I’ve listened to Kenny Rogers’ song The Gambler a zillion times. Since I’m not a live poker player, the advice he gives seemed to make sense. After all, how bad can “You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em” actually be?
Whether the preceding line of the song is correct or not, I noticed there’s one line of advice in that song that has to be very wrong for many poker players — but largely correct for video poker players. So, I said to myself, “Self, there’s a column there!” So here goes.
The offending line is, “You never count your money when you’re sitting at the table.”
Since I’m not a poker expert, you’re well advised to take everything I say here with a grain of salt. But if the standard is being more accurate than a Kenny Rogers song, I’m confident I can clear that bar.
In no-limit hold ’em, among others, a major goal is to stack your opponents. That means, however many chips he has, that’s how many you’re trying to get.
For any given stakes, say $2-$5, your decisions are made relative to the amount of money in the pot. If there’s $20 in the pot and everybody at the table has $200, you need to play your cards fairly straightforward. The stacks are only 10 times the amount in the pot.
But if everybody has $2,000 in front of them, you can play much more speculatively, because if the right cards come in, you can collect 100 times what’s in the pot rather than only the 10 times in the previous example.
So far, I’ve been talking about how much money your opponents have, but the amount of money you have matters too. If you have $20 in front of you and your opponents all have $2,000 — then from your point of view, all your opponents have is $20 each. They can have side pots amongst themselves, but that doesn’t affect you financially. For you to stack somebody, you need at least as many chips as he has. (Being short-stacked definitely affects your strategy — where you’re basically “fold or all in.” Consult poker experts for more complete advice on this.)
With this in mind, it’s clear that, at least approximately, you need to know how much you have and how much your opponents have. This is counter to Rogers’ “You never count your money when you’re sitting at the table” advice.
In video poker, however, Kenny Rogers’ advice is generally spot on. If you’re trying to decide whether to hold three, four, or five cards from AAA33, there is no line on the strategy card that says, “Check the amount of money in your wallet first!” Players who adjust their strategy based on their bankroll are giving up EV every time they do so.
It definitely is important to consider your bankroll before you sit down to play and choose the particular game and denomination you’re going to play. But once you’ve made that choice you should make the highest EV play at all points.
One exception to this would be if you’re playing Ultimate X and you’re running out of money. If you’re playing the Ten Play version, you should never play a 100-coin hand when you have less than 145 credits (or more money in your pocket or otherwise close at hand.)
Why 145? It starts with knowing that if you play five credits per line (50 credits total), you can play off any existing multipliers without creating any new ones.
If you play 100 credits and don’t earn any credits (i.e., you drew no paying hands), you left no multipliers on the game. So, you take your 45 remaining credits and go home. If you play 100 credits and earn at least five credits, you will have at least 50 credits to play off all the multipliers on the game, again leaving no multipliers on the game.
So long as you earn at least five credits, you will have earned multipliers for the next hand — and you want to play those off five-credits per line, meaning 50 coins, before you abandon the machine to others. There are “fleas” who go around checking if you’ve abandoned any multipliers and you don’t want to be the person to feed those fleas.
There are a number of areas where video poker and live poker are played differently. In my just-completed video poker semester, there were several poker players who attended regularly. Comparing a draw to an unsuited KQJT with QJT9, I would explain the first had eight cards to complete the straight and nine cards to give you a high pair. The second hand also had eight cards to complete the straight but only six cards to give you a high pair.
“Aha!” one poker player would translate into a language she understood, “17 outs versus 14.” Sort of, but not really. In poker, an “out” is a card that will beat another player. In video poker, a card to give you a straight (paying 20 coins) is four times as valuable as a card that gives you a pair of queens (paying 5 coins.) All outs are not created equal.
I still enjoy hearing The Gambler occasionally whether it gives good advice or not. Bonnie and I dance the Texas Two Step and this song has a good beat for that. I never look to popular music of any decade to teach me to play games — professionally anyway. There are a number of songs through the years that have provided “words to live by.” But not “words to gamble by.”
