Over this past Mother’s Day weekend Bonnie and I attended a square dance convention in Reno. It’s a better than average convention, but the real attraction is that Bonnie’s daughter lives in the area. We arranged a long Mother’s Day meal/visit before flying home.

The dance itself is in Grand Sierra Resort. I haven’t established myself at GSR, but since I’m a Seven Stars player within the Caesars system, I can always get a free room at Harrah’s. This time my host was able to get me some free play and $100 worth of food to go along with the free room. So much the better. Continue reading Almost

Creating good video poker strategies is as much art as it is science. Someone suggested to me recently that my 9/6 Double Double Bonus Quick Quads strategy was unnecessarily cumbersome. I ended up agreeing with him and the results are found below. He told me I could publish this if I wanted but under no circumstances did he want to be identified in print.

The area it relates to deals with “Quick Trips.” A Quick Trip, QT, is a 4-card combination consisting of a pair and two other cards adding up the rank of the pair. Two examples would be 8844 and 8853. Continue reading A Strategy Improvement in 9/6 Double Double Bonus Quick Quads

I periodically check the wizardofodds.com strategy calculator to make sure I’ve gotten every one of the special cases mastered. The format used in that application isn’t as user friendly (to me) as I’d like, although I’m sure that for some players it is easy to understand.

For example, in discussing the hands where there is a suited AQ and an unsuited AQJT inside straight draw, he lists the following as all the cases where you go for the straight (although the site has it in one column not two, and the labels in front of each hand were added here by me so I could refer to them more clearly): Continue reading A Strange Play in 9/6 Double Double Bonus Quick Quads

More than four years ago I began co-hosting a weekly Thursday evening radio show called Gambling with an Edge. It took awhile to find our stride and settle on the best co-hosting partnership, but it’s now a popular show among both advantage gamblers and wannabe advantage gamblers. A surprising number of casino employees listen as well, partly to see what the players are up to. My co-host, Richard Munchkin, is knowledgeable about all sorts of gambling with the exception of video poker, which is where I come in. Continue reading Change Coming

I know of no casinos in Las Vegas that offer auto-hold, a feature on some video poker games where the machine offers a suggested play which the player can either accept or change. Years ago when I was teaching at Barona Casino, near San Diego, they had auto-hold on their video poker which was particularly bad. On a hand like 35678 of mixed suits, it would routinely suggest tossing the 8 (which left you with only four cards that could complete the straight) rather than tossing the three (which left you with eight such cards). The machine would regularly recommend holding a suited ace-ten in Jacks or Better — which is a horrendous play. And the auto-hold would treat all 3-card straight flushes as being equivalent, no matter how many gaps the combination had. Continue reading A Legal Case Involving Auto-Hold