professional gambler wouldn’t have already seen “Casino” twenty times, but Hollywoodizations of what we do for a living aren’t always so appealing. Besides, we be werkin’ all the time! It turns out that “Casino” is not a gambling movie; it’s “Goodfellas” in a casino (with the same movie director, screen writer, and cast!). So, it didn’t come close to unseating our #1 gambling movie (guess what that is!), but “Casino” still contained some valuable lessons for the modern casino AP:
The Club Calling the Spade Black
On a blackjack Website, I read a thread about a card counter doing a “great drunk act” (that’ll be another blog entry later). The post read:
The count goes up a bit, the drunk stops play with, “Can I change my bet?” The pit says sure. The drunk then takes the two greens he had bet and replaces them with two different greens from his stack. It totally cracked me up.
Then another card counter posted the reply: “Hilarious.” Continue reading The Club Calling the Spade Black
The Denominator—Where “Due” Happens
After a weekend of listening to football broadcasters, I need to detox. I still feel this zinger from a few weeks ago during the Sunday Night Football broadcast: the commentator noted that Adam Vinatieri, the kicker for the Indianapolis Colts, had a career record of 18 of 36 when attempting field goals over 50 yards, and a season record of 2 of 4 at that distance. No matter how you look at it, he said, it’s a 50-50 proposition. Then Vinatieri kicked the field goal, upping his record on the season to 3 out of 5 from long range. Then the commentator quipped, “So I bet he misses the next one.”
Pushback and Bayes’ Rule
I’m only one post into this blogging adventure and I’m getting pushback from the cognoscenti. In my intro post, I advised APs to avoid using the word “stuck.” A player then tells me, “Using that word doesn’t make you a pro—it just makes you old school.” Sigh. I’m not sure where to start. First of all, you don’t want to be old school! You want to be an idiot tourist, one of the millions of new gamblers who only recently discovered the wonders of the Pairs Plus when gambling (er, “gaming”) was finally legalized in their state last year. You want to be the guy who boasts to his friends that he now has been to Vegas 6 times, oblivious to the fact that knowing the exact number undermines the spirit of his boast. On top of that, guess who defended “stuck” as an acceptable word in a casino? None other than a longtime professional player who is a member of the Blackjack Hall of Fame! QED! Continue reading Pushback and Bayes’ Rule
A Look at Wong on Dice
Stanford Wong is one of my heroes. He has written knowledgeably about many different casino games — from video poker to blackjack to Pai Gow poker to sports betting to casino tournaments to . . . He is a friend and has been a repeat visitor to Gambling with an Edge. He will be appearing again this Thursday night, 7-8 p.m. 1230AM in Las Vegas. Live streaming at www.klav1230am.com. And it will be archived the next day on www.bobdancer.com. Continue reading A Look at Wong on Dice
Change for Gold Coast Seniors
Mondays have been “Young at Heart” (for seniors 50+) at the Gold Coast for some time. Some benefits stay constant, but the rewards for video poker players changes from time to time. Beginning November 1 they removed their senior drawing and 5x points for video poker players and replaced it with a 100-coin bonus on four natural fives (no wild cards, bottom line only on multiple line machines, $100 maximum bonus).
Overall this isn’t a terrible tradeoff. On a game like Jacks or Better, the promotion adds 0.4%. On a game like NSU Deuces Wild, the game adds 0.3%. If you play at the Emerald level, (0.3% every day), these bonuses ADD to what you already get. The previous promotion only added 0.2% for these players because the 5x points (totaling 0.5%) was a MAXIMUM amount no matter what level you were at. The new promotion, for some players at least, more than makes up for the loss of 5x points and goes a long way toward replacing the drawing.
It was somewhat surprising to me that the casino was really jumping with video poker players on Sunday November 7 when they were giving 5x points, but largely dead when they had the four fives promotion on Monday November 8. I played from 9 p.m. to midnight, connected on the promo twice (a rare occurrence to be sure), and the slot shift boss was telling me that these were the 6th and 7th bonuses they’d paid all day and they’d paid a similar number the week before. I would have thought that they’d have three or four times that many. What gives?
Part of the answer lies in what else was happening in the video poker world. Sunday was a day when “nothing special” was going on promotion-wise, but Monday had gift cards at the Palms (in addition to video poker bingo) and senior day at the Silverton.
To be sure the Sunday promotion was open to all ages and the Monday promotion was only open to 50+, but usually more than half of players in a casino qualify for the senior category. Also, how the two promotions compare is affected by your tier level. If you are Ruby level, 5x points and the four fives promotion have approximately equal EV. If you are Sapphire level, four fives is a little better. And if you are Emerald, four fives is a lot better. Overall, four fives is a better for the players mathematically, but clearly (looking at head counts) many players don’t see it that way.
Although four fives is worth more than 5x mathematically, there is a huge difference in terms of frequency and certainty. You’ll connect on four fives every 5-8 hours, depending on how fast you play. If you’re going to be playing 2 or 3 hours on Monday, you’re probably not going to collect the 100-coin bonus this time. If you were getting 5x points, you’ll get a small bonus on every hand played.
Over the course of 4,000 hands (the approximate frequency of four fives in some games), the additional 0.2% (i.e. the difference between the daily 0.3% for Emerald and the 0.5% for the 5x point promotion) would have been worth an extra 40 coins. To me it’s no contest between a promotion that gives me an extra 40 coins over 4,000 hands versus one where I get an extra 100 coins. I appear to be in the minority about this.
Many people seem to prefer the guaranteed 40 coins versus the theoretical average of 100 coins for the same amount of play — but which probably isn’t going to happen today. Players who can figure this out and are able to take a long-term point of view to their gambling find this obvious. Others, not so much. To me this is a variation of my “today’s score doesn’t matter” mantra that I’ve been preaching for years. One wag recently called my preaching “ear banging.” I thought that was a clever expression.
Another player told me that he preferred to play Five Play machines, and since this bonus only played on the bottom line, this was equivalent to a 20-coin bonus for him. That’s true, of course, so long as he insists on playing Five Play. But why do that? Winning players learn to swing with the punches. If one promotion pays better on a particular type of machine, those are the machines to play.
Players differ in their flexibility on this. If you want to take a “if the promotion doesn’t work really well on the machine I usually play, then screw it!” attitude, fine. That’s your choice. As for me, I’ll look for ways that I can benefit from what is being offered. Which is why in the ten casinos I play the most at, I play a total of seven different games, and at some casinos am playing a different game this month than I did last month because of promotions.
The Type of Hands that are Most Difficult to Play
I’ve had a lot of discussions with “Kal.” Kal played successful blackjack for years and is relatively new to video poker. We bring different “beating the house” skills to the table and enjoy learning from each other.
Recently Kal told me, “on hands where three or more relevant combinations are in the same hand, my accuracy rate is much lower than on hands where only two combinations exist.” This seems sort of obvious when you think about it, but it isn’t the way I’ve been studying.
In the past year, I’ve learned four new games as opportunities change. When I’m trying to learn a new game, I frequently use WinPoker (yes, I still use that product on occasion) and set “Hard Hands” to 0.02 or so. This deals me hands where the difference between the top play and the second-best play have a EV difference of 2¢ or less for the 5-coin dollar player. I figure that if I can learn the hard hands, the easy hands surely won’t be a problem.
Sometimes just being close in EV isn’t the same as being difficult. In 9-6 Jacks or Better, for example, from AJ542 “rainbow,” the best play (AJ) is worth less than a penny more (for a 5-coin dollar player) than the second-best play (J by itself). For those of us who have learned the rule “two high cards, suited or not, are ALWAYS preferred to one high card in this game,” this is a no-brainer type of hand, even though the difference between the top two hands is fairly small.
What Kal was talking about is different. He’s talking about hands such as: Ah Kh Qc Tc 8c, where you need to consider the 2-card royal flush ‘AK’ (the correct play in 9-6 Jacks or Better by 18¢), the 3-card straight flush ‘QT8’ (the correct play in 9-7 Triple Double Bonus by 6¢), and the 4-card inside straight AKQT (the correct play in 9-7 Double Bonus by 25¢).
In none of these three games would this hand show up when I was checking for hands where the top two plays were within 2¢ of each other. And since each play was correct in one of the games, and a number of players use the same strategy for all games, it’s a 100% lock that some players will misplay the hand in one or more of the games. Since I wouldn’t be concentrating on this particular hand, it’s possible that I personally would mess it up. My accuracy rate is very high if I have recently reviewed a particular game. But if I haven’t, and I’ve played a lot of different games recently, sometimes I’m not 100% positive of the correct play.
In the Triple Double Bonus game it’s a “penalty card” hand, because you play Ah Kh Qc Tc 8c differently than you play Ah Jh Qc Tc 8c, where ‘AJ’ is the better play by less than a penny. A play this close would definitely show up during my practice of hard hands, but I’d need to be on my toes to realize that the play was different depending on whether the lower heart was a jack or a king. It would be easy to reach the wrong conclusion — at a rather major cost of 25¢.
In “Video Poker for Winners,” the computer software I helped design, the hands discussed here show up regularly when you have the “Level of Difficulty” set to “Advanced.” When designing which types of hands should be displayed when this feature was turned, I included a number of possibilities where you had 3-card straight flushes of various stripes mixed and matched with inside straights of various stripes. Many other combinations were included as well.
While there were dozens of criteria used to determine what the advanced hands should be, “dozens” isn’t very many. You’ll find you’ll get the same types of hands listed over and over again.
Still, the difficult hands presented to you in WinPoker are different from the difficult hands presented by Video Poker for Winners. Which is why owning and practicing with two or more software products is advisable. Although there is a lot of overlap in doing the basic things, each computer trainer has features the other ones don’t. Considering the money many of us run through the machines every year, the price of these products is small compared to the potential value.