Not too long ago I wrote an article about the auto-hold on Oregon lottery machines that was pretty poor. See it here As stated in that article, I felt that the manufacturer had no obligation to guarantee that the hold was optimal unless such a declaration was posted somewhere on the machine. Comments I read […]
Posts in category Video Poker
A Strange Play in 9/6 Double Double Bonus Quick...
I periodically check the wizardofodds.com strategy calculator to make sure I’ve gotten every one of the special cases mastered. The format used in that application isn’t as user friendly (to me) as I’d like, although I’m sure that for some players it is easy to understand. For example, in discussing the hands where there is […]
Shutting Down Machines
There was a post a few weeks ago on vpFREE that said: “To all of you cretins that shut down machines – that’s not the right thing to do and I NEVER shut down any machine. I even tell others not to shut down machines and let others play. If you need to put in […]
Change Coming
More than four years ago I began co-hosting a weekly Thursday evening radio show called Gambling with an Edge. It took awhile to find our stride and settle on the best co-hosting partnership, but it’s now a popular show among both advantage gamblers and wannabe advantage gamblers. A surprising number of casino employees listen as […]
A Day at the Office
Saturday, March 27, was date night for Bonnie and me. We decided to go dancing to Wes Winters in the Grandview Lounge at the South Point and then have dinner afterwards. Wes Winters is our old “standby,” and we go there two or three times a month. I guess we’re semi-regulars. Dinner was going to […]
A Legal Case Involving Auto-Hold
I know of no casinos in Las Vegas that offer auto-hold, a feature on some video poker games where the machine offers a suggested play which the player can either accept or change. Years ago when I was teaching at Barona Casino, near San Diego, they had auto-hold on their video poker which was particularly […]
How Happy Do You Get with a Royal Flush?
I recently read Michael Craig’s “The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King,” which was about a banker from Texas, Andy Beal, taking on the best poker players in the world, one at a time, in heads up limit Texas Hold’em poker. For a discussion of the book, you can listen to the March 5, […]
A New Way to Answer an Old Question
I teach a lot of classes and one of the most frequently asked questions I get is, “If I’m having a bad session, when do I change machines?” My answer was always some version of, “It doesn’t matter. Changing machines has absolutely nothing to do with the winning process.” Several years back I started trying […]
False Conclusions
This column was inspired by the following article: fivethirtyeight.com, although the author of that article shouldn’t be blamed for the direction it inspired me to take. The fivetirtyeight.com website, one of my favorites, takes a mathematical and statistical approach to analyzing a number of different types of situations. The particular article cited above looked at […]
Comparing Video Poker to Basketball
I lived in greater Los Angeles from my birth in 1947 until 1993 when I moved to Vegas. I was a fan of the local sports teams — primarily Dodgers and Lakers, not so much the Angels, Kings, or Ducks. Perhaps 40 years ago I was listening to a Lakers basketball game on the radio. […]
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