Comments on: Losing at VP – Part 4

By: dhoppell

dhoppell — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:03:25 +0000

What really drives me crazy, is when someone is playing two machines at the same time, AND THEY ARE DIFFERENT GAMES!!! I flew 3000 miles to play my favorite VP game in my favorite Downtown casino, only to find someone hogging my Deuces Wild machine as well as the Double Double Bonus machine next to it. How hard would it be to play one hand with DW strategy and the next hand with a different DDB strategy, and DW and DDB strategies aren’t very similar. As if that wasn’t challenging enough, this person had a system that if they won on one of the machines, they would hit the cash-out button on the coin-dropper, scoop the coins out of the tray, and feed them into the other machine. They were either a genius, an idiot savant, or the typical clueless VP player that we (and the casinos) depend on to keep the better games on the floor.

By: Kevin Lewis

Kevin Lewis — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:22:19 +0000

The machines supposedly deal randomly, with no “memory” of past hands. So in reality, there is no such thing as a “hot” or a “cold” machine. Our tendency to perceive patterns (as in, “streaks”) is an artifact of our primate brains, and is so strong as to make us INVENT patterns in observed data, and to ascribe meaning to them where no such meaning actually exists (which sells a LOT of Racing Forms).

This can be tested empirically. If there was such a thing as “hotness” or “coldness” in a machine (or a blackjack dealer, or a roulette wheel), then logically, that would equate to having recently won (or lost) making it more likely that the player would win (or lose) in the immediate future. That, in turn, would strengthen the existing tendency, until at some point, there would be machines where the player always won, and some where the player always lost. I know of no such machines, in either category (and if there were any always-winning machines, Harrah’s would have bought the casino they were in and then taken them out back and blown them up).

So bunny-hopping from machine to machine will neither harm you nor hurt you–the next hand is equally likely to win whether it is on Machine A or on the identical game on Machine B. You will, however, be subject to what psychologists call “confirmation bias”–you will remember the times when you switched and then hit something big, and forget the times when you switched and nothing special happened.

By: Kerr Mudgeon

Kerr Mudgeon — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 05:19:55 +0000

Jean,
I understand what you mean by switching games, like JOB -> BP, etc., but do you have an opinion on moving from one machine to another while playing the same game?
I usually play Bonus Poker, and I have a habit of moving from machine to machine, looking for the one that’s “hot” – then I move on to another “hot” machine to play Bonus Poker on it when the previous machine cooled off.
I try to avoid the worst pay tables machines, so I often restrict my gambling hours to ones when more machines are available – like after midnight, or early in the morning.
I’ve had success playing “streak machines”, although I’ve sometimes lost a lot investing in a series of machines that were “cold”.
Any comments on this strategy?