A few more questions have come in from my Harrah’s Cherokee Casino trip report. A couple pertained to the other Cherokee casino in North Carolina.
Q: Did you ever consider switching your play to the Harrah’s Cherokee Valley River Casino in Murphy, North Carolina?
Q: Have you tried the other Cherokee casino, in Murphy, NC? I have had little to no real wins at the casino in Cherokee, NC, since they started the massive ongoing building project.
A: I would have liked to switch our play to Valley River, since it’s about an hour closer to our home in Columbus, GA. However, with research on vpFREE2 and questions on the vpFREE forum, it seems that no video poker games there have an EV (expected theoretical value) as high as the 99.7% I could find in Cherokee, and most of the lower denominations have the same low-EV paytables in both casinos.
I don’t know if the player who asked the second question was playing VP or slots. You can find out the theoretical return of any VP machine and compare them at both properties by checking the paytables. You can’t do that by studying the slot machines. However, I doubt that the losing streak was due to the building projects, since the same tribe owns both casinos and slot returns at both are probably similar. Losing streaks will come to all players – it’s just the universal volatility of gambling!
Q: After not playing for a while, was it easy to remember NSUD strategy or were you a little rusty?
A: I wasn’t a little rusty. I was extremely rusty! And this really surprised me. For the last couple of years that I lived and played in Las Vegas, NSUD was my main game choice. I used to say that I’d played it so much and for so long, I could probably play it in my sleep. In fact, I had even played it in some of my dreams! 😊
But I did know I should brush up a bit before I left for Cherokee, so I pulled up the software to practice. I started playing at my usual fairly fast speed and was astonished to see error messages come up – not once in awhile, but frequently. I carefully analyzed every error and found out that it wasn’t because I’d forgotten the strategy, but was the result of not immediately seeing the correct play as I scanned the hand on the screen.
In that last year and a half of not playing, I’d lost an important skill that I really hadn’t been fully aware of in the past: the difference between looking and seeing. Oh, I sometimes said that when I was tired, my fingers refused to hit the draw button after I’d held a play and that alerted me to the fact that I needed to look again for a different, correct play. But I hadn’t realized that this “seeing” was like a second sense that was an unconscious inner guide the whole time I would be playing. I’d read some scientific writings about this phenomenon, but hadn’t really connected it to playing video poker.
This internal guide was something that developed by doing the same thing over and over until it became almost automatic. Although I really didn’t consciously conceptualize this idea, I see now that I understood that it was not a perfect guide. It would become inoperable when I was tired or worried or upset. It didn’t work at all when my surroundings were chaotic and distracting. So when these circumstances were present, I instinctively knew I should slow down and use extra care in choosing my holds.
This sudden illumination of the difference between just looking and actually seeing prodded me to undertake long practice sessions on my computer before we left for Cherokee. I deliberately played extra fast for a short time, then went back and checked what kind of errors I was making. That helped me “train” my inner regulator to look for those. But a few days’ practice wouldn’t get me back to that former power that had been building up for years during thousands of hours of play. That’s why it took me longer than planned to get up to the higher-tier levels for which I was aiming. Nothing like playing a $5 machine and knowing the cost of errors to slow down your play, making you almost paranoidly careful!
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This ends the very long Cherokee trip report. However, I always appreciate comments and questions related to past blogs. In fact, my next blog will discuss some of the questions I received about CRZ casinos, not just Cherokee, but generally about play in that whole huge kingdom: their tier system, the players club benefits, the differences between high-level and low-level play. Let me know if you want me to cover other often puzzling areas!
Thank you for your six part series! Staying at Harrah’s Cherokee in August. Looking forward to it as I seem to visit every August. Will heed your advice. Thank you, Dale White
DON’T BE AFRAID TO USE STRATEGY CARDS IN THE CASINO! Unless tribal casinos are different from Las Vegas casinos, the management won’t mind your using them. I always use my strategy cards when I play VP in Vegas. They actually spare me from having to practice on my computer before a trip. I start a playing session, and whenever I honestly don’t know what the correct hold is for a certain hand, I just look at the card, and I “relearn” the correct strategy. This will happen several times on my first day of play, then I only need the card occasionally on the 2nd day, and then I rarely need it on the 3rd day. And no matter how “on top of it” you feel, you can still get hit with a momentary brain malfunction and not know what to hold; having your card there allows you to look up what to do and prevent an error.
Like you, I’ve played a LOT of NSUD in these past few years, for the same reasons. I didn’t play much at all over the last 14 months, like everyone else. So when I hit the South Point earlier this month, I found that I was making a few of the same errors, over and over. In particular, I was missing holds like A35 suited (and throwing away all five cards instead), and for some dumb reason, I kept holding other double-gap three-card straight flushes even over a plain old inside straight. The former error has a trivial cost but the latter can be quite expensive. I fixed these errors after self-monitoring and slowing down for a couple of hours until I was sure I was playing optimally.
I was surprised that a game I had been able to play extremely rapidly and reflexively without any errors was now one where I had to stop and think. My hands per hour rate dropped like a rock (and this really bothered me, because I was “putting in time” to earn gift cards and this forced slowdown meant I had to spend that many more hours to achieve the same goal). What I seemed to have lost was my ability to instantaneously evaluate a hand. What I had regarded as a skill that had become ingrained turned out to be one it was all too easy to lose without practice.
Did you notice any discernible pattern in your errors when you were practicing?