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 Giving“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.
I recently published an article on quitting when you’re ahead which may be found here. The article referred to a particular $100,000 royal flush I hit at Dotty’s and why circumstances at that establishment led me to quit gambling there for a few months after the jackpot. Some of the follow-up comments about the article were, to me, very strange and irrelevant. I wouldn’t call them stupid questions. I would call the questioners uninformed. Continue reading Is it Guaranteed?
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.
