Category: Advice for Players

Posted on by — 12 Comments

When the Rules are Not the Rules

The M Casino Resort is located along I-15 at the southern edge of the Las Vegas valley. The location was picked expecting the Southern Highlands development to explode, but that didn’t happen. The 2007 housing bubble hurt that development big time — and this casino as well.

I live about 8-10 miles from the casino, depending on whether I take the freeway or not. I know having a casino this close would be a luxury for many of my readers, but it’s actually too far away for me. Although I do drive and will drive, I do not particularly enjoy “spinning my wheels.” I much prefer playing at closer casinos if I can find suitable ones.

To make matters worse, it’s the kind of casino where you must come in and pick up your free play multiple times over the month. Sometimes up to 10 times.

For the past seven years or so, up until the end of 2016, I had a “special deal” at that casino. This consisted of me coming in once a month and doing all my play at one time. Usually the figure was $200,000 of coin-in played on a $10 single line 8/5 Bonus Poker machine.

In exchange for this, I received all my free play for the month in one lump sum and was guaranteed to receive 2x points (worth a total of 0.60%) each time I came in. If you included the free play and the benefits of being an ICON member (their highest tier), including a certain amount of food each month, this was sufficient to entice me to play there.

Although the arrangement evolved over time, for the last few years I was unwelcome at most drawings and invitational tournaments. The reason for this was that most tournaments included “second chance drawings” where players would play during the weekend event and, based on $5,000 coin-in for one drawing ticket, tickets would be drawn to give away money. The reason for the second chance drawing was to induce extra play out of the players. I was excluded from these drawings because the $200,000 I would play wouldn’t be extra play — it would just be normal monthly play. This would give me an unfair advantage, or so the managers believed.

In late 2010, the M was sold to Penn National Gaming, effective sometime in 2011, but the former owner, Anthony Marnell III, still had a management role. So, most of the special deals that were allowed when Marnell owned the place were still in effect. Eventually Marnell moved on to other opportunities and the new General Manager was a PNG employee with no ties at all to the way the casino was run in the past.

I was informed in November 2016 that my deal was going to end on December 31. I was still welcome to play but I would receive the normal mail for an ICON player — based on how much I continued to play. I would need to pick up my free play in whatever increments the other players got their free play and would be eligible to participate in tournaments and drawings should my play warrant it. If this wasn’t acceptable, I didn’t have to play there at all.

I appealed this decision to the GM, but to no avail. It took until about the end of January to get me back on all mailing lists. I had been manually excluded by the former Vice President of Marketing (because of my special deal), and each of those manual over-rides had to be found and removed.

For March, I decided to play on Thursday, March 2, primarily because there was a drawing on Friday, March 3. I figured my equity in the drawing would help make up for the inconvenience of having to travel to the casino so many times. According to an over-sized postcard I received in the mail, so long as my tickets to the drawing were activated prior to 7 p.m., I was in the drawing. So, I played more than $200,000, at a bigger-than-average loss, and activated my entries at 6:45 p.m.  Unfortunately, I was totally skunked in the drawing.

Since there were 75 names drawn and I probably had more tickets in the drum than anyone else, it was highly improbable that I didn’t get picked anywhere. A “top 10” finish was likely, I believed, with a decent shot at winning the $4,000 first prize. I didn’t think I was intentionally excluded from the drawing (although with the manual overrides the former VP of Marketing had instituted, it was possible that one forbidding me from participating in drawings was still inadvertently in effect). I thought the most likely explanation for me not being called was that they pulled the 75 names before my tickets were in the drum.

The following Tuesday I spoke to the man who was responsible for pulling the tickets the previous Friday evening. He told me he pulled them at 6:30 p.m., as he had been instructed to do. I asked him who told him to pull at 6:30 p.m., because that would be the first person I called — if I decided to follow up on this.

It was not clear that following up on this would yield good results. Using aphorisms, we can say the squeaky wheel gets the grease (which means I should definitely follow up on this), but we can also say the nail that sticks up is often hammered down (which means I should just let it go). Playing “aphorism roulette,” I decided to pursue this.

I left voicemail messages explaining what I wanted to talk about to two different Marketing Supervisors. Whether they were in town and received the messages or not, I don’t know, but they didn’t return my calls. So, I next directed a written email to Patrick Durkin, the Vice President of Marketing. I told him I didn’t want to go to the Gaming Control Board if I could avoid it, but I strongly felt I was short-changed.

He sent me a return email saying he would research the matter and get back to me by the end of the day. He did, although he said he preferred to talk face to face. We set up a meeting for the following week, but he also told me the written rules and the postcard sent in the mail had different information on it.

This was an unusual twist. The rules said to swipe before 6:30 p.m. and I didn’t read those rules until afterwards. The mailer — which included a LOT of detail including small print disclaimers — seemed to cover everything and contained what were certainly at least “pseudo rules.”

I hoped the casino wouldn’t argue that the written rules were the only relevant ones and the mailer wasn’t official. I’ve heard LOTS of strange arguments from casino employees through the years. I would just have to wait until the meeting.

I certainly didn’t know how the meeting would go. They could give me some free play. They could say “sorry Charlie.” Or they could restrict me in some minor or major way. I’ve seen variations of all of those. But I wasn’t going to get anything if I didn’t go to the meeting, so I went.

Insofar as the mailer went, I didn’t take it with me. I did, however, take an iPhone photo of both front and back and had that with me. (Years ago, some employees at the Suncoast, after it was purchased by Boyd, disputed that I had received a postcard invitation and asked to see it. I gave it to them and they took it into the back room. I never saw the postcard or them again. Since I couldn’t prove I received the postcard, the Suncoast’s official position was that I hadn’t received one. Although I didn’t think the M would operate in such a rinky dink fashion as the Suncoast, I wasn’t taking any chances.)

At the meeting with Mr. Durkin, he couldn’t have been more gracious. We chatted for 10 minutes or so — one professional to another. He had worked at several casinos over the years and I had played at many of them. We knew many of the same people. I am somewhat of a “special case” in the player community and he wanted to get to know me. He had only worked at the property for a few months and, although we had exchanged some emails and phone calls, we hadn’t met each other prior to our meeting.

When it came time to discuss whether I was going to receive any compensation for trusting the mailer, he told me the promotion had been designed by his predecessor, who now worked elsewhere. Although he and his staff checked the rules and the mailers, they missed the “6:30 vs 7:00” difference. Without admitting any error, he asked what would satisfy me. I, of course, would have preferred that he come up with a proposed amount of free play first. But at least we were finally talking turkey.

I won’t go into exactly how the negotiation to find the “right” number took place, but we came up with an amount of free play that both of us could live with. Maybe a better negotiator would have gotten more. Maybe some players would have gotten less. Being able to negotiate effectively when you have to is a player skill that is underrated.

I came away impressed with how Mr. Durkin handled this. He understood that his company had made a mistake and my grievance was legitimate — and he treated it as such. None of us can guarantee we will never make a mistake, but we can try and clean it up afterwards when we fall short. And that’s what Mr. Durkin did without giving away the store.

To my mind, the fact that I had lost a bit more than usual this time made it easier for him to award me free play. Had I hit a $40,000 royal flush and ended up considerably ahead on the play, it would have been more difficult for him to justify the additional payment to his bosses. So, you can be sure I mentioned my loss in the negotiation. Had I won during the play, he probably would have mentioned that.

While idealists can make a pretty good case that my results shouldn’t have mattered in this case, these things do matter. Thinking they don’t would be naïve.

Posted on by — 22 Comments

The Important Message

I’m a fan of The Moth podcast, in which people stand up without notes and give a 10-minute autobiographical talk about something interesting. Some time ago I thought I would try to be a performer on that show. I couldn’t use notes to tell the story live, but I sure as hell could use them to help prepare for the talk. So, I wrote out what I’d say about an incident that happened almost 40 years ago.

Sometime later I decided not to try out for The Moth, although I thought the story would fit well enough into this blog. I’ve already shared parts of this story with my readers, but not all of it, and certainly not the big secret I reveal at the end. So here is what I was planning to say:

In the 1970s, I was a professional gambler. My game was backgammon. It was played in discos, at least in greater Los Angeles, which is where I lived. I even took lessons learning how to disco dance so I could hang out in these discos without looking like a gambling hustler. I also played at an underground club near Los Angeles called the Cavendish West.

It isn’t hard being a successful gambler when the competition isn’t very good. And that was the way backgammon was for me in the mid-1970s.

I had first heard of the game from an article in Playboy, which I really only picked up because of the articles. I bought every book I could find on the subject, bought a board to practice on, and soon was in business. As bad as the books were at the time, my studying was more than my competitors did. Plus, I was smarter than average and had been playing board games since I was a pre-teen. I did well.

At the Cavendish, I became a regular.  In backgammon, you are not playing against the house. You are playing against other players and the house charges each player a rental fee for providing the boards and the place where other like-minded players can congregate.

No matter how good or bad you are, your success at backgammon is primarily determined by your skill relative to that of your opponents.  If you are the third best player in the world but always are playing with numbers 1 and 2, you’re going to be a loser.

For those who don’t play the game, it’s a board game where there’s a special device called the doubling cube. If you’re not playing for money — or perhaps trying to win a backgammon tournament — the doubling cube is irrelevant and kept in the box. If you are competing for cash, though, learning to use the doubling cube well is important. It’s every bit as important as learning to move the checkers well.

Without going into details about the cube, it can be used to increase the stakes of the game dramatically. If your opponent is too aggressive or too passive or too timid with the cube, so much the better. Systematic mistakes were exploitable. So, similar to reading poker tells, good players kept a catalog of sorts on the doubling cube practices of every opponent. If you saw your opponent make a doubling cube error, AND THEN MAKE IT AGAIN in another game, this was called “confirmation” and you had a potential gold mine. A single game of backgammon usually lasted less than 10 minutes — and we played for 6-8 hours at a time. There were LOTS of opportunities to get confirmation on these exploitable habits of others.

In 1979, I was a much better backgammon player than I was in 1975. But I was going broke. Gone was the regular infusion of bad players that were easy to find in the disco era and not so easy to find anymore. The players still in the game had been there for as long as I had. I was a good player, but I was mostly playing REALLY good players. This was not a recipe for success.

I started contemplating getting a job. This I viewed as an admission that I was no longer able to live off my wits in the gambling world. I was no longer able to accurately assert superiority over those doofusses who actually had to find a job in order to survive.  I was now going to be a doofus too.

This was very traumatic. I also didn’t know what I could do to earn money. Although I had a pretty good education and got up to the almost-PhD level in Economics, I had been fired five years earlier from a think-tank job in which I was a research associate. I hadn’t read any economic books or journal articles in five years. My skills were woefully out of date.

Since I had used some Fortran-based computer packages in my research-associate position years before, I decided to market myself as a computer programmer. The available jobs were in COBOL, a computer language I didn’t know at all. Still, I read a how-to-program-in-COBOL book one weekend and went on a job interview the following Monday. Before I did, I shaved off the beard I had worn for 10 years and got a haircut that made me look like a Republican. God! It was awful!

I was interviewed by two guys, both of whom liked to gamble. I talked backgammon with the first guy and blackjack with the second. Although my skills weren’t good enough to survive as a gambling professional, they were WAY better than these two wannabe gamblers. They were impressed with my abilities. The $25,000 a year job in programming I was applying for had been filled that morning, but there was a $35,000 a year job as a systems analyst available. It was now the week before Christmas and their budget didn’t allow another hire until after the first of the year. Was I interested in starting in two weeks?

I was, although I had no clue what a systems analyst did. I went to a bookstore, bought two books on how to be a systems analyst, and went home where I stayed in bed for two weeks. I’d come out of my room only to grab something out of the refrigerator or go to the bathroom. Otherwise, I read the books over and over again and was seemingly catatonic. I was sure I was going to be found out as a fraud and fired immediately.   When that happened, I didn’t know what I was going to do. The fact that I was having to get a job in the first place wasn’t helping matters any. And I liked my hippie look WAY better than looking like a Baptist preacher.  But that look was now gone. Not shaving for two weeks didn’t come close to making me feel better.

I was living with a lady named Betty at the time. I didn’t say a word to her for those two weeks. Not one word. She’d ask what she could do to help, or suggest I get out and exercise a bit, or maybe we could go see a movie or something, and I’d just lay there with my back to her, totally mute. I didn’t know what to say. There wasn’t anything to say. I was a doofus who looked like a Republican.

She kept the refrigerator stocked with good eating options, bless her heart, and didn’t get too freaked out by my behavior.

Two weeks later, Wednesday January 2, 1980, I was 10 minutes early to work. I came up with a couple of good answers to questions I was asked in the first week and somehow lasted on that job for three years — at which time I went out and found a better one. I can’t tell you exactly how I did it. I just don’t know. I suspect being in the right place at the right time helped a lot.

One year after I had started working, I received a phone call at three in the morning from a lady friend named Margo. Not a romantic lady friend — I was still with Betty — but a good friend nonetheless. Margo was contemplating going back to work. Margo was a nurse and had written some books on pain management. She had gone around the country lecturing to nurses about treating those in pain. But her 15 minutes of fame was now up. She no longer got enough attendees to come to her lectures. It was time for her to go back to work.

Like I had been, Margo was severely traumatized. She didn’t want to go back to work. She knew I had gone through something similar the year before and needed some good advice. And she needed it now! At three in the morning. What could I tell her?

She had just returned from a nightclub where she’d probably had several beers (or something stronger). I was sound asleep when the call came. I gave her the best secret I could come up with on the spur of the moment. I told Margo that I hadn’t spoken to Betty for two weeks prior to starting my new job and recommended she not speak to Betty either. Not talking to Betty, I told Margo, was the secret to my success, and now I was going back to sleep. Good night.

Flippant though it was, Margo took my good advice to heart. For the next 10 days or so, Betty and I would get messages on our family answering machine that said things like, “Bob, I’m getting ready to start working at a hospital a week from Monday. Don’t let Betty know. I’m not talking to her.”

Margo started her job and did well at it. This, my friends, is confirmation! You now have the magic secret of getting through whatever it is that you are fearing most. And that secret is: Don’t talk to Betty.

Posted on by — 21 Comments

But You Just Said the Opposite Ten Minutes Ago!

There were two separate incidents that occurred during a recent NSU Deuces Wild class I taught at the South Point. They are not related to each other at all — except they both happened on the same day and neither is enough to justify an entire column. So, I’ll combine them.

The first incident happened before the class. For the noon class, one of my helpers, “Larry,” gets there at 10:30 and together we set up the room. I had finished my part of the setup and was hovering near the back table where Larry was setting up strategy cards, Winner’s Guides, software, and books that I sell during the class.

Some guy, maybe 75-years old, came by and asked us what we were doing. When he found out I was going to be teaching a video poker class, he told us he already knew how to play video poker, so he didn’t need a class.

“Would you like to take the test we give at the end of the class and see how many you get right?” I asked gently. Unless the guy was a really good player, I knew he wouldn’t ace the test. There are a lot of things to know in order to play video poker well.

It didn’t matter, because he didn’t want to take the test. But he asked me if I wanted to earn $200 by just getting one joke correct — and I’d only have to pay $5 if I got it wrong.
“No thanks,” I told him, as did Larry. This had “sucker bet” written all over it and we wanted no part of it.

But this guy insisted on asking his joke anyway, namely, “What has ten wheels, flies, and it isn’t an airplane?” And he was still asking Larry and me if we wanted to play.

I told him I’m not paying off if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure there must be some type of jet that had ten wheels — which should qualify as being a correct answer whether it was the one he had in mind or not. He told me that wasn’t the answer, but if I wanted to guess for real and win $200 while only risking $5, he’d still let me.

Neither Larry nor I bit, so he told us the answer — namely “a garbage truck.” Cute enough. As he left, he told us we could make a lot of money from that making bar bets.
Doubtful. This guy was letting us take the bet AFTER WE’D HEARD THE QUESTION. The only time someone would/should take the bet is if he already knew the answer. If the guy was actually going to pay off if someone said “garbage truck,” this bet was a loser, not a winner.

It’s possible, of course, that were Larry or I able to come up with “garbage truck,” he would disqualify the answer somehow. We avoided it because it seemed like a sucker bet. After the guy left, I wondered who the sucker was.

Here’s the second incident: One of the test questions at the end of beginner level NSU class was how to play J♥ T♥ 7♥ 5♠ 3♦. This is pretty simple. Holding JT7 (the bold italics mean the cards are suited with each other) is clearly correct. I include it in the test because in Full Pay Deuces Wild, the correct play is JT, not JT7. For players who play all Deuces Wild games the same and learned FPDW sometime in the past, this would be a “tricky” hand.

But a guy who missed it, “John,” always sits in the front row and takes exhaustive notes. He regularly challenges me if he doesn’t understand something the first time. I don’t mind this at all. Usually I know the correct answer and can set him straight. Sometimes it requires using the Video Poker for Winners software. And a few times, he has caught an error which I took note of and corrected before the next time I taught the class.

But this time was different. John said, “I’m taking notes and I know that ten minutes ago, you said we never hold three-card straight flushes with two gaps in this game. I take good notes and I know you said it and now you’re saying the opposite!”

John was correct. I did say it. But he skipped a few words at the beginning of my quote, namely, “When there are one or two deuces in hand . . .” That is, letting a W stand for a deuce, W 6♣ 8♣ and W W 6♣ 8♣ are eligible to be held, but W 6♦ 9♦ and W W 6♦ 9♦ aren’t. This rule is specific to NSU. In many other deuces wild variations, the rule is different.

Video poker is full of those “read the fine print” caveats. And it takes a while to master them. It’s also possible that I didn’t utter the complete caveat when I was speaking about the strategy in the 2-deuces or 1-deuce sections. Within each section, it’s clearly understood that I’m speaking only about the strategy rules in that section.

At least it’s clearly understood by me. Maybe not so much by John. Which is why he asked the question.

Will I phrase it more accurately next time? I’m not sure. When I’m explaining the 1-deuce strategy, I’ll mention “1-deuce” three or four times in the five minutes it takes to go through that section in the beginner class (the 1-deuce section in the intermediate class takes much longer than five minutes). Mentioning it more than that gets tedious and sounds too much like legalese. I can never know exactly which of my statements will get transcribed into someone’s notes.

There’s a trade-off between giving enough information and giving too much information to the class as a whole, and whatever statement I make will be too much for some particular students and not enough for others. I’m sure other teachers struggle with this as well. So, I just use my judgment to pitch it where I think is appropriate and rely on student questions to let me know when they need more help.

Posted on by — 12 Comments

Dollars and Sense

This column is written primarily for beginners and low-intermediate players. Readers more advanced than that should give it a once-over as well. There’s a chart here you’ve likely never seen before.

You’re playing Double Double Bonus, receiving 45 for a full house. How much you get for the flush is irrelevant to this discussion. If you get only 40 for the full house in the game you typically play, you’re permitting yourself to play such a bad game that no amount of advice from me is going to help you be a winning player.

You’re dealt K♠ K♥ 6♣ 6♦ 5♠. You’re debating holding just the kings or holding the two pair. You’ve read from people like me that holding two pair is correct by a mile, but it’s counterintuitive to you. After all, you get the same “even money” for a pair of kings as you do for two pair and if you hold the kings you might get lucky and receive four kings. So why not go for it?

Let’s talk dollars and sense. Assume you’re playing dollar single line DDB, five coins at a time. Holding two pair, you have the following possibilities — and the value of those possibilities.

The frequency numbers from the chart may be found in Video Poker for Winners or other quality software. The dollar figures aren’t generally seen, although you do get the sum of them, shown in green. And notice I didn’t include columns for straights, flushes, straight flushes, or royal flushes simply because you can’t get one of those when you start out by holding a pair or two pair.

Let’s take the line corresponding to KK66. You have 47 possible draws, which is the normal number when you’re drawing one card from a 52-card pack and you’ve already looked at a five-card deal. You’ll end up with two pair 43 times and a full house four times. You can probably do this much in your head if you start with figuring how many full houses you can get. After all, the only time you’re going to get a full house is when you draw one of the two remaining kings or one of the two remaining sixes. In all other cases, you’re going to end up with the same two pair with which you started.

What’s new in this chart, shown in blue, is how much each of these hands is worth. The two-pair final hand contributes $4.57 to your total EV and the full house adds $3.83. Rather than give a definition for how I figured out those numbers, I’ll show you the calculations: $3.83 = (4 * $45 / 47). $4.57 = (43 * $5 / 47). The $45 and $5 in the formulas are the amounts you receive from a full house and two pair respectively in this game.

In the line corresponding to holding the kings, there are now 16,215 possible draws. For most of us, including me, there are way too many possibilities to figure this stuff out in our heads, or even with paper and pencil, with a high degree of confidence. Fortunately, software to do this for us is very fast, accurate, and inexpensive.
The number that really pops out at me on this line is the 69¢ that the chance at a 4-of-a-kind is worth. Yes, the quad is worth $250 when you get it, and that’s the number beginning players focus on, but you only get it a little less than one chance in 360. Multiply it out and it comes to 69¢.

Also, note that the chance for a full house is 47¢ when you hold a pair, compared to the $3.83 it’s worth when you hold two pair.

It’s easy to think of possibilities — like you COULD get a four-of-a-kind. It’s much harder to think of probabilities — which means how often does it happen percentage-wise. It’s even harder to multiply out the VALUE of the hands which means the probability multiplied by the pay schedule.

Players sometimes confuse this hand with A♠ A♥ 6♣ 6♦ 5♠. To put this into the above chart we need to add another column for four aces with a kicker. If we do that, we’ll find all the numbers in the chart stay the same, except the value of the four aces without a kicker is worth $1.63 and the value of four aces with a kicker is worth $1.48. Adding those together gives us $3.11 — compared to the 69¢ the kings were worth. This makes holding the aces worth more than holding two pair, aces up.

The strategy for this part of the game is AA > Two Pair > KK, QQ, JJ. If you can read the strategy and just follow it no-questions-asked, then you don’t need columns like this one. If you ever wonder “why,” and haven’t figured out the answer to this particular question, maybe this column will be useful to you.

As for me, I’m always wondering “why?” Once I figure that out (which I normally can do in video poker — not so much in certain other parts of life), it makes it much easier to keep strategies memorized.

Posted on by — 19 Comments

Are Women the Dutch Book?

Last week, as part of the celebration for International Women’s Day (March 8), a statue of a defiant girl staring down the Wall Street bull appeared. Count me among those who love the statue and hope it will stay. It is no secret that women are under-represented in many fields, including the AP world, as I discussed in an earlier post. Some APs have floated the idea that if the casino’s old-boy network underestimates the skills of women, women might actually have a strategic advantage relative to their fellow male APs. These ringer women will get away with murder, and will make huge profits before they are even suspected. Well, that’s the theory at least, but are women the Dutch Book? Continue reading Are Women the Dutch Book?

Posted on by — 9 Comments

Whom Do You Trust?

I’m showing my age, but I remember the “Who Do You Trust?” television show hosted by Johnny Carson before he got the Tonight Show gig. He always said later that the first word should have been “Whom” rather than “Who,” and if you can’t trust Johnny Carson, whom can you trust?

Many of the people who attend my classes are quarter or dollar players. It’s no secret that I play for higher stakes, at least some of the time. Usually once or twice a semester, someone says something like, “Although I would never play for the stakes you do, I’m really curious as to what games you play and where. Will you tell me?”

My standard answer is that I write about the places I play that I don’t mind you knowing about, and don’t write about the ones I would rather keep secret. So, if they don’t already know about one of my plays, I’m not going to tell them.

The reason for this is simple. Many plays can only support one or two competent players. Telling the world about such a play would be the kiss of death to the play. No thanks.

One player followed up with, “But I promise I won’t tell anybody, and I certainly won’t be playing those stakes myself. Don’t you trust me?”

Well, I’m not sure. I’d rather not put it to the test. If I trust 20 people and 19 of them never told a soul, the secret is still out. Is this guy one of the 19, or the one who says, “It won’t hurt anything if I mention this to my brother-in-law?” I don’t know beforehand, so it’s better that I keep quiet.

I’m not a proponent of the “Two can keep a secret only if one of them is dead” philosophy. If Richard Munchkin wants to know the where and why on any of my plays, I’m going to tell him. I trust him — even though he has the bankroll along with family members and close friends who could burn out any play I told him about. Among top gamblers, their word is their bond. If I told him, “I’ll tell you about it but you can’t play because of xxxxx,” I believe he’d honor that.

On the radio show, we’ve had blackjack team captains describe teams they were on where one of the team members ripped off the others. This is rare — but it happens — and it’s always a shock when it does. You can protect yourself from this by never telling anybody anything, but that’s going to be a lonely life you lead.

Trusting somebody has similarities with marriage. Although it ends badly some of the time (and I’ve experienced my share of that), overall, I’m convinced my life works better being married than being single.

I’d actually be more comfortable telling Richard about a play than I would be telling Bonnie! Bonnie is not a player at all and although she’s definitely on my side, if I tell her I’m going to be playing at the (pick a casino), it’s possible that she would inadvertently tell her sister, daughter, or a girlfriend where I’m playing. If I tell her over and over again, “This is a secret — you can tell no one,” she’ll honor my wishes. But she has no good gambling sense about what is a secret and what isn’t and she’s not really practiced in keeping secrets. It’s better not to tell her.

If I took her to a comped meal at the Wicked Spoon buffet at the Cosmopolitan, she would figure out that there was some play (now gone) that I had there, but she isn’t really capable of understanding why the play there was better or worse than playing at some other casino. She’s willing to listen and nod her head if I tell her, “The game pays xxx% off the top, with yyy% from the slot club, and zzz% from the mailers.  This other promotion they’re having now adds another vvv%, and there’s a pretty good chance I can talk them into www% worth of comps.”  These are just numbers to her and it’s all kind of gobbledygook.

Richard, however, would understand each of these things and if he didn’t, he’d ask me to explain further. And he could put the numbers into context of other plays he knew about. That is, a 100.5% play is pretty good if the best you can find otherwise is 100.3%. But if you can find a 101% play for the same stakes, a 100.5% isn’t such a good deal.

Posted on by — 17 Comments

You’re Not Ready Yet

Immediately after one of my classes at the South Point, a man, “Joe,” came up to me and asked if I would mentor him in becoming a professional video poker player. He told me he had plenty of bankroll and wanted to turbocharge his learning process. He had heard that I would do private consulting for $250 an hour with a two-hour minimum and that did not present a problem for him.

I had another engagement after class, so we scheduled a lunch date for the near future. Although I have food comps at casinos, I preferred having the conversation at a local Applebee’s where the chances of being overheard by other players was far less. I don’t pay retail for food in Vegas very often, but this was one of those times.

In the time before I met with Joe, I tried to figure out what kind of person I would be willing to mentor. Assuming he had the bankroll, I figured the main criteria were:

a. His personality was acceptable to me. This isn’t a particularly high bar to cross, but there are a few people I just don’t enjoy hanging out with. I didn’t want a long-term relationship with somebody like that.

b. He was smart enough. Video poker is applied math. Not everybody is capable of learning it at a high level.

c. He had some history of success at the game and could study on his own. When I’m consulting with somebody two hours at a time, I don’t really care how good they are when they come to me. I’ll spend the two hours doing my best to improve their skill and knowledge level. But a mentoring relationship is a longer-term affair and spending dozens of hours while moving somebody from beginner to intermediate isn’t how I want to spend my time.

Okay. After Joe and I ordered lunch, I asked him where he lived and how he got his bankroll. I had spoken to Joe a few times previously and he passed the personality test, such as it is. He had sent me a number of emails over the past few years with questions and/or suggestions for the Gambling with an Edge radio show. These emails led me to believe he was smart enough to succeed at this.

Joe told me he was 49 years old, lived on the East Coast, and had recently inherited more than $2 million. He planned to retire from the Air Force Reserve in a few months and was looking at how he wanted to spend the rest of his life.

Joe had listened to a number of the radio shows and it really sounded like I enjoyed my life more than he enjoyed his. Plus, he had read my Million Dollar Video Poker autobiography and was fascinated with the life of a gambler. He decided he wanted to invest a portion of his inheritance, maybe $200,000, to see if he had the aptitude to maybe be the next Bob Dancer.

I asked him how many of the Winner’s Guides he had closely studied. He told me he had purchased a set but had yet to open them up. I asked him how much time he had spent with a computer program such as Video Poker for Winners. He told me he hadn’t purchased a copy of that yet but it was next on his list.

I told him he wasn’t ready for mentoring yet. In the next six months, I suggested he learn two games at the professional level — perhaps Jacks or Better and NSU Deuces Wild. Using the Winner’s Guides and the software, this wasn’t such a formidable task. But neither was it a trivial one.

Then, I wanted him to spend at least two weeks straight in Las Vegas or another casino city gambling 30 hours a week. At the end of that, if he still wanted me to mentor him, he knew how to get in touch with me. I would give him a test on the two games, and if he knew the games at a high level, we could revisit the mentoring idea.

Joe was in love with the idea of being a gambler, but he hadn’t had any actual experience. It’s hard work to get to the professional level at one game — let alone two. Playing 60 hours will turn out to be a boring experience for many people.

Video poker is a grind-it-out affair. It’s one thing to be fascinated by what appears to be a glamorous life. It’s another thing entirely to go through the process of getting good at some games and then successfully playing those games for 60 hours without going totally bonkers.

Can Joe do this?

I don’t know. If he can’t, he was never going to be a success at gambling anyway. If he can master two games and still be interested in being mentored after some real-life experience, then at least he will be going into this with his eyes wide open rather than looking through the rose-colored glasses he seems to be wearing today.

On one of our radio shows, Richard Munchkin told us that he periodically gets these kinds of requests from people wishing to learn blackjack. Richard tells them to learn basic strategy completely for four different games — i.e. with or without standing on soft 17 and with or without the ability to double after splitting. Once they know all four of these basic strategies, come back and see him again.

Richard tells me he’s never had somebody come back to him with these four strategies memorized.

I guess Richard’s experience influenced how I dealt with Joe. The task I gave Joe is more difficult than learning four basic strategies — each of which is more than 90% identical with the others. Jacks or Better and Deuces Wild are games very different from each other.

Still, if Joe passes this test, he’ll be a worthy student and I won’t mind at all working with him.

Posted on by — 28 Comments

Is it Wrong?

I’m glad my articles are now posted on the GamblingWithAnEdge.com website. That provides a forum and often people take the time to respond to what I’ve said — or to comment on other responses.

A while ago somebody posted there, “Is it wrong to see someone drop money and you don’t tell them?” I want to tackle that one today.

My answer today is probably different than it was twenty-four years ago. Twenty-four years ago, I was brand new to Las Vegas and had moved to town with $6,000 in cash. My car was in decent repair. I wasn’t broke — but I was one or two unfortunate incidents away from being broke. I was playing blackjack with a girlfriend-partner, and that $6,000 had to cover bankroll AND living expenses.

At that time, I would probably have kept my mouth shut, waited until the person who dropped the money had stepped away, picked up the money, and left the area. This exact scenario didn’t happen to me, but similar-enough situations occurred that I’m pretty sure that’s what I would have done. I REALLY was in survival mode. Not literally, but psychologically. Since I hadn’t caused the person to drop the money, I wouldn’t have felt I was stealing the money. I could have slept at night.

Today I’m in a different situation in life. When I see people drop something, I normally speak up — basically by reflex. It’s usually not money which is dropped, of course, but sometimes it is. Today, the pleasure I get from an “extra” $100 is usually less than the grief felt by the person who lost it.

Even when I was barely getting by, there would be situations where I would speak up. Such as:  If a mother was struggling with three young children and one of the kids caused her to drop some money — even if I was in a survival mode, I would have spoken up. Whatever her financial status, a mother with three young kids is having a difficult time and I wouldn’t want to make it any more difficult. Keeping the money would forever have me worrying about, “What if she was getting medicine for one of the kids and that was the only money she had?” Best to play it straight and not have those worries.

Picking up money that has been inadvertently left behind has lots of analogs in a casino. You see credits left on machines. You see multipliers left on Ultimate X machines. You see players leave “must hit by $500” machines when the meter is at $498. Sometimes you know who left these things and sometimes you don’t. Collecting credits left on the machine may be against the law in some jurisdictions (usually you won’t be caught), but often there’s no law telling you what you must do. Often, you’re free to make your own judgments and decisions.

Is there a moral difference to what my actions should be based on whether I was poor or I was rich? Probably not, but the world sure looks different depending on whether things are going your way or not.

I like living in a world where random acts of kindness are not all that unusual. And to have that world exist requires that I do my share. So, I do.

Posted on by — 9 Comments

Not What I Thought I Knew

I enjoy reading. I read both fiction and non-fiction — on a wide variety of subjects. Periodically I look at “Best Books of xxxx” lists to see if anything looks interesting. One such list included the novel Mata Hari’s Last Dance by Michelle Moran.

I vaguely remembered learning decades ago that Mata Hari was a seductress and a spy in World War I — but I didn’t know anything else about her. So, I ordered a copy from the library, figuring that if I couldn’t get into it in a few chapters, I didn’t have to finish it.

Mata Hari, the stage name of a Dutch woman named Margaretha Zelle MacLeod, was a dancer who, beginning in 1905, didn’t mind baring herself at a time when others didn’t do that. She also took several lovers over the years. To keep the mystique going, she regularly fabricated tales — especially to the press. Any novelist trying to get to the truth — and trusting contemporary accounts — was going to have to make some educated guesses as to the actual facts. In the end, nobody can be sure what the whole truth is — simply because there will always be conflicting accounts.

By the time the war started, Mata Hari was nearing 40 years of age and her career was eclipsed by imitators who were younger and better dancers. She made some mistakes and the French believed (probably erroneously) that she was a German spy.  They executed her in late 1917. Whatever spying she did was amateurish at best. The novel presents her circumstances as tragic — although it was clear that she was unwittingly her own worst enemy at times.

Plus, since that’s the only book I’ve read about Mata Hari, most of my “knowledge” comes from that particular book and that author’s point of view. I’m assuming the book was fairly accurate (as historical fiction goes), but I don’t have a depth of knowledge to know for sure.

Although I enjoyed the novel and reading about an era I didn’t know much about, let’s bring this discussion to gambling.

Many video poker players only “know” either what they’ve heard from somebody else or they “know” things about which they’ve made some semi-educated guesses and stuck with. While it may be intuitively “obvious” to some that from K♠ K♥ 7♣ 7♦ 3♠ you hold the kings and not two pair, that play is usually incorrect. From K♥ T♥ 3♥ 7♣ 4♦, it may seem trivial that the best play is to hold exactly two cards (and it is sometimes), but there are games where holding no cards is better, other games where holding one card is the best, and still others where three cards is superior number to hold.

I am somebody who accepts that for most players most of the time, choosing the play with maximum expected value is the way to go. Virtually all long-term successful players use these strategies. There are theoreticians who devise special strategies which have different goals than max-EV, but I’ve never used such a strategy and do not intend to.

How do you figure out what the best max-EV strategy is? Simple. Use a computer program that provides you that information instantly. I sell such a program (Video Poker for Winners) but there are others on the market as well.

The computer program will tell you how to play one hand at a time. That’s fine, but there are 2.6 million different hands — or slightly more than 130,000 if you treat all suits as being equal. That is, if you consider 7♣ 7♦ A♦ 9♦ 4♦ to be “essentially identical” to 7♥ 7♠ A♠ 9♠ 4♠, then you’ve cut the possible number of hands to learn by a factor of about 20. Surprisingly to most novices, 7♥ 7♠ A♠ 9♠ 3♠ is considered to be a totally separate hand than the previous ones.

Exactly how to simplify these things into a usable strategy is a discussion we’ll leave for another day. Modern software products do this for you — some better than others. Various authors have done the heavy lifting for you and present usable strategies — and again, some better than others.

I teach classes for those who prefer to learn by listening rather than figuring things out by themselves. (Author’s note: The next semester of free video poker classes at the South Point will begin at noon Wednesday, January 25, at the South Point in the Silverado Lounge. See bobdancer.com for the complete class schedule.)

Back to the question of “how do I know this is the right way to go?” Short answer is: (drum roll please) I don’t!

I do, however, believe I’m going about this the right way. And I’m betting many tens of millions of dollars a year on this belief. So, the question is:  Why am I so confident?

  1. I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years with a great deal of success. That isn’t a guarantee that I’m right. Luck plays a part in all results. Still, long term success tends to build your confidence.
  2. A lot of really smart players do it the same way. Bob Nersesian regularly says that the smartest people he knows are professional gamblers. I agree. And most smart, successful video poker players I know are using techniques similar to those I use.
  3. I have many contacts among casino executives, game manufacturers, gaming lawyers, game designers, mathematicians, and whole bunches of successful gamblers in other disciplines. I’m a sponge for new knowledge. I’m always tweaking what I do. You don’t get good in a vacuum. The more you talk to people in other somewhat related disciplines, the better you understand how things work.
  4. Other smart gamblers accept me as an expert in video poker. If I was way off base, someone knowledgeable would have probably said why. And I probably would have listened. I do read authors I disagree with. I can often gain something from what they say. Nobody has a monopoly on intelligent strategy and it pays to keep an open mind.
  5. Going through the process of putting your thoughts into words and letting any and everybody challenge them has a way of making you a lot sharper. People do find errors in my writing sometimes. I am far more grateful that I get to learn something new than I am embarrassed at being found imperfect. I accepted decades ago that I can’t walk on water.
  6. I’ve been reading and studying gaming strategies for many decades. Bright people tend to get good at what they spend their time doing.

Put this all together and I’m confident in what I say about video poker. I am far less confident in what really happened to Mata Hari, although I know more about her situation than I did a month ago. I likely won’t read another biography of her ever — but who knows? While I enjoyed the novel, becoming a history-professor type of expert on her is not in my plans.

Posted on by — 15 Comments

How Bad Is It to Be Greedy?

I assume you know what it means to be greedy. If I’m right about this assumption, then you’re ahead of me. I’m very confused by what the word means.

I Googled “What is greed?” It came back with the Oxford Dictionary definition, “intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power, or food.” It mentioned that greed was one of the seven deadly sins. And it also quotes Gordon Gekko, the Michael Douglas character in the movie Wall Street who said “Greed is good!”

Still not clear.  When does a desire become intense? I remember back in college that sometimes friends and I would go out seeking pleasant short-term feminine companionship. I would call those desires intense and selfish. Back then, fifty years ago, there was kind of a “boys will be boys” mentality about “cruising for babes.” Today it is considered to be far more predatory than it was then. There are a lot of names you could have called our behavior back then, but I never considered “greedy” to be one of them.

If a student athlete wants to be good enough to someday be drafted into the National Football League, he might undertake the following: he begins his workouts every day at 6 a.m.; he spends hours each week studying game film to improve his own skills and figure out the tendencies of whoever is going to be his college opponent next week; he avoids drugs; he’s the last one to leave practice every day. It’s fair to call this athlete very intense. Although he loves the game, the potential million dollar benefits are certainly a part of working that hard. He may well be looking forward to buying his mother a house, but most of his thoughts about using this money are personal and selfish.

I would call the behavior in the preceding paragraph appropriate actions for somebody with a plan. Laudable behavior. Give that kid a standing ovation for working so hard. The actions, though, meet the Oxford Dictionary definition of “greed” namely “intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power, or food.” I think it’s far better to praise this young man for trying to make something of himself than it is to castigate him for the sin of greed.

I have heard the term greed used in at least four separate gambling contexts recently. Perhaps you didn’t hear of these particular instances, but I’m confident you’ve heard of similar ones.

The first was on a video poker bulletin board where somebody posted a picture of a $1,500 jackpot on a quarter Triple Double Bonus Ultimate X game with the note, “Unfortunately the greed took over and I kept playing and ended up with only $700. I hate when that happens!”

The second followed a story about another Las Vegas casino planning on charging for parking. This comment by a player who was unhappy with the casino’s decision started off with “Greed! Greed! Greed!”

The third was a comment from a quarter player who was mad at all the five dollar players for being greedy and winning all the drawings.

The fourth was about a player who hit three royal flushes in two weeks at a casino after which the casino kicked him out. The comment from another player was, “Serves him right for being so greedy!”

These examples do not follow the Oxford Dictionary definition.  The first case resulted from normal swings in a game with sky-high variance. If the swings went up, the person would have felt intelligent, skillful, and proud. When the swings went down, the player blamed greed. To me, it’s a case of the player either not understanding the normal swings of the game or being a bad loser.

In the second and third example, we have somebody else taking actions that cause our lives to be a little more expensive. Since they did it to us, then they are greedy! I see the world as a bunch of moving parts where each person is trying to do what’s best for himself. I do not expect anybody else to roll over and play dead in order for me to succeed. If they block me going to the left, I go to the right. As our outgoing first lady said recently, “If they go low, we go high.” I do not see this as greed on their part. Or on my part for adjusting to what they are doing.

In the fourth example, the player was greedy because he hit three royals? I don’t know anybody who knows for sure when he’s going to hit his next royal, let alone his next three. Royals happen in their own good time. It is possible you’re going to hit three royals tomorrow. It’s possible it’s going to be months and months before you hit that many.

The player who hits three royal flushes in a short period of time is fortunate. But greedy? Like he did it on purpose just to spite the casino? I might well have some unkind words about a slot director who thinks getting royals quickly is a sign of great skill, but calling the player greedy? I don’t get it.

What would I call greedy? Well, if there was only so much food for, say, four people, then taking more than a fourth of it before others have had a chance to eat would be greedy. If some food was left over at the end, then that’s fair game. Or perhaps two roommates were both trying to get ready to go and they had a deal that 15 minutes in the bathroom at a time was all you got. Someone who took more than that is greedy, in my opinion.

What these examples have in common is that there’s a fixed amount of something and sharing is the name of the game. In this context, greed is refusing to share. In a game situation, where players compete against each other, refusing to share is often the sensible thing to do.

If you think of the world as a closed system and everybody from all lands are brothers, then you can come up with some sense of greed. In this context, you’ll see “green” philosophies, which basically try to save the environment for everybody. Within that context, people who refuse to save the environment are greedy.

But you’re not going to get universal agreement on this. I can easily support a “take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints” philosophy when visiting a national forest. Whether we should shut down a lumber industry to save an endangered species of owl is a topic of spirited emotions on both sides.

If you cannot or will not see the world as a closed system and you believe it is “every man for himself,” then greed isn’t well defined, at least to me. Or perhaps, Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good!” makes sense. I do not see the world that way, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out exactly where the lines of demarcation go.