I received an email from a player, “Sam,” discussing a promotion that has come and gone, in an unnamed casino in an unnamed state. He wanted to know how I would have analyzed whether or not to play it.
The gist of the promotion was that for two consecutive days, four hours per day, each W-2G received the following free play bonuses:
Continue reading How Would You Play This One?I received the following email for the Gambling with an Edge mailbag show:
Hi Bob, how do you calculate the edge on this video poker promotion? Molly’s in Vegas offers “lose $20, get $20” but I’m not sure how to calculate the advantage (if any). Also, if you have played this promotion before, do you literally have to put in $20 and lose it all before you get the $20 free play, or can you just lose four hands at $5 a hand to be credited the $20 free play?
Continue reading Promotion at Molly’s — Part I of IIThis true story happened some time ago, but so far, I haven’t written about it. I was playing $25 single line Double Double Bonus (DDB), rather heavily, at an out-of-town casino for more than a week. What casino, pay schedule, slot club, and promotions that made this a good play in my opinion are for another story, another day. Suffice it to say that I believed it to be a play where I had enough of an advantage to warrant playing hard.
If you can figure out where and when this took place (perhaps you saw me — a lot of players know what I look like), please keep it to yourself. There are reasons I don’t specify all the details of the game here, and please don’t undermine my reasons.
Continue reading My Lucky Shirt — Part 1 of 2In terms of number of hands played, or number of dollars played, 9/6 Jacks or Better has been the video poker game I’ve played most in my career. Not so much recently, but certainly over my entire career.
The major things I like about the game are:
Continue reading What’s Wrong with Jacks or Better?You’re playing dollar Double Double Bonus with progressives on both the royal and aces with a kicker (AWAK). On the hands we’re going to talk about today, the only thing that matters are quads and full houses, so assume AWAK pays $2,200 and a full house pays $45. If you’re not familiar with the game, trips pay $15 and aces with the fifth card not being a 2, 3, or 4 pay $800.
I’ll start with the three hands in question, where suits don’t matter:
There is a version of 10-6 DDB that pays 200 for the straight flush rather than 250 and that change drops the return from 100.06% to 99.96%. Casinos which have a firm policy of never offering a game returning more than 100% sometimes have this game. I refer to the games as 10-6-50 and 10-6-40, where the 50 and 40 represent the one-coin return for the straight flush.
The strategy for the two games is very similar, of course, but not identical. If I had places where I could play both games, I’d likely use one strategy for both. But I don’t know of any casino with the 10-6-50 game where I want to and am welcome to play, so I concentrate on the 10-6-40 strategy. The Dancer/Daily Winner’s Guide for Double Double Bonus covers the 10-6-50 game completely. Today I’ll just discuss the differences between the two games. All money amounts assume you are playing for dollars, betting five coins at a time.
Continue reading Looking at a 50-coin Penalty for the Straight Flush in 10-6 Double Double BonusNot too long ago, here I wrote an article about when to hold a kicker to three aces while playing a Double Double Bonus progressive. The thumbnail conclusion was that if four aces pay 800 coins, and the aces-with-a-kicker (AWAK) progressive is at least 2285 coins, from a hand like AAA53, you should hold AAA3.
Whether you understood the article or not, assume for today that the previous sentence is true and that you and Al (whom you’ll meet shortly) both believe that and play that way.
Continue reading Is it Good for Me or Good for Us?Competent Double Double Bonus players know that from a hand like A♠ A♥ A♣ 4♦ 7♠, the correct play is AAA and not AAA4. Players might be tempted to hold AAA4 because four aces with a 2, 3, or 4 (a kicker) in this game receive 2,000 coins and four aces with any other fifth card “only” receive 800 coins.
Sometimes, however, there are one or more progressives on this game. If there is only one progressive, it’s usually on the royal flush. The second progressive goes on four aces with a kicker (AWAK). There can also be progressives on aces without a kicker, and sometimes other hands as well.
Continue reading When to Hold a Kicker in Double Double Bonus ProgressiveThis 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.
Casinos are in the business to make money. They don’t intentionally make mistakes. Still, sometimes mistakes happen that smart players can exploit. You don’t need to be a pro. You just have to be alert and savvy — and find one of these mistakes. It also helps if you have the requisite knowledge and bankroll — but that’s not necessary. If someone brought the following to me and nobody else knew about it, I might well have paid a $1,000 finder’s fee. Continue reading Too Good to be True?
