A Mistake That Didn’t Cost Me

I happen to believe that mistakes cost you — even when they don’t. Say you were playing 9/6 Double Double Bonus for single line dollars, five coins bet, and were dealt 3♦ K♠ K♥ 3♣ 8♦.  Assume you’re knowledgeable enough and disciplined enough to know that holding KK33 is correct — but you were playing fast and only held KK because you saw the high pair but didn’t see two pair.

Further, assume the three cards you draw are 5♠ A♥ 9♣. Holding the kings only you end up with five credits. Had you held the two pair and ended up with the same draw (specifically only the 5♠), you would still end up with five credits. Many people believe this to be a no harm-no foul “non-event.”

I believe it cost you $1.16 in EV which is the difference in EV between holding KK33 and KK.

While it is true that you can’t take EV to the bank, my decisions in video poker (including which games to play, where, and when) all come down to EV. Over time, my actual results and my EV results will be fairly close.

They will never (okay, extremely rarely) be EXACTLY the same, but close enough. If they happened to be exactly the same and I played one more hand, they would usually be different. (If you want actual results and EV results to be identical all of the time, consider playing a change machine. You insert a hundred-dollar bill and get out five twenties. Put one of them back in and receive four fives. Put one of them back in and receive five ones. Then you take all that to the cashier and receive a $100 bill. Repeat. What fun!)

Each misplay I make costs me EV, and over time, those mistakes add up.

In the last week of August, there was a promotion at the Palms where video poker players received either a 2x or 3x multiplier every day. The base slot club returns 0.25%, so this means you would get either 0.50% or 0.75%. They limited the number of bonus points you could get to 80,000, so this meant if you received a 2x multiplier you could play $80,000 coin-in and if you received a 3x multiplier you could play $40,000 coin-in to max out your bonus points.

If this doesn’t make sense, don’t worry about it. Supposedly on October 1, Red Rock Resorts (formerly called Station Casinos) will be taking over and what is now Palms may be called something like Palms Station and be incorporated into the Boarding Pass system.

Since Station Casino has cut me off from receiving benefits long ago, along with several hundred other players, I do not anticipate playing at this casino once it changes ownership. And before October 1, I will convert my remaining Palms Club points to free play so I don’t have to worry about converting them once the casino changes names. If for some reason the conversion to Palms Station doesn’t go through, I can always start earning Palms Club points all over again.

Anyway, the only “decent” Ultimate X games at Palms that offer slot club points are 15-9-4-4-3 Deuces Wild. In the Ten Play version, this game returns 99.44%. With single or double points, a player is “under water” on the game, although that can possibly be made up with drawings, other promotions, and mailers. With triple points, the player has a slight advantage — with the drawings, other promotions, and mailers still on the table.

So I play this game during triple point days and avoid it otherwise. The machines come in 50¢ and $1 denominations, meaning $50 or $100 per 100-coin max bet. You can play it for Triple Play or Five Play with smaller maximum bets, but when you do the EV on the game is only 99.13% or 99.27% respectively. Not for me.

The strategy I use, which I will teach in my September 28 class at South Point, is broken down by the sum of the multipliers active at any one time. The multipliers may be anywhere between 10x and 120x. In the one-deuce section, for example, I recommend one strategy for multiplier sums between 10x and 31x, another strategy between 32x and 53x, a third strategy between 54x and 75x, and a fourth strategy between 76x and 120x.

So there are four different (but similar) strategies in the zero-deuce section and four more for the two-deuce section. In the three-deuce section, there are only two strategies for multipliers below 96x, and six more for those rare cases where it’s above 96x. For four deuces, there is only one strategy no matter what the multiplier sum is. I’m not going to tell you what it is.

In 2016, I’ve only played this game four times because it’s been rare when the conditions are good enough. So I haven’t committed this strategy to memory. It’s tougher than average to memorize and it’s a long time between opportunities, so I practice maybe a half hour before potential play and bring the strategy sheets with me.

The Palms is fewer than 10 miles from my home, so it’s not terribly inconvenient to go in and check whether my multiplier would be 2x (which means I wouldn’t play) or 3x (which means I would.) Every day I had the strategy with me — in case. I would show up slightly after midnight because there would be less competition for the machines at that hour. I’m not the only one who plays this game on 3x point days.

On Monday, August 29, I received a 2x multiplier. Tuesday, August 30, I received a 3x multiplier, and I sat down and played 40,000 points. I ended up a small winner, which was fortunate. Ultimate X has a VERY high variance and on any particular day, your score can be quite a bit ahead or quite a bit behind.

The last three days of the week, I received 2x multipliers each time and didn’t play. But I didn’t know it before I got there. So I practiced a bit, took my strategy with me, and was well rested when I showed up.

My strategy, which is on three sheets of 8½” x 11” paper is carried in a library book. If it takes awhile to be paid (like, for example, on an “in my dreams” hand of a dealt straight flush followed by a dealt royal which would pay $240,000 or $480,000 depending on which denomination I was dreaming about), I’ll read my book. Also, the sheets of copy paper last longer if they are protected by being in a book rather than carried loosely.

The last time I went to check my multiplier, however, I made a mistake. I had two library books checked out and the book I put my strategy in was not the one I ended up taking to the casino. So had the multiplier been 3x (it wasn’t), I wouldn’t have had the strategy with me.

Had I received the correct multiplier, I would have asked the attendant to lock up the machine, gone home to pick up the strategy, and been back within a half hour or so. It would have been a tad inconvenient, but not an EV loss, unless you want to argue that time is money and gas isn’t free and I wouldn’t have a good rejoinder to that. Still, I need to be more careful and wish I hadn’t made this mistake.

If this machine and opportunity is still available after October 1, you’ll have to find out from somebody else. I don’t expect to be welcome there.