At www.gamblingwithanedge.com , in the comments section for a recent blog post of mine, a poker player said he had two stop limits–one for being ahead and on for being behind. (It’s possible he uses the same amount for each. He didn’t say.) He wanted to know if winning video poker players use this system as well.
In all gambling, money management is important. One of the key elements is being able to stay in the game. If you go broke, you’re out of the action.
Continue reading When Do You Quit?Author’s note: I ran this originally in December 2009, while I was teaching classes at the Eastside Cannery.
After this was published, Andy and Sharon became good friends with Shirley and me, and later Bonnie and me. Recently Sharon, real name Phillis, died after dealing with a brain tumor for years. Reprinting this article is one way to say, “Rest in Peace, Phillis.”
Continue reading A Sexy CorrelationI have played for more than ten years at Dotty’s, a chain of 15-machine (mostly) establishments located throughout Nevada.
While the promotions at Dotty’s vary periodically, one constant has been their Jackpot Bonus promotion where 10% of all W2gs receive a 10% bonus. That is, if you hit a $4,000 jackpot, 10% of the time you’ll receive an extra $400 in cash.
Continue reading You Can’t Do That!In Las Vegas, there was a 70-day break for the pandemic, assuming you played in the casinos on March 17 and returned on June 4. If you socially distanced before March 17, or didn’t rush back as soon as the casinos reopened, the break was longer.
Certain casino venues elsewhere in the country opened earlier or later than June 4, but for now, let’s assume we all had a 2¼ -month break, minimum. It’s close enough for today’s purposes.
Continue reading Are You Still Up to Snuff?When I was nine years old, I was an All-Star baseball player. It wasn’t part of the official Little League system. Our city parks in Gardena, a suburb of Los Angeles, had a minor league, from 8-10 years of age, a major league, from 10-12, and a pony league, from 12-14.
At the start of the summer, I was 10 years old. I could have played in the minor leagues or the major leagues. Most of my friends were a bit older and didn’t have that choice. So, I went along with them and signed up to play in the majors.
Continue reading Finding my SpotIn the middle of his famous poem “If,” Rudyard Kipling poses the condition, “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.” At the end of the poem filled with twenty or so other conditions, comes the conclusion, “you’ll be a Man, my son.”
Although addressed to his son, this applies equally to daughters. The phrase is etched over the players’ entrance at Wimbledon’s Centre Court. I read it recently in a book by Maria Konnikova which I will review next week. This phrase was a very small part of the book, but it speaks to me as a video poker player as surely as it does to tennis players.
Continue reading Kipling Said It BestToday I want to look at the advanced strategy features of 9/5 TBPP. Unlike the previous two weeks, I’m not comparing this game to another. I’m just listing exceptions to the intermediate rules.
I assume you’re generally familiar with penalty cards and the difference between ‘when’ and ‘with’ inside parenthesized exceptions. These are common for all the Dancer/Daily Winner’s Guides and strategy cards. If you’re not familiar with our notation, this might be tough going. It would take several thousand words to explain all the features of the notation, and that’s kind of tough for 800-word columns.
Continue reading A Look at 9-5 Triple Bonus Poker Plus — Part 3 of 3This game returns a robust 99.80% with perfect play, is found in a number of Las Vegas casinos, and for some reason I have neither taught nor written much about the game. That is about to change.
Today I’ll discuss the basics of the game. Next week I’ll talk about some Intermediate-Level peculiarities to the game. And in two weeks I’ll discuss some of the advanced penalty card situations.
1 coin | 5 coins | ||
| Royal Flush | 250 | 4,000 | |
| Straight Flush | 100 | 500 | |
| Four Aces | 240 | 1,200 | |
| Four 2s thru 4s | 120 | 600 | |
| Four 5s thru Ks | 50 | 250 | |
| Full House | 9 | 45 | |
| Flush | 5 | 25 | |
| Straight | 4 | 20 | |
| Three of a Kind | 3 | 15 | |
| Two Pair | 1 | 5 | |
| Jacks or Better | 1 | 5 |
It was not my intention to spend a lot of time on backgammon, as backgammon is not my game of choice — nor is it really much of a gambling game anymore. But just as we were preparing to air two GWAE shows with Bob Wachtel on his Backgammon Chronicles, Richard and I received a review copy of Bill Robertie’s first book in his series How to Play the Openings in Backgammon.
Robertie is a two-time world champion in backgammon and author of numerous books on the game. In addition, he’s published several books on chess and co-authored a popular series of poker books with Dan Harrington. He’s the publisher for Gammon Press and moderates the backgammon forum on the Two Plus Two website. Simply put, he’s at the pinnacle of gaming/gambling writers.
Continue reading A Look at Bill Robertie’s New Series on Backgammon OpeningsTwenty years ago, I spent Easter locked down in a concrete holding cell at CCDC—Clark County Detention Center—after being jailed on trumped-up charges by Caesars Palace, who couldn’t handle that my teammate and I had won a few thousand bucks playing Three Card Poker. From the jailhouse phone, I called Arnold Snyder, my publisher, to tell him to hold the presses to give my lawyer time to look over the manuscript for Beyond Counting, published a few months later. Like Jesus, I consider Easter something of a professional anniversary, typically celebrated by whacking a casino game while contemplating my career goals. This weekend there won’t be any game-whacking for me (can’t say about Jesus).
Today I’m spending my Easter locked down by the CDC—Center for Disease Control and Prevention—after a supposedly trumped-up coronavirus, without the flashy gore of Ebola and smallpox, caused a real pandemic after all. For me, it was real from the beginning. Ever since my own deadly bout with a pathogen years ago, Google has been feeding me every article on Ebola, MERS, E. coli, and brain-eating amoebas. I click on them all. I needed a ventilator for over a week, and had to re-learn to walk, so the medical implications of the coronavirus are quite real to me.
For others, there are different stages of realness. Did it become more real when the virus attacked a celebrity (Tom Hanks)? An athlete (Rudy Gobert)? When the NBA shut down, and then all sports, and hence sports betting, it started to feel real to some APs. Did it get real when Ireland shut down pubs? Maybe when Canada shut down hockey? Or when China shut down casinos?
Then the ides of March brought casino closures worldwide. That’s when it got real for APs. For some, the financial impact is palpable, but they don’t realize how lucky they got, medically. I am very confident that if casinos had remained open one more week, many APs I know—or you—would have gotten infected. No big deal, you say? A virus with a roughly 1% death risk, maybe a bit less for someone under 50 years of age—ha! I don’t know if you’ve looked at a calendar lately, but most of us aren’t young anymore! On top of that, most APs are male, possibly boosting the death risk twofold. Now we’re talking about something comparable to a one-outer in poker. Have you ever been in a “1n1” game of Ultimate Texas Holdem, on the river with the dealer down to a single out to beat you? Put your life against that last card the dealer is about to flip over. If everyone at the Blackjack Ball is put up against that, one or two people die.
It’ll become more real when someone you personally know dies. I’m there. A hobbyist card counter who often played a double-deck game that I sometimes played got COVID19 and died. He was such a fixture that my crew had a nickname for him. We called him “The Futurist” due to his resemblance to Dr. Michio Kaku, a scientist who is popular for his conjectures about the future. I suppose I didn’t personally know The Futurist. If you had asked him if he knew me, he would surely have said no, or he would have just said that I’m a local gambler he recognizes. I knew his name and his game, though, so that’s pretty close in my world.
The Futurist would always sit at third base on DD, playing one or two spots, always enjoying himself, especially when betting the Lucky Ladies in unison with other counters at the table. He probably enjoyed the camaraderie of it all more than whatever money could be made off that game. He was a friendly fellow, and he so consistently anchored that band of counters that it became a bit unnerving to occasionally see that table deadspread on a weekend afternoon.
And now, when the casino eventually re-opens, The Futurist won’t be sitting anchor. This isn’t real.
When the coronavirus forced casinos to close last month, the smart APs I know were not in the casinos at all, or they were bouncing around the country liquidating chip inventories, making sure they had enough cash on hand to survive a protracted lockdown. The fake APs? Well, they were, I imagine, just panicking. Panicking about possible death from a relentless virus? No!! Rather, some are panicking about not being able to pay for basic expenses for a few months. APs are not peculiar in this regard. A recent survey estimates that over half of Americans do not have enough savings to survive three months of expenses: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/nearly-half-americans-live-paycheck-to-paycheck-bank-survey. It should be embarrassing for any AP to be living game-to-game after winning six or seven figures in the last few years. Fiscal responsibility is especially important for an AP, whose income can be highly variable and unpredictable. Who knows when the next big score will come?
Even a squirrel is smarter than most Americans. A typical squirrel works hard all year long, and builds up a bankroll of 10,000 units, er, nuts. And no, the squirrel doesn’t forget where they all are. Studies show that squirrels have organized storage systems: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/504458/squirrels-are-probably-more-organized-you-study-finds. So the typical squirrel is smarter than Johnny Chang, the MIT counter of Bringing-Down-the-House fame, notorious for discovering caches of chips previously hidden and forgotten in his house. (I have no doubt Johnny Chang will comment below with a link to a squirrel trying to hide a nut in the fur of a Bernese Mountain Dog, and say, “I’m definitely smarter than that squirrel!” I’ll beat him to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTPOSdyA7Uo)
So while half the world is whining about what a nightmare this lockdown is, and comparing it to the UIGEA Black Friday in 2011, the competent people I know are all seizing this unique opportunity to be productive, to get caught up on projects and start new ones. We’re running around like Quicksilver while the rest of the world is on Pause: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMp_5HtO-aE.
On top of my standard workload writing code daily and working on my next book for Anthony Curtis, my publisher, I’ve added several activities to fill the extra time the lockdown has gifted me. As Kevin Garnett famously said: “I take a lot of pride in my craft. I work really hard on my craft every day, and I’m a true professional.” Here are some specific recommendations on what to do:
