Tag: video poker

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Paying to Avoid Royal Flushes

Assume you are a 5-coin dollar player playing 9/6 Jacks or Better and are dealt 3♠ A♥ K♥ T♥ 5♥.  The only two plays to consider are holding three hearts to the royal flush and holding all four hearts.

If we check out EV, we find holding three hearts is worth $6.43 and holding four is worth $6.38. That nickel’s worth of EV has always been too much for me to ignore and I go for the royal every time.

BUT, I file as a professional player and get lots of W-2Gs. Let’s say you don’t get a lot of W-2Gs. In that case, each one that you do get has some serious tax consequences. What if you held the four hearts in order to prevent the W-2G?

Once every 1,081 times on average, AKT turns into a royal flush. If you gave up a nickel each of those 1,081 times and ended up getting one fewer royal flush, it would cost you $55 (rounding slightly).

This is probably not too high a price to pay because a $4,000 royal has far more than $55 worth of tax consequences.

AKT (and AQT and AJT) are the weakest 3-card royal flush draws for two separate reasons. First, the presence of the ace eliminates all straight flush possibilities and reduces straight possibilities. Second, the presence of a ten reduces the chances for a high pair.

If we compared the preceding hand to 3♦ A♣ K♣ J♣ 5♣, holding this 3-card royal flush is better than the 4-card flush by a little more than 17¢ and avoiding the $4,000 royal flush over 1,081 opportunities will cost you $185. That’s quite a bit more than the $55 we were talking about earlier.

Going for the flush from 3♥ K♠ Q♠ T♠ 5♠ costs us $683 over the 1,081 draws, and from 3♣ K♦ Q♦ J♦ 5♦, it sets you back $770. Finally, from 3♠ Q♥ J♥ T♥ 5♥ you’ll lose a whopping $1,095 over the 1,081 hands by going for the flush every time.

So where do you draw the line? I’m not sure. I go for the 3-card royal on all of these hands. You’re going to have to decide for yourself what avoiding a W-2G is worth.

Other factors: If it were a multiple point day and/or there was another juicy promotion which gave me a considerable advantage playing this game, I would be more inclined to go for the flush. After all, time is money and it could easily take 5-20 minutes to be paid.

If I were playing in a state where royals were penalized (say Mississippi which has a 3% non-refundable tax on W-2Gs), that would make going for the flush mandatory in our first example and a closer play in the others.

If I were playing near the limit of my bankroll — either actual or psychological — I would tend to go for the flush, which is a play with a much lower variance.

On the first hand, you get skunked about 70% of the time going for the royal and “only” 68% of the time going for the flush.  If I were someone for whom today’s score mattered, I might go for the flush.   I certainly don’t recommend that you worry about today’s score, but some players just can’t help themselves.

This wouldn’t happen to me because I don’t do this, but if you were picking up someone else’s free-play and a royal flush would be awkward and you insisted on playing dollars anyway because you were in a hurry, I would go for the flush every time on these hands.

There are other hands in this game and every other game where it could make sense to avoid the possibility of a royal flush if it could be done at a low cost. But you should look at them one-at-a-time BEFORE YOU PLAY so you know which “inferior” plays are cost-effective. Trying to figure it out at the machine is very difficult. It’s easy to over-compensate when you’re doing this without study beforehand.

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A Good Game Gone for About Five Years

Someone posted a picture of a $50,000 royal flush on wizardofvegas.com and that brought back memories. Although this particular jackpot was hit by someone else, I’ve had more than my share.

The game was called “Deuces Plus” and was a 10/4/4 version of Deuces Bonus with a 1000-for-1 royal flush. They were available at fewer than ten 15-machine bars in the Gambler’s Bonus system on the east side of the Las Vegas valley. Village Pub (more than one store), Rae’s, Doc Holliday’s, Franklin’s (which changed names several times), and maybe a few others. Not only was the game 100.35% by itself, these places had 0.10% or 0.20% slot clubs and pretty juicy bonuses. The bonuses were cash (up to $500 for hitting a royal flush on graveyard at one place), “points” (you’d get 20-coin to 50-coin bonuses for various things like four 3s, or maybe a full house including all royal cards, or whatever), and sometimes other things (like “squares” in an upcoming Monday Night Football game where winners got $100 or $500).

Plus, big players always were eligible to get two meals to go. These were 10-coin machines, up to $5, so a $50 bet could turn into $50,000. I hit more than 20 of these jackpots before eventually being 86’d from everywhere they were dealt. Some months later, the pay schedules were no longer offered anywhere.

One of the irritating things about the system back then was that you could download only $100 worth of points (i.e., accumulated free-play) per midnight-to-midnight 24-hour period. Even showing up at 11:45 p.m. and then downloading for “today” and then a few minutes later for “tomorrow” didn’t solve the problem because you easily could re-generate more than you downloaded if you played for several hours and/or hit some of the bonuses. I played on both my card and my wife’s card so I could get $200 before and $200 after midnight, but still I had several thousands of dollars of free play to download when I finally had no good-game places to play.

I ended up playing off $400 per trip at Gambler’s Bonus locations without the good games. It took a while, but downloading $400 “free money” per trip (even played on 98% games) made it worthwhile. Leaving the house at 11:30 p.m. wasn’t the most convenient, but you do what you have to do. Being “irritated” doesn’t sound like the right word to outsiders because, after all, it was a very juicy game and we were making bunches of money, but it certainly wasn’t as player-friendly as we would have liked.

This was before I had an iPhone, consequently I don’t have any pictures — so I “borrowed” the pictures shown below. Four deuces with an ace ($20,000), which occurred slightly more often than a royal, would have been worth a picture too. Maybe even the $10,000 “regular” four deuces shown below — again hit by somebody else — but I easily had more than 50 of them.

In one case I was dealt a royal flush — and had to hold the buttons because the (then) 30-year-old technology on the machines didn’t have auto-hold on royals. It took 20 or so minutes to be paid as the bars didn’t have that much cash on hand and drivers would come out and deliver the money. I know they paid you for $4,000 “five aces” jackpots from an on-property cash dispenser and had to call out for $10,000 “four deuces” jackpots. Whether the actual cutoff was at $5,000 or $10,000 I don’t know because the game I played never hit in that range.

When they had to bring in money from the outside, they paid you in $5,000 “straps.” One bartender liked to put the money into food take-out boxes as a form of disguise. One night I came home at about 4 a.m. and left the box containing $50,000 in the bathroom sink at home when I went to bed. My wife initially cursed me for leaving food un-refrigerated but screamed in delight when she finally opened the box to see what food I had brought home.

During one 18-month period, I probably was playing 20-30 hours a week on this game, mostly after midnight, spread out over as many locations as I was welcome — averaging about $250/hour profit throughout that period. Although the machines were old, I ran well for the entire time and did better than expectations said I should.

I generally do not tip very well on jackpots. At these places it was different. An 8-hour “shift” would give me an EV of about $2,000 every night — in front of the same bartenders over and over again. Tips in the range of $50 per night if I lost, or $100 if I won, and more than that if I hit for $20,000 or more, felt about right to me. I wanted the bartenders on my side as much as possible when the discussions came as to who should be kicked out.

Another idiosyncrasy of these machines was that if you hit a hand-pay, any points you had accumulated since the last time you pulled your card disappeared. Since this included wild royals ($1,250) and higher, you’d hit one of these taxables every 375 hands on average. The cards were “virtual” — meaning you had to enter your 6-10 digit account number and password on a keypad to go through the log-in process, unless you mis-keyed and then it would take maybe another 30 seconds to log off and log back on again. I used the rule of thumb that if I had earned $20 worth of points since the last time I logged out, it was time to do it again. That way I never lost too much due to this idiosyncrasy nor did I waste too much time logging off and on. It was a “compromise.” These points were valuable, but the rest of the play was more valuable.

If you want to criticize/condemn me for helping to burn out the game — knock yourself out. I plead guilty. I certainly was one of the people who did this. If I found this opportunity again, I very likely would play it the same way.  (And many would criticize/condemn me again.) You only get so many chances at such an opportunity. You know it’s going to end eventually. You know others are out there doing the same thing. You simply have to get while the getting is good.

A year or so after the play ended, I was in one of these places playing another promotion that was pretty good. Not $250/hour good, but pretty good. The manager (who knew exactly who I was) told me someone was talking about bringing back the old Deuces Plus game for high stakes somewhere and wanted a lot of action. Was I interested and could I help spread the word among other big players?

Yes and yes.

Then I thought some more about it. I speculated that this was going to be some kind of money laundering deal for whoever the owner would be. Even giving up 1.5% or so to the players (it would be less than that as there would be a lot of “normal” players as well who lost — but probably 75% of the coin-in on the $50-per-hand games was from knowledgeable players), he could still launder his money fairly cheaply. Assuming people who needed to launder money could very well be related to the mafia or maybe a drug cartel, I wondered if doing too well could be dangerous to my life expectancy. I was second-guessing my “yes and yes.” Well, it never happened so it’s all speculation on my part. It’s possible there was nothing shady about it at all — but in that case I couldn’t figure out how the owner could possibly be making money with this business plan.

I currently don’t have any plays this lucrative on an ongoing basis — although three times in the past two years I found such a game on a short-term basis. Players regularly complain that the games aren’t as good as they used to be. That is true, but this particular game lasted two years or so and ended only about five years ago, not 15 or 20. While some players knew about it, there were a lot of pros in Las Vegas who didn’t. (Even out-of-towners could have played while they were here. A $250 per hour play was likely more lucrative than their other options here. But for whatever reason, the play was kept reasonably quiet.)

It is not unreasonable to expect plays this juicy in the future. You just have to search for them, recognize them for what they are when you find them, learn the requisite strategy, and then play them for as much as you can afford for as long as they last. If “normal” video poker software won’t tell you how to play the game, you need to do your own programming or have a good programmer on call or on retainer.

Preserving your bankroll for special opportunities like this, which you may or may not find during your gambling career, is a form of “keeping your powder dry” for when you need it. Playing less than 100% games just because you can’t find anything better at the moment is the opposite of keeping your powder dry.

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But You Just Said the Opposite Ten Minutes Ago!

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.

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Dollars and Sense

This 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.

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There’s More to EV than Just EV

“EV” stands for expected value, which is a type of weighted average. The exact definition I’ll leave to the probability and statistics textbooks. As cut and dried as the definition is in the math books, there’s plenty of wiggle room in the way it’s applied to video poker.

Before we discuss this wiggle room, let’s talk about how EV is most properly used. EV gives you a “best guess” of how a situation will turn out — on average — if you play it out zillions of times. It’s not a guarantee at all of how things will turn out this time. If you’re flipping a fair coin 100 times, the EV is for 50 heads to show up. But sometimes only 40 heads will appear, and equally often 60. In actuality, ending up with exactly 50 heads out of 100 trials is an underdog to happen. If you’re betting on heads, you may well be upset that the actual result this time didn’t match up with the EV.

The definition of EV is about “how many times something happens.” In video poker, we often turn this into a percentage. For example, 9/6 Jacks or Better has a well-known probability of returning 99.544% when played perfectly. That means if we play $100,000 through a 9/6 JoB machine, our average ending balance will be $99,544, meaning the casino keeps $456 from our play. This will be true whether we play for nickels, quarters, dollars, or larger stakes. This will be true whether we are playing single line, Triple Play . . . or Hundred Play.

It is common among video poker players, but not universal, to add the return on the game with the slot club return and call the result EV. That is, if you’re playing 9/6 JoB at the South Point on double point days, the EV is 99.544% +2(.300%) = 100.144%. Adding the slot club return is reasonably certain, as almost always you know what it’s going to be before you play.

Adding mailers is a bit iffier, if that’s a word. If you know you are going to get mailers worth $80 for $40,000 coin-in, you can go ahead and add another 0.20% to the EV. But we are rarely that certain — or rather, the ones who are certain are frequently mistaken. Slot clubs change their parameters for mailers all the time, and usually these parameters are unpublished. You can get a feel for what the rules are if you talk to enough players, but it’s normally the case that players don’t keep good enough records to be useful.

Someone can accurately tell you that their mailer is $25 a week. But if you want to know how much they won or lost each month over the last six months, including how much was played during promotions and on which machines, that information is tougher to come by. And, at some casinos, how many times did the player come into the casino? And what “discretionary” comps were issued to this player? Some or all of this information is used by at least some casinos to determine your mailer. And most casinos don’t publish the formula they use.

Still other players (including me) add an estimate for the value of the current promotion into the EV calculation. I wouldn’t be playing at all at any casinos if it wasn’t for their promotions. (Yes, I could play 100% games for low stakes in Las Vegas for less than $10 per hour. And there’s money to be made playing video poker progressives. If that’s your thing, welcome to it. For me, no thanks.)

I was playing $1 9/6 JoB Spin Poker on a recent double point day at the South Point, when there was another promotion going on as well. There are higher-EV games there, but only for lower stakes. With good enough promotions, playing $2 single line ($10 per hand) 99.728% NSU Deuces Wild sometimes just isn’t as good as the 99.544% ($45 per hand) game.

Another player was playing $1 9/5 White Hot Aces on the same Spin Poker machine. I asked him why he chose that game instead of JoB and he responded “Higher EV.” Really? Not in my book.

The WHA game returns 99.572% which is certainly a tad higher than the 99.544% you get from JoB. But every time you get dealt a quad, the Jacks or Better game returns  “only” $1,125 which, importantly, is less than W2G range. Getting two or more quad 2s, 3s, or 4s, or even one set of aces, generates additional W2Gs.

For professional players who get LOTS of W2Gs, these are not particularly terrible things. We have learned how to “write off” a high percentage of them. Still, at this casino, on a double point day, it takes more than five minutes per W2G for a slot attendant to arrive and reset the machine. On a promotion that is worth, say, $36 an hour, not playing for five minutes costs you $3. Are you planning on tipping when you get paid for your W2G? If you typically tip $5, that’s $8 out of every W2G. That more than eliminates the difference in EV from the game itself.

You pretty much get the same number of royals in the two games, but you get more straight flushes in WHA. Why? Two reasons. First of all, you get paid $400 per straight flush rather than $250 so it only takes three to get a W2G rather than five. Also, the strategy calls for you to go for straight flushes more in WHA. For example, from a hand like 3♠ 4♥ 5♥ 6♥ 7♥, you hold five cards in JoB and only four in WHA. When you do catch a straight flush on the draw, usually you get three of them — and hence a W2G.

Instead of EV, I use a form of “expected dollars per hour,” which includes how many hands per hour I can play and at what stakes. Are my calculations different from those of other players? Maybe. Part of the calculation includes an estimate for the current promotion, and personal estimates differ. But for figuring out whether I should be playing at Casino A or B, I find the calculation very useful.

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Was She Talking Like a Woman or Talking Like a Man?

Using stereotypes to say “women are this way and men are that way” in today’s political climate is a formula guaranteed to generate multiple negative comments. Rightfully so. There is very little interesting where you can say that every female (or every male) is a certain way. There are always exceptions.

With that said, there are also tendencies that appear to be there. A tendency doesn’t mean a certainty. For example, I can correctly say that in general men tend to be taller than women. And that’s true on average — but we recognize there are some taller and shorter examples of each sex.

What brings this up is something that happened to a friend of mine, Reuben, who is also a competent video poker professional. He was playing at a casino whose name he doesn’t want me to publish, and playing a game that is still around. He said that if I wrote about it, I could call it $5 Multi Strike — just to give it a name — but in fact it was a different game.

He was playing two machines at a time — which happened to be the only two $5 Multi Strike machines in the casino. He believed that the game plus the slot club plus whatever promotions were going on gave him enough of an advantage to justify him being there.

He rarely played two machines at a time. It often announces “I am a pro” to a casino which tends to reduce your longevity there. But in this particular casino, he had run unlucky and to date was a big loser — even though he had always played games with positive EV. Since he figured this casino wouldn’t make him as a pro, he could play more aggressively than he otherwise would.

After playing a while, a woman he had never seen before came up and asked if these were the only two high-denom Multi Strike machines in the casino. Instead of his usual “I don’t know,” which is generally the smart answer in cases like this, he told her that yes, he believed they were.

The woman then asked, “How long do you intend to play?” Reuben said he hadn’t really decided yet. It depended on how much he lost and how quickly. Which was nonsense, of course. Reuben was planning on playing until midnight, which was when the promotion ended. She looked at the machines longingly for a while and then left.

Reuben speculated that she was waiting for him to offer her a machine. After all, in Reuben’s experience, women tend to be more empathic and less direct in their requests. Had it been his wife instead of a stranger, his wife would have expected him to realize that she wanted a machine — and hence, given one to her because it was the polite thing to do.

Still, keeping both machines was the desired goal and if this lady wanted a machine, she was, at a minimum, going to have to explicitly ask for one. Whether Reuben would have said yes or no wasn’t a certainty. He would have made a decision when necessary — but not before. There are often extenuating circumstances one way or the other.

Reuben considered the possibility that the woman would go to the slot shift boss and complain that she couldn’t get a machine and one guy was hogging both of them. He didn’t want that to happen, although it was largely out of his control. He preferred to be a “low maintenance” player. It doesn’t take too many incidents for some casino employees to conclude this player is “always” causing trouble. If he developed that unwanted reputation, close calls down the road (such as whether to pay him in a sticky button situation — or whether to allow him to remain even after he starts winning) might not go his way.

If the slot shift boss came over and asked for a machine for the woman, Reuben’s answer would have been an immediate, “Of course.” He likely would have added, “All she needed to do was to ask me, but she never did.” The last four words were absolutely true. The first nine — maybe. But the slot shift boss couldn’t know that.

It’s possible the woman believed she shouldn’t have to ask. She possibly believed even a guy should have been able to understand she wanted a machine. It could seem to her to be common courtesy that should prompt Reuben to give up a machine. That definitely was Reuben’s best guess as to what his wife would believe were she the one wanting a machine.

One thing that Reuben felt was a bit of a safety cushion this time was that the slot shift boss was a man. Right or wrong, he believed a male shift boss would be more sympathetic to “she never actually asked” than a woman shift boss would. Reuben’s actions would likely have been the same with any boss, but he would expect the aftermath to be gentler on him when the boss was a male.

Could Reuben’s stereotypes and assumptions based on them have been way off? Of course. No player or boss acts exactly like you expect him or her to.

Is he smart to use such stereotypes and assumptions in his decisions? Absolutely. You are frequently called on to make decisions based on incomplete information, and sometimes stereotypes give you some extra information that is useful.

Would Reuben be called prejudiced or sexist if he verbalized his thought processes? That too. You can’t please everybody, and people will use whatever ammunition against you that you give them. Often, it’s better to make your decisions quietly and not discuss why you made them.

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Whom Do You Trust?

I’m showing my age, but I remember the “Who Do You Trust?” television show hosted by Johnny Carson before he got the Tonight Show gig. He always said later that the first word should have been “Whom” rather than “Who,” and if you can’t trust Johnny Carson, whom can you trust?

Many of the people who attend my classes are quarter or dollar players. It’s no secret that I play for higher stakes, at least some of the time. Usually once or twice a semester, someone says something like, “Although I would never play for the stakes you do, I’m really curious as to what games you play and where. Will you tell me?”

My standard answer is that I write about the places I play that I don’t mind you knowing about, and don’t write about the ones I would rather keep secret. So, if they don’t already know about one of my plays, I’m not going to tell them.

The reason for this is simple. Many plays can only support one or two competent players. Telling the world about such a play would be the kiss of death to the play. No thanks.

One player followed up with, “But I promise I won’t tell anybody, and I certainly won’t be playing those stakes myself. Don’t you trust me?”

Well, I’m not sure. I’d rather not put it to the test. If I trust 20 people and 19 of them never told a soul, the secret is still out. Is this guy one of the 19, or the one who says, “It won’t hurt anything if I mention this to my brother-in-law?” I don’t know beforehand, so it’s better that I keep quiet.

I’m not a proponent of the “Two can keep a secret only if one of them is dead” philosophy. If Richard Munchkin wants to know the where and why on any of my plays, I’m going to tell him. I trust him — even though he has the bankroll along with family members and close friends who could burn out any play I told him about. Among top gamblers, their word is their bond. If I told him, “I’ll tell you about it but you can’t play because of xxxxx,” I believe he’d honor that.

On the radio show, we’ve had blackjack team captains describe teams they were on where one of the team members ripped off the others. This is rare — but it happens — and it’s always a shock when it does. You can protect yourself from this by never telling anybody anything, but that’s going to be a lonely life you lead.

Trusting somebody has similarities with marriage. Although it ends badly some of the time (and I’ve experienced my share of that), overall, I’m convinced my life works better being married than being single.

I’d actually be more comfortable telling Richard about a play than I would be telling Bonnie! Bonnie is not a player at all and although she’s definitely on my side, if I tell her I’m going to be playing at the (pick a casino), it’s possible that she would inadvertently tell her sister, daughter, or a girlfriend where I’m playing. If I tell her over and over again, “This is a secret — you can tell no one,” she’ll honor my wishes. But she has no good gambling sense about what is a secret and what isn’t and she’s not really practiced in keeping secrets. It’s better not to tell her.

If I took her to a comped meal at the Wicked Spoon buffet at the Cosmopolitan, she would figure out that there was some play (now gone) that I had there, but she isn’t really capable of understanding why the play there was better or worse than playing at some other casino. She’s willing to listen and nod her head if I tell her, “The game pays xxx% off the top, with yyy% from the slot club, and zzz% from the mailers.  This other promotion they’re having now adds another vvv%, and there’s a pretty good chance I can talk them into www% worth of comps.”  These are just numbers to her and it’s all kind of gobbledygook.

Richard, however, would understand each of these things and if he didn’t, he’d ask me to explain further. And he could put the numbers into context of other plays he knew about. That is, a 100.5% play is pretty good if the best you can find otherwise is 100.3%. But if you can find a 101% play for the same stakes, a 100.5% isn’t such a good deal.

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You’re Not Ready Yet

Immediately after one of my classes at the South Point, a man, “Joe,” came up to me and asked if I would mentor him in becoming a professional video poker player. He told me he had plenty of bankroll and wanted to turbocharge his learning process. He had heard that I would do private consulting for $250 an hour with a two-hour minimum and that did not present a problem for him.

I had another engagement after class, so we scheduled a lunch date for the near future. Although I have food comps at casinos, I preferred having the conversation at a local Applebee’s where the chances of being overheard by other players was far less. I don’t pay retail for food in Vegas very often, but this was one of those times.

In the time before I met with Joe, I tried to figure out what kind of person I would be willing to mentor. Assuming he had the bankroll, I figured the main criteria were:

a. His personality was acceptable to me. This isn’t a particularly high bar to cross, but there are a few people I just don’t enjoy hanging out with. I didn’t want a long-term relationship with somebody like that.

b. He was smart enough. Video poker is applied math. Not everybody is capable of learning it at a high level.

c. He had some history of success at the game and could study on his own. When I’m consulting with somebody two hours at a time, I don’t really care how good they are when they come to me. I’ll spend the two hours doing my best to improve their skill and knowledge level. But a mentoring relationship is a longer-term affair and spending dozens of hours while moving somebody from beginner to intermediate isn’t how I want to spend my time.

Okay. After Joe and I ordered lunch, I asked him where he lived and how he got his bankroll. I had spoken to Joe a few times previously and he passed the personality test, such as it is. He had sent me a number of emails over the past few years with questions and/or suggestions for the Gambling with an Edge radio show. These emails led me to believe he was smart enough to succeed at this.

Joe told me he was 49 years old, lived on the East Coast, and had recently inherited more than $2 million. He planned to retire from the Air Force Reserve in a few months and was looking at how he wanted to spend the rest of his life.

Joe had listened to a number of the radio shows and it really sounded like I enjoyed my life more than he enjoyed his. Plus, he had read my Million Dollar Video Poker autobiography and was fascinated with the life of a gambler. He decided he wanted to invest a portion of his inheritance, maybe $200,000, to see if he had the aptitude to maybe be the next Bob Dancer.

I asked him how many of the Winner’s Guides he had closely studied. He told me he had purchased a set but had yet to open them up. I asked him how much time he had spent with a computer program such as Video Poker for Winners. He told me he hadn’t purchased a copy of that yet but it was next on his list.

I told him he wasn’t ready for mentoring yet. In the next six months, I suggested he learn two games at the professional level — perhaps Jacks or Better and NSU Deuces Wild. Using the Winner’s Guides and the software, this wasn’t such a formidable task. But neither was it a trivial one.

Then, I wanted him to spend at least two weeks straight in Las Vegas or another casino city gambling 30 hours a week. At the end of that, if he still wanted me to mentor him, he knew how to get in touch with me. I would give him a test on the two games, and if he knew the games at a high level, we could revisit the mentoring idea.

Joe was in love with the idea of being a gambler, but he hadn’t had any actual experience. It’s hard work to get to the professional level at one game — let alone two. Playing 60 hours will turn out to be a boring experience for many people.

Video poker is a grind-it-out affair. It’s one thing to be fascinated by what appears to be a glamorous life. It’s another thing entirely to go through the process of getting good at some games and then successfully playing those games for 60 hours without going totally bonkers.

Can Joe do this?

I don’t know. If he can’t, he was never going to be a success at gambling anyway. If he can master two games and still be interested in being mentored after some real-life experience, then at least he will be going into this with his eyes wide open rather than looking through the rose-colored glasses he seems to be wearing today.

On one of our radio shows, Richard Munchkin told us that he periodically gets these kinds of requests from people wishing to learn blackjack. Richard tells them to learn basic strategy completely for four different games — i.e. with or without standing on soft 17 and with or without the ability to double after splitting. Once they know all four of these basic strategies, come back and see him again.

Richard tells me he’s never had somebody come back to him with these four strategies memorized.

I guess Richard’s experience influenced how I dealt with Joe. The task I gave Joe is more difficult than learning four basic strategies — each of which is more than 90% identical with the others. Jacks or Better and Deuces Wild are games very different from each other.

Still, if Joe passes this test, he’ll be a worthy student and I won’t mind at all working with him.

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Why Did You Print the Wrong Information?

I received an email from a player who told me that he found an error in Dream Card. I was definitely interested. If I verified that it was an error, I would send the information along to the folks at IGT (who manufacture the game), videopoker.com (who invented the game), and the player community. Whether IGT and videopoker.com chose to “fix” the problem in their next release would be up to them, but even if they did, older versions might still be out there and players should be warned about it.

Please note that this falls into the realm of “hearsay.” I didn’t see the error, and the man who told me about it said it happened to his son. There’s plenty of room in there for some misunderstanding to have taken place. Still, the situation is interesting on a couple of different levels which makes it worth talking about.

Curiously, I came away concluding that yes, there may have been an error with Dream Card in this situation, but it wasn’t the error I got the email about!

Here’s the situation. The player was playing 9/6 Jacks or Better Dream Card. Dream Card moves a 99.54% game to 99.56% — with a much bigger variance.

The dealt hand was A♠ K♠ Q♠ Q♦ DC, where DC indicates a Dream Card which is supposed to be the best possible card given the first four. The machine chose the T♠, giving the player a 4-card royal flush. The player wanted the Dream Card to be another queen, giving him 3-of-a-kind.

I told him that a 4-card royal was much superior to a 3-of-a-kind. I suggested he enter the hand A♠ K♠ Q♠ Q♦ T♠ on Video Poker for Winners and see that the 4-card royal is worth 92.34 coins. Then if he entered the hand A♠ K♠ Q♠ Q♦ Q♣, he would see the value of the trip queens is 21.51. If the reader hasn’t gone through the exercise of checking the value of combinations using VPW or other quality software, it’s an educational process to go through. It’s not difficult and it is eye-opening.

“So,” I asked, “why on earth would you prefer 3-of-a-kind to a 4-card royal flush? It’s not close!”

“Well, my son uses the Dancer-Daily strategy card and that card says 3-of-a-kind is better. If it isn’t better, why did you print the wrong information?”

Hmm, this could be embarrassing. I do have a good explanation for that but I can see where the confusion arose. The first two lines in both the Basic Strategy and the Advanced Strategy for that game are as follows:

 

RF5; SF5; 4-OF-A-KIND; FULL HOUSE; 3-OF-A-KIND; TWO PAIR

RF4 > FL5 and ST5 > any SF4

 

The top line of the strategy lists all hands in that game that are always held when dealt — with no exceptions. This list of hands is not the same for all games. There are games where from AAA44 or AA339 you just hold the aces, but Jacks or Better isn’t one of those games.

The second line lists those cases where a 4-card royal flush or a 4-card straight flush is in the same five cards as a dealt flush or a dealt straight. That is, from A♦ K♦ Q♦ J♦ T♣ you hold just the diamonds, but from Q♦ J♦ T♦ 9♦ 8♣ you hold all five cards.

A key underlying assumption for the strategy cards is that the combinations listed on the first line of the card are mutually exclusive with the combinations listed on the second line of the card. That is, you can’t have 3-of-a-kind and a 4-card royal in the same five cards. It takes at least seven cards to have both combinations.

I suppose technically you could argue the hand A♥ K♥ Q♥ J♥ T♥ is on the first line of the card, and any four cards from that combination are also on the second line of the card — hence the lines are not completely mutually exclusive.  But anyone who has trouble figuring how to play a dealt royal has no chance to understand my writings anyway.

If combinations are mutually exclusive, it doesn’t matter which order you list them in. Liam W. Daily and I recognized that using this underlying assumption allowed us to give completely accurate strategies with fewer rules. And we saw that as a good thing.

When you introduce the concept of Dream Card and you’re considering among alternative fifth cards, we can no longer hold with the assumption of mutual exclusivity while playing that version.

Simply put, the Dancer-Daily strategy card was designed for the “regular” version of Jacks or Better, not the Dream Card version. Since the machine almost always selects the correct Dream Card, you can continue to use the strategy card for the hands where Dream Card is not in effect.

With all that said, while the T♠ would be a much better choice than the Q♣ given the first four cards, the J♠ would be better still, simply because a jack presents three extra chances to end up with a high pair (namely the other three jacks) and a ten gives you no such chances.

Possibly the machine actually gave the correct card and there was a mix-up in the way the situation was presented to me. I assume IGT and videopoker.com can check on that easily enough. But whether there was or wasn’t an error, a discussion on an underlying assumption of the strategy card made this a conversation worth having.

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How Bad Is It to Be Greedy?

I assume you know what it means to be greedy. If I’m right about this assumption, then you’re ahead of me. I’m very confused by what the word means.

I Googled “What is greed?” It came back with the Oxford Dictionary definition, “intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power, or food.” It mentioned that greed was one of the seven deadly sins. And it also quotes Gordon Gekko, the Michael Douglas character in the movie Wall Street who said “Greed is good!”

Still not clear.  When does a desire become intense? I remember back in college that sometimes friends and I would go out seeking pleasant short-term feminine companionship. I would call those desires intense and selfish. Back then, fifty years ago, there was kind of a “boys will be boys” mentality about “cruising for babes.” Today it is considered to be far more predatory than it was then. There are a lot of names you could have called our behavior back then, but I never considered “greedy” to be one of them.

If a student athlete wants to be good enough to someday be drafted into the National Football League, he might undertake the following: he begins his workouts every day at 6 a.m.; he spends hours each week studying game film to improve his own skills and figure out the tendencies of whoever is going to be his college opponent next week; he avoids drugs; he’s the last one to leave practice every day. It’s fair to call this athlete very intense. Although he loves the game, the potential million dollar benefits are certainly a part of working that hard. He may well be looking forward to buying his mother a house, but most of his thoughts about using this money are personal and selfish.

I would call the behavior in the preceding paragraph appropriate actions for somebody with a plan. Laudable behavior. Give that kid a standing ovation for working so hard. The actions, though, meet the Oxford Dictionary definition of “greed” namely “intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power, or food.” I think it’s far better to praise this young man for trying to make something of himself than it is to castigate him for the sin of greed.

I have heard the term greed used in at least four separate gambling contexts recently. Perhaps you didn’t hear of these particular instances, but I’m confident you’ve heard of similar ones.

The first was on a video poker bulletin board where somebody posted a picture of a $1,500 jackpot on a quarter Triple Double Bonus Ultimate X game with the note, “Unfortunately the greed took over and I kept playing and ended up with only $700. I hate when that happens!”

The second followed a story about another Las Vegas casino planning on charging for parking. This comment by a player who was unhappy with the casino’s decision started off with “Greed! Greed! Greed!”

The third was a comment from a quarter player who was mad at all the five dollar players for being greedy and winning all the drawings.

The fourth was about a player who hit three royal flushes in two weeks at a casino after which the casino kicked him out. The comment from another player was, “Serves him right for being so greedy!”

These examples do not follow the Oxford Dictionary definition.  The first case resulted from normal swings in a game with sky-high variance. If the swings went up, the person would have felt intelligent, skillful, and proud. When the swings went down, the player blamed greed. To me, it’s a case of the player either not understanding the normal swings of the game or being a bad loser.

In the second and third example, we have somebody else taking actions that cause our lives to be a little more expensive. Since they did it to us, then they are greedy! I see the world as a bunch of moving parts where each person is trying to do what’s best for himself. I do not expect anybody else to roll over and play dead in order for me to succeed. If they block me going to the left, I go to the right. As our outgoing first lady said recently, “If they go low, we go high.” I do not see this as greed on their part. Or on my part for adjusting to what they are doing.

In the fourth example, the player was greedy because he hit three royals? I don’t know anybody who knows for sure when he’s going to hit his next royal, let alone his next three. Royals happen in their own good time. It is possible you’re going to hit three royals tomorrow. It’s possible it’s going to be months and months before you hit that many.

The player who hits three royal flushes in a short period of time is fortunate. But greedy? Like he did it on purpose just to spite the casino? I might well have some unkind words about a slot director who thinks getting royals quickly is a sign of great skill, but calling the player greedy? I don’t get it.

What would I call greedy? Well, if there was only so much food for, say, four people, then taking more than a fourth of it before others have had a chance to eat would be greedy. If some food was left over at the end, then that’s fair game. Or perhaps two roommates were both trying to get ready to go and they had a deal that 15 minutes in the bathroom at a time was all you got. Someone who took more than that is greedy, in my opinion.

What these examples have in common is that there’s a fixed amount of something and sharing is the name of the game. In this context, greed is refusing to share. In a game situation, where players compete against each other, refusing to share is often the sensible thing to do.

If you think of the world as a closed system and everybody from all lands are brothers, then you can come up with some sense of greed. In this context, you’ll see “green” philosophies, which basically try to save the environment for everybody. Within that context, people who refuse to save the environment are greedy.

But you’re not going to get universal agreement on this. I can easily support a “take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints” philosophy when visiting a national forest. Whether we should shut down a lumber industry to save an endangered species of owl is a topic of spirited emotions on both sides.

If you cannot or will not see the world as a closed system and you believe it is “every man for himself,” then greed isn’t well defined, at least to me. Or perhaps, Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good!” makes sense. I do not see the world that way, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out exactly where the lines of demarcation go.