I turned 74 years old in mid-February. Not a big deal. I have a birthday every year. But this time it turned out to be special in an unusual way.
My Nevada Driver License expired on my birthday. Again, not a big deal. It always expires on a birthday, every three or four years. But this time it turned out to be special in an unusual way.
Continue reading A Birthday Present That Keeps on GivingToday we’ll have a personal anecdote about what happened to me recently. I’m not sure how widespread my situation is, but perhaps some of my readers will relate to it.
I’ve been gambling at video poker since 1994. For the right promotion, I’ll go any time of the day or night. To make this work, I also need to be able to sleep any time of the day or night so I can be at my best when I play. Sometimes I’ll play daytime for one promotion, sleep four to six hours, and then go play graveyard at some other promotion. At age 74, it’s more difficult to do this than it was when I was younger.
Continue reading A Lesson RelearnedRecently, a poster on the videopoker.com forum wrote words to the following effect: “I have no doubt that if I could ever learn to quit while I was ahead, I’d be far ahead at video poker, even though I play games returning only about 99%.”
Let’s look more closely at that statement.
Continue reading Quitting While You are Ahead — Does it Work?On our February 4 Gambling with an Edge podcast, Anthony Curtis brought up something that I had experienced, but not understood why it was happening. With some notable exceptions, numerous Las Vegas casinos have really tightened up. Slot clubs are less generous. Promotions are smaller. Games aren’t as loose as they were.
In my opinion, this is not the smart way for these casinos to be acting. Their customers are hurting. Their customers have less money. At least some of the customers are wary about venturing into casinos at all until the percentage of our population vaccinated is much higher than it is now.
Continue reading Who Are the Patrons?I have two brief things that came up recently and are worthy of writing about, but neither is sufficient to fill up an entire blog. So, I stacked them together. Hope you don’t mind.
New Rules
Continue reading Two StoriesThe mathematical analysis in this blog was done by Rick Percy. I do not have the tools to do that analysis myself. Thank you, Rick!
My personal goal is to learn the best strategy for every game I play. Not everybody shares that goal. Some people want to minimize their work, or don’t have the time, or have trouble keeping the differences between strategies straight.
Continue reading Using One Strategy for Two GamesThere are some excellent video poker opportunities to be found from time to time in Las Vegas. When these are found, good players rush in to take advantage of them. After a few days or weeks of getting pounded, casino slot directors decide that they are tired of this, so they remove the promotions, the machines, or sometimes, the offending players.
For a promotion to work, good and bad players need to play. If the casinos do not make money, the promotion will not last. When good players hog all of the machines, the casino cannot make money, and so the casino makes adjustments.
Continue reading Killing the Golden GooseI was playing a $1 9/6 Double Double Bonus game with multiple progressives. The royal was at $5,400 and aces with a kicker (AWAK) was slightly above $2,300. The other two active progressives, which reset at $800, had been hit in the previous half hour and had not yet risen much.
The numbers made the game about 100.1% which I would usually consider a waste of time, but it was by far the best game in the house. The slot club added 0.2%, the meter was rising at 1%, and I needed to play some to keep my mailers coming. Plus, sadly, at the moment I didn’t know of any better game around, so I played.
Continue reading Is It Worth the Risk?A friend, Jake Jacobs, posted in passing on a Facebook page recently that he’d been active in car rallyes in the Chicago area way back when. Some of them were time-speed-distance events where you were timed and crossing a checkpoint 30 seconds early was as bad as 30 seconds late — but both were better than 40 seconds either way.
The other type of rallye was called a gimmick rallye, where time was not a factor, although you had to finish by such-and-such a time because that’s when awards were passed out. You were scored on the basis of your answers to questions, such as, “What is the name of the first street you pass on the right?” or, “How many streetlights do you pass between xxx and yyy?” There was always some sort of trick in the rules leading many participants to get the wrong answer.
Continue reading It All Adds UpSomeone recently mentioned that one of the characters in the book, The Ultimate Edge, was based on himself. This book, written by Mark Billings, talks about blackjack in the 80s. It includes some insider tips that I haven’t seen elsewhere and ends with a discussion of the main characters’ best play.
I read the book in preparation for a Gambling with an Edge visit from the author on April 4, 2013 and came across one tiny throwaway section that has brought a lot of fun to my life. I wrote about it back then, but since I’m sure many of my readers didn’t read that particular column 7½ years ago, I’ll repeat the fun part here.
Continue reading A Life Changing Book