Category: Video Poker

Not too long ago I wrote an article about the auto-hold on Oregon lottery machines that was pretty poor. See it here

As stated in that article, I felt that the manufacturer had no obligation to guarantee that the hold was optimal unless such a declaration was posted somewhere on the machine.

Comments I read after the article appeared indicated that my opinion was in the minority among video poker players. Most of the players who expressed an opinion said that the holds should be correct on either a basic strategy or perfect strategy level. Continue reading More on Auto-Hold

There was a post a few weeks ago on vpFREE that said: “To all of you cretins that shut down machines – that’s not the right thing to do and I NEVER shut down any machine. I even tell others not to shut down machines and let others play. If you need to put in a certain amount of action – get the torture over with and do it all in one play and keep the assembly line moving.”

I don’t agree. There are times when you have to look out for Number 1.
Continue reading Shutting Down Machines

Saturday, March 27, was date night for Bonnie and me. We decided to go dancing to Wes Winters in the Grandview Lounge at the South Point and then have dinner afterwards. Wes Winters is our old “standby,” and we go there two or three times a month. I guess we’re semi-regulars.

Dinner was going to be nothing special. We had lots of food coupons to spend at the Silverton (three miles away from the South Point). These coupons were going to expire in a week so we were probably going to spend $35 worth of them in the coffee shop at the Silverton. It’s a nice-enough meal, but it’s not like we were looking forward all day to the delicious dinner there. Continue reading A Day at the Office

I recently read Michael Craig’s “The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King,” which was about a banker from Texas, Andy Beal, taking on the best poker players in the world, one at a time, in heads up limit Texas Hold’em poker.

For a discussion of the book, you can listen to the March 5, 2015 podcast of Gambling with an Edge, which is available for free download from both bobdancer.com and richardmunchkin.com. Today I want to talk about something mentioned in the book that we didn’t cover in the radio interview. Continue reading How Happy Do You Get with a Royal Flush?

This column was inspired by the following article: fivethirtyeight.com, although the author of that article shouldn’t be blamed for the direction it inspired me to take.

The fivetirtyeight.com website, one of my favorites, takes a mathematical and statistical approach to analyzing a number of different types of situations. The particular article cited above looked at the case of a child having a seizure 5 minutes before he was supposed to receive an unrelated vaccination from his doctor. The parents in this type of case typically do not see any correlation between the impending vaccination and the seizure. If, however, the child had the seizure 10 minutes later—immediately following the vaccination—many parents would erroneously conclude that the vaccination caused the seizure simply because the injection came first. Continue reading False Conclusions