Many of you know that I participate in storytelling events. I’ve been regularly attending a workshop to improve my skills.
Recently, after we had all practiced our stories online for the day, Pete, the leader who lives on the East Coast, asked me if I would be willing to take him around and show him how to play were he to come to Vegas.
Continue reading Unrealistic ExpectationsIn January of this year, I was preparing to teach a video poker class at the South Point. As is my custom, once I got set up, I went around to chat with the students before the class began.
One lady I had never seen before seemed to be a friend of a frequent student. She told me her name and proclaimed, “I hate Stations!”
Continue reading “I Hate Stations,” She Said.My co-host on the Gambling With An Edge podcast is Richard Munchkin, a table games player who’s been successful at gambling for several decades.
We often answer listener questions on the show and if anyone asks about a table game, Richard is the go-to guy. Sometimes I’ll have a bit to add, but mostly what Richard says covers the subject very well.
He has used one particular phrase in his answers over and over again. The questions vary, but part of the answer stays the same.
For example, some blackjack player is using one particular count and is considering learning another count because it’s more powerful. Richard will discuss the features of each count, but say, “You’re stepping over dollars to pick up pennies. A slightly better count is NOT where the money is in blackjack. There are far more important things to spend your time learning.”
I’ve heard him say variations on this numerous times and I started to wonder if the way I tackle video poker makes me guilty of stepping over dollars to pick up pennies?
As many of my readers know, I try to learn most video poker games at the 100% level. In NSU Deuces Wild, for example, letting a W stand for a deuce, I play W 4♠ 5♠ 3♥ J♥ differently than I do W 4♠ 5♠ 3♥ J♦.
For the five-coin dollar player, if he holds W 4♠ 5♠ both times he is making a quarter of a penny error half the time. If he holds just the W both times he is also making a quarter of a penny error half the time.
I avoid this small error. I learned the game this well when I was playing $25 games so the error every other time is 6¢ rather than a quarter cent. I still have that play memorized even though the larger games aren’t available, insofar as I know.
Although this particular distinction is one of many many I have memorized, it is safe to say I’ve spent dozens of hours, probably more, learning these exceptions in the first place and reviewing them often enough to keep them memorized.
Have I gained enough to make the difference between learning these things worth more than even an additional $2 per hour over all the hours I’ve spent studying? Probably not.
Without spending this time learning these exceptions, could I have played games worth substantially more than $2 per hour and been better off financially? Definitely yes, insofar as finding games worth more than that.
So, is this a case of stepping over dollars to pick up pennies? Have I been violating Munchkin’s advice (never mind that I spent most of those dozens of hours studying that game before I ever heard Richard give that advice)? Maybe, but if so, as
they say in Traffic Court, I plead guilty with an explanation.
Although in the Dancer/Daily Winner’s Guides for both NSU Deuces Wild and Full Pay Deuces Wild, we distinguish between penalty cards and “power of the pack” considerations, for the sake of simplicity today I’m going to include both of these into the term “penalty cards.”
The underlying assumption behind the question “Is learning penalty cards worth it?” is that without studying the penalty cards you can play the penalty-free strategy perfectly. For me, at least, that assumption wouldn’t track with reality.
Just the study and practice I undergo to learn the penalty cards causes me to be practicing the basic strategy simultaneously. For example, the difference between W J♦ 9♦ 5♣ 6♣ and W J♦ 9♦ 5♣ 7♣, which is a basic strategy play, is probably ignored by all players who have not also made a serious attempt at learning all the exceptions. Even though this play is clearly shown on the Dancer/Daily Strategy Card and Winner’s Guide for this game, I suspect most players simply ignore it or don’t understand why the two hands are played differently.
So, while learning the penalty cards might only return $2 an hour on my study time, I also gain considerably more than that because I learn the basic strategy better during the process.
For me personally, since I’ve chosen a teaching career and a how-to writing career, there are additional income streams available to me for learning this stuff that wouldn’t be available to most others.
Plus, I like being a student. I was good at school and continue to try and learn new things. So even if learning penalty cards doesn’t make great financial sense, it brings me pleasure. Can you really put a price on that?
I’m going to conclude that Richard’s “stepping over dollars to pick up pennies” warning doesn’t apply to me in this particular case. And I make this conclusion knowing full well that others may disagree with my conclusion. That’s okay. I’ve made my own bed here and I’m perfectly happy sleeping in it.
Yes, I know I mentioned that certain hands were played differently than others, but I didn’t explain what the differences were. If you want to know, you’re going to have to look up the information for yourself. If that annoys you, so be it, but the learning process isn’t easy and you need to go through it to become a strong player.
There were two separate incidents that occurred during a recent NSU Deuces Wild class I taught at the South Point. They are not related to each other at all — except they both happened on the same day and neither is enough to justify an entire column. So, I’ll combine them.
The first incident happened before the class. For the noon class, one of my helpers, “Larry,” gets there at 10:30 and together we set up the room. I had finished my part of the setup and was hovering near the back table where Larry was setting up strategy cards, Winner’s Guides, software, and books that I sell during the class.
Some guy, maybe 75-years old, came by and asked us what we were doing. When he found out I was going to be teaching a video poker class, he told us he already knew how to play video poker, so he didn’t need a class.
“Would you like to take the test we give at the end of the class and see how many you get right?” I asked gently. Unless the guy was a really good player, I knew he wouldn’t ace the test. There are a lot of things to know in order to play video poker well.
It didn’t matter, because he didn’t want to take the test. But he asked me if I wanted to earn $200 by just getting one joke correct — and I’d only have to pay $5 if I got it wrong.
“No thanks,” I told him, as did Larry. This had “sucker bet” written all over it and we wanted no part of it.
But this guy insisted on asking his joke anyway, namely, “What has ten wheels, flies, and it isn’t an airplane?” And he was still asking Larry and me if we wanted to play.
I told him I’m not paying off if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure there must be some type of jet that had ten wheels — which should qualify as being a correct answer whether it was the one he had in mind or not. He told me that wasn’t the answer, but if I wanted to guess for real and win $200 while only risking $5, he’d still let me.
Neither Larry nor I bit, so he told us the answer — namely “a garbage truck.” Cute enough. As he left, he told us we could make a lot of money from that making bar bets.
Doubtful. This guy was letting us take the bet AFTER WE’D HEARD THE QUESTION. The only time someone would/should take the bet is if he already knew the answer. If the guy was actually going to pay off if someone said “garbage truck,” this bet was a loser, not a winner.
It’s possible, of course, that were Larry or I able to come up with “garbage truck,” he would disqualify the answer somehow. We avoided it because it seemed like a sucker bet. After the guy left, I wondered who the sucker was.
Here’s the second incident: One of the test questions at the end of beginner level NSU class was how to play J♥ T♥ 7♥ 5♠ 3♦. This is pretty simple. Holding JT7 (the bold italics mean the cards are suited with each other) is clearly correct. I include it in the test because in Full Pay Deuces Wild, the correct play is JT, not JT7. For players who play all Deuces Wild games the same and learned FPDW sometime in the past, this would be a “tricky” hand.
But a guy who missed it, “John,” always sits in the front row and takes exhaustive notes. He regularly challenges me if he doesn’t understand something the first time. I don’t mind this at all. Usually I know the correct answer and can set him straight. Sometimes it requires using the Video Poker for Winners software. And a few times, he has caught an error which I took note of and corrected before the next time I taught the class.
But this time was different. John said, “I’m taking notes and I know that ten minutes ago, you said we never hold three-card straight flushes with two gaps in this game. I take good notes and I know you said it and now you’re saying the opposite!”
John was correct. I did say it. But he skipped a few words at the beginning of my quote, namely, “When there are one or two deuces in hand . . .” That is, letting a W stand for a deuce, W 6♣ 8♣ and W W 6♣ 8♣ are eligible to be held, but W 6♦ 9♦ and W W 6♦ 9♦ aren’t. This rule is specific to NSU. In many other deuces wild variations, the rule is different.
Video poker is full of those “read the fine print” caveats. And it takes a while to master them. It’s also possible that I didn’t utter the complete caveat when I was speaking about the strategy in the 2-deuces or 1-deuce sections. Within each section, it’s clearly understood that I’m speaking only about the strategy rules in that section.
At least it’s clearly understood by me. Maybe not so much by John. Which is why he asked the question.
Will I phrase it more accurately next time? I’m not sure. When I’m explaining the 1-deuce strategy, I’ll mention “1-deuce” three or four times in the five minutes it takes to go through that section in the beginner class (the 1-deuce section in the intermediate class takes much longer than five minutes). Mentioning it more than that gets tedious and sounds too much like legalese. I can never know exactly which of my statements will get transcribed into someone’s notes.
There’s a trade-off between giving enough information and giving too much information to the class as a whole, and whatever statement I make will be too much for some particular students and not enough for others. I’m sure other teachers struggle with this as well. So, I just use my judgment to pitch it where I think is appropriate and rely on student questions to let me know when they need more help.
Not so long ago, a man named Dennis Krum posted an article on vpFREE about video poker and the devolution of gaming. www.gamblingforums.com
After a quick read, I found the premise interesting and invited Krum as a guest on my Gambling with an Edge radio show. Krum accepted. That particular show may be heard at www.slot-machine-resource.com
I am grateful that Dennis Krum came on the radio show. I discovered that I recognized his face but not his name. He reminded me that we were both at the same event about 10 years previously and were both seated at the same table. I remembered the event but not that he was at the table. I do, however, have no reason to doubt him.
I ended up disagreeing with his premise. This comes across slightly on the radio, but I further clarified my thoughts after the show aired.
Krum’s premise is that casinos are middlemen. They offer games, collect from the losers, pay off the winners, and keep the difference as their fee for having the facilities. All they should be concerned with, according to Krum, is maximizing the amount of play. Their profits will come.
This theory works well enough on games of chance — such as craps and roulette (although there are said to be pros at craps and I KNOW there are pros at roulette). If it is strictly chance, there is no reason for casinos to eliminate anybody.
It’s different, in my mind anyway, when you have games of skill. If a casino offered a blackjack game with sufficient rules, bet spread, and penetration so that competent players could earn $500 an hour, every counter in the country would camp out there. There would be a few wannabe counters who lose, but this game would be juicy enough that large numbers of good counters would move into that casino “for the duration.” And even if there were enough seats for all counters and still had some $5 tables for the recreational players, the many tables losing $3000 an hour from the pros would dwarf the few making $100 an hour from the squares.
The casinos have to do something to keep from hemorrhaging money — despite Krum’s thesis that they should always want to maximize the amount played. They can tighten the rules, penetration, bet spread allowed, or eliminate certain players. If they don’t, they will surely go bankrupt for creating a candy store for knowledgeable players.
The same with video poker. Maybe 10 years ago, Caesars Palace, probably by accident, installed a couple of FPDW (100.76%) machines that took $300 a hand to play. While that is beyond the means of most players, there are plenty of players in Vegas (including some who would create temporary teams and pool their money to play) to keep those machines occupied 24/7. (I would have gladly paid $500 to have an 8 hour shift on one of those machines. I could easily have won or lost a sizeable amount of money over those 8 hours, but the odds were definitely in my favor. Assuming I could get 100 hands an hour — you do get a W2G every 12 hands or so and that slows things down— $30,000 coin-in an hour at a 0.76% rate comes out to $228 an hour plus benefits from the Total Rewards system, which was more generous then than now.) Anyway the machines lasted a couple of days and I didn’t find out about them until after the fact.
A dealt $240K royal sealed the deal on the removal of the machines. Caesars over-reacted. It barred from all Harrah’s properties that particular player for having the nerve to get a dealt royal. We can rant and rave all we want on how inappropriate that was, but let’s go on.
To survive, the casinos MUST somehow balance their wins and losses. They can tighten machines, limit points earned on their loosest machines, restrict players, etc. They can lower their slot club rate, the mailers, the amounts of the drawings, their comp rate, whatever.
Several casinos are in considerable financial stress. Krum argues casinos should want more and more business and should never tighten machines or restrict players. He’s entitled to that opinion, but he’s not going to get any casino manager to agree with him. He’ll get players to agree with him because we don’t like the restrictions casinos place on the game.
As players, we always want MORE. You could give us a 105% game with a 2% slot club and a 3% comp rate and we’d still be asking for senior discounts and be REALLY ticked that we have to pay a $12 daily resort fee.
You can argue that there are enough square players and others playing silly money management schemes that casinos can fade a few winning players. And you’d be right. Except if you give the strongest players a very positive high limit game, we can easily wipe out all the profits generated by the lower-limit players.
Running a casino isn’t easy. It’s easy for players to resent casinos tightening up. It’s kind of like an extra tax on players. Nobody likes taxes and everybody wants the OTHER guy to be taxed.
It’s easy for people to argue how casinos SHOULD spend their money. Everybody who has some money is used to fending off “requests for donations” from a wide variety of charities. Well, players following Krum’s thesis are basically requesting “donations to players.” And for some reason, casinos are lending a deaf ear.
As they should.
