Let’s say you decide to go out and play video poker for three hours later today. What should be your focus? I’ve asked this question to many players and the most common answer is that they are focused on winning. In my opinion, that’s 100% the wrong answer. Winning should be far down the list of things to focus on. Continue reading Where Is Your Focus?
A Look at The Smart Money
The Smart Money, by Michael Konik, is a sports betting memoir by one of my favorite gambling writers. Continue reading A Look at The Smart Money
I’ve Never Done This Before
On Tuesday, February 15, (Happy Birthday to me!), at 1 p.m., I’ll begin another 10-week semester of free video poker classes at South Point. This is my eighth semester at this casino, and perhaps my 50th semester since I began teaching classes in 1997. Continue reading I’ve Never Done This Before
Gambling With An Edge
I have decided to become a radio personality when I grow up. And I decided to grow up starting this Thursday at 7 p.m. on 1230 AM in Las Vegas. What happens in Vegas no longer stays there, because we’ll be talking about it on our show. Continue reading Gambling With An Edge
Whom Do You Trust?
About fifty years ago Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon had an afternoon television show entitled “Who Do You Trust?” I remember years later Johnny saying that correct grammar would have been “Whom Do You Trust?” I’m going to trust that Johnny was correct. Continue reading Whom Do You Trust?
Apples and Oranges
The M recently held a 2-week-long point invitational challenge. I ended up winning it, but that is not what this column is about. Continue reading Apples and Oranges
MGM Resorts International Rolls out M life Players Club in Las Vegas
I played at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas between 1999 and 2001, when I was severely restricted due to my success at video poker. (It was Shirley’s fault, really. She’s the one who hit the $400,000 royal flush.) During this time, MGM became “MGM Mirage” due to its merger with several Mirage corporation properties. More recently, the company was rebranded again and is now “MGM Resorts International.” Continue reading MGM Resorts International Rolls out M life Players Club in Las Vegas
Video Poker New Year’s Resolutions
I belong to a local gym and every year there’s a big influx of exercisers in early January. A large number of people, apparently, make a New Year’s Resolution that “this year” is the one where they eat smarter, eat less, and exercise more. By mid-February, the gym population is pretty much back to normal. It’s one thing to MAKE a resolution. It’s totally another to STICK to one for a lengthy period of time. Continue reading Video Poker New Year’s Resolutions
Change for Gold Coast Seniors
Mondays have been “Young at Heart” (for seniors 50+) at the Gold Coast for some time. Some benefits stay constant, but the rewards for video poker players changes from time to time. Beginning November 1 they removed their senior drawing and 5x points for video poker players and replaced it with a 100-coin bonus on four natural fives (no wild cards, bottom line only on multiple line machines, $100 maximum bonus).
Overall this isn’t a terrible tradeoff. On a game like Jacks or Better, the promotion adds 0.4%. On a game like NSU Deuces Wild, the game adds 0.3%. If you play at the Emerald level, (0.3% every day), these bonuses ADD to what you already get. The previous promotion only added 0.2% for these players because the 5x points (totaling 0.5%) was a MAXIMUM amount no matter what level you were at. The new promotion, for some players at least, more than makes up for the loss of 5x points and goes a long way toward replacing the drawing.
It was somewhat surprising to me that the casino was really jumping with video poker players on Sunday November 7 when they were giving 5x points, but largely dead when they had the four fives promotion on Monday November 8. I played from 9 p.m. to midnight, connected on the promo twice (a rare occurrence to be sure), and the slot shift boss was telling me that these were the 6th and 7th bonuses they’d paid all day and they’d paid a similar number the week before. I would have thought that they’d have three or four times that many. What gives?
Part of the answer lies in what else was happening in the video poker world. Sunday was a day when “nothing special” was going on promotion-wise, but Monday had gift cards at the Palms (in addition to video poker bingo) and senior day at the Silverton.
To be sure the Sunday promotion was open to all ages and the Monday promotion was only open to 50+, but usually more than half of players in a casino qualify for the senior category. Also, how the two promotions compare is affected by your tier level. If you are Ruby level, 5x points and the four fives promotion have approximately equal EV. If you are Sapphire level, four fives is a little better. And if you are Emerald, four fives is a lot better. Overall, four fives is a better for the players mathematically, but clearly (looking at head counts) many players don’t see it that way.
Although four fives is worth more than 5x mathematically, there is a huge difference in terms of frequency and certainty. You’ll connect on four fives every 5-8 hours, depending on how fast you play. If you’re going to be playing 2 or 3 hours on Monday, you’re probably not going to collect the 100-coin bonus this time. If you were getting 5x points, you’ll get a small bonus on every hand played.
Over the course of 4,000 hands (the approximate frequency of four fives in some games), the additional 0.2% (i.e. the difference between the daily 0.3% for Emerald and the 0.5% for the 5x point promotion) would have been worth an extra 40 coins. To me it’s no contest between a promotion that gives me an extra 40 coins over 4,000 hands versus one where I get an extra 100 coins. I appear to be in the minority about this.
Many people seem to prefer the guaranteed 40 coins versus the theoretical average of 100 coins for the same amount of play — but which probably isn’t going to happen today. Players who can figure this out and are able to take a long-term point of view to their gambling find this obvious. Others, not so much. To me this is a variation of my “today’s score doesn’t matter” mantra that I’ve been preaching for years. One wag recently called my preaching “ear banging.” I thought that was a clever expression.
Another player told me that he preferred to play Five Play machines, and since this bonus only played on the bottom line, this was equivalent to a 20-coin bonus for him. That’s true, of course, so long as he insists on playing Five Play. But why do that? Winning players learn to swing with the punches. If one promotion pays better on a particular type of machine, those are the machines to play.
Players differ in their flexibility on this. If you want to take a “if the promotion doesn’t work really well on the machine I usually play, then screw it!” attitude, fine. That’s your choice. As for me, I’ll look for ways that I can benefit from what is being offered. Which is why in the ten casinos I play the most at, I play a total of seven different games, and at some casinos am playing a different game this month than I did last month because of promotions.
The Type of Hands that are Most Difficult to Play
I’ve had a lot of discussions with “Kal.” Kal played successful blackjack for years and is relatively new to video poker. We bring different “beating the house” skills to the table and enjoy learning from each other.
Recently Kal told me, “on hands where three or more relevant combinations are in the same hand, my accuracy rate is much lower than on hands where only two combinations exist.” This seems sort of obvious when you think about it, but it isn’t the way I’ve been studying.
In the past year, I’ve learned four new games as opportunities change. When I’m trying to learn a new game, I frequently use WinPoker (yes, I still use that product on occasion) and set “Hard Hands” to 0.02 or so. This deals me hands where the difference between the top play and the second-best play have a EV difference of 2¢ or less for the 5-coin dollar player. I figure that if I can learn the hard hands, the easy hands surely won’t be a problem.
Sometimes just being close in EV isn’t the same as being difficult. In 9-6 Jacks or Better, for example, from AJ542 “rainbow,” the best play (AJ) is worth less than a penny more (for a 5-coin dollar player) than the second-best play (J by itself). For those of us who have learned the rule “two high cards, suited or not, are ALWAYS preferred to one high card in this game,” this is a no-brainer type of hand, even though the difference between the top two hands is fairly small.
What Kal was talking about is different. He’s talking about hands such as: Ah Kh Qc Tc 8c, where you need to consider the 2-card royal flush ‘AK’ (the correct play in 9-6 Jacks or Better by 18¢), the 3-card straight flush ‘QT8’ (the correct play in 9-7 Triple Double Bonus by 6¢), and the 4-card inside straight AKQT (the correct play in 9-7 Double Bonus by 25¢).
In none of these three games would this hand show up when I was checking for hands where the top two plays were within 2¢ of each other. And since each play was correct in one of the games, and a number of players use the same strategy for all games, it’s a 100% lock that some players will misplay the hand in one or more of the games. Since I wouldn’t be concentrating on this particular hand, it’s possible that I personally would mess it up. My accuracy rate is very high if I have recently reviewed a particular game. But if I haven’t, and I’ve played a lot of different games recently, sometimes I’m not 100% positive of the correct play.
In the Triple Double Bonus game it’s a “penalty card” hand, because you play Ah Kh Qc Tc 8c differently than you play Ah Jh Qc Tc 8c, where ‘AJ’ is the better play by less than a penny. A play this close would definitely show up during my practice of hard hands, but I’d need to be on my toes to realize that the play was different depending on whether the lower heart was a jack or a king. It would be easy to reach the wrong conclusion — at a rather major cost of 25¢.
In “Video Poker for Winners,” the computer software I helped design, the hands discussed here show up regularly when you have the “Level of Difficulty” set to “Advanced.” When designing which types of hands should be displayed when this feature was turned, I included a number of possibilities where you had 3-card straight flushes of various stripes mixed and matched with inside straights of various stripes. Many other combinations were included as well.
While there were dozens of criteria used to determine what the advanced hands should be, “dozens” isn’t very many. You’ll find you’ll get the same types of hands listed over and over again.
Still, the difficult hands presented to you in WinPoker are different from the difficult hands presented by Video Poker for Winners. Which is why owning and practicing with two or more software products is advisable. Although there is a lot of overlap in doing the basic things, each computer trainer has features the other ones don’t. Considering the money many of us run through the machines every year, the price of these products is small compared to the potential value.