Shirley and I attended the Harrah’s Seven Star Event in Atlantic City about a month ago. They provided travel money, food money, gift cards, and various events to make the weekend interesting, and on Thursday they gave us a game in which we had a small edge.
We received 7x points for the day, up to a maximum of 12,500 points — which means $125,000 coin-in on most video poker machines. You can use your points for comps (which make them worth 0.70% if you accept at face value the comp prices) or you can sell them back to the casino for free play (which is always worth at least 50% of the comp rate, sometimes more. At the 50% rate, the 7x points were worth 0.35%).
In addition, for every $15,000 coin-in, we got a $25 gift card. This is worth 0.17% at face value. We figured the gift cards could be used at the Pier Shops at Caesars, which included an Apple Store. Happily, it turned out that the gift cards were actually Master Cards which are good anywhere. Shirley and I figure that these Master Cards are worth face value.
The best game I found where you could play $125,000 in a reasonably short period of time was $5 9/6 Jacks or Better at Caesars. It takes 6 or 7 hours to play that much on these $5 machines. There were LOTS of Seven Star folks in for the weekend and there were only five of these machines that I saw. I heard there were a few of these machines at Harrah’s and none at Bally’s or Showboat. Perhaps I heard wrong, but at any rate there were not many of them. I would have preferred a $10 game but I could not find any with that pay schedule.
Much of the time that I played, there were other players from Vegas there as well. “Ron” and “Mary” have attended my classes and have been playing on at least a semi-professional basis for a number of years. Most of their gambling years end up positive, but if they don’t it’s not a disaster. They’re retired and have a nest egg — so if they don’t win every year they can still live comfortably. But by playing video poker well, they get to stay in really nice suites, have gourmet meals, qualify for cruises, etc., that they would not normally be able to afford. A lot of us think this is a pretty nice lifestyle.
At one point, I hit a straight flush, which is a $1,250 hand pay on these machines. The casino was busier than usual and it took several minutes for me to be paid. I was idly watching Mary play while I waited.
She was dealt A♥s; K♥ T♥ 3♥ J♣. She held ‘AKT’ rather than the correct ‘AKT3’. I called out “hold all four hearts” but she wasn’t even sure I was talking to her. She made her play, hit the button, and then turned around and asked, “Did I mess that up?”
This is not a major error. For a $5 player the mistake is worth 18.5¢ and only comes up every 4500 hands. It’s one of the penalty card situations in 9/6 JoB. If you’re not familiar with these, in Video Poker for Winners, from 9/6 JoB click on ANALYZE — STRATEGY — SHOW REPORT and you’ll see the short list of all of them.
The penalty cards in 9/6 JoB are both few in number and relatively simple. There are many recreational players who either don’t care enough to learn them or aren’t smart enough to learn them, but Mary isn’t a recreational player at all. Ron and Mary probably play 1,500 hours a year, frequently for stakes higher than $5 per coin, and they’ve played 9/6 JoB thousands of hours.
There’s simply no excuse for her mistake.
Talking with Ron and Mary later over lunch, Mary embarrassedly confessed that she hadn’t studied video poker in a while. She also stated that she would not have thought to study 9/6 JoB again because it’s such an easy game and they’ve played it so much. I asked them about some of the other penalty card situations in the game and they weren’t clear on them either.
Not knowing a few penalty cards is one thing, but I then asked them questions about some hands that had nothing to do with penalty cards, such as A♦ K♦ J♣ 9♣ 8♣. Mary guessed the diamonds and Ron (correctly) guessed the clubs. But he wasn’t sure. Playing A♦ K♦ would be a $1.40 error for a $5 player. Recreational players make bigger mistakes than this all of the time. But Ron and Mary think of themselves as video poker professionals. I thought so too.
There are players, even pretty good ones, who are philosophically opposed to learning penalty cards. They have bought into the argument that they are too hard to learn and not worth very much. The late Skip Hughes and I used to argue publicly over this with Skip taking the “penalty cards are not worth messing with” position.
Whichever side you take in this argument, however, if you’re someone who’s playing for meaningful money, you need to review strategies and practice periodically. Memories aren’t perfect and when people switch from game to game to game, the fine points of each game are easily confused.
Whenever people ask me how come I’m so lucky at video poker, I tell them that I teach others to play and I study a lot in order to find things to teach and write about. Hard work is the “secret” key to me being lucky. It’s a key that can work for others as well.
Author’s note on a different subject: The next semester of free video poker classes will be on Tuesday’s, 1 p.m., beginning July 10, at Sam’s Town. The full class schedule may be found at www.bobdancer.com