You Can’t Hope Your Way to Victory

I recently saw a Northwestern Mutual commercial which aired during the college football playoffs. Although it ended as an advertisement for their insurance company, the part that interested me said:

There are no accidental champions.

They are won in the offseason.

In football, this seems to be true. You want the quarterback and the wide receivers “on the same page.” This kind of rapport is built up over years of practice, both during the season and over the summers. If the rapport isn’t there by the time of the playoffs, you can’t do a whole lot to create it quickly.

The same is true with physical conditioning. The guys who lift weights and do a lot of running during the offseason have a much better chance of still being in good shape at the end of the season. You can’t make yourself strong and flexible in a few short weeks. It must be done over a long period of time if it is going to be done at all.

There are, of course, some flukes in football. The ball sometimes takes a funny bounce and the best team doesn’t always win. But there are teams that win far more than their share of games. Somehow these teams have a culture of winning and they usually work very hard to maintain whatever edge they have. It’s not accomplished just by hoping.

For me, success at video poker is like that. I see a lot of players whose strategy appears to be mainly hoping for a royal flush or perhaps four aces with a kicker. When these things don’t happen, they say that it’s all luck anyway and they’re just not lucky.

The “offseason” in video poker involves studying everything worthwhile that’s been written about the games you’re interested in — and then reading it all again every three to five years; it’s keeping your physical well-being in order through diet and exercise; it’s keeping your emotional or spiritual well-being in order through prayer or meditation; it’s practicing on the computer; it’s scouting in order to find new opportunities because you know the current ones won’t last forever; it’s analyzing promotions; it’s knowing several games well enough that you can take advantage of promotions at a number of casinos; it’s finding and nurturing a core of other like-minded players who can share information and help you improve; it’s building and protecting your bankroll; and it’s even actively considering Plan B in case video poker dries up completely as a money-making opportunity. (I also find teaching and writing about the games very educational. There’s always someone who knows less about video poker than you do, and the writing process is useful whether or not anyone else reads it.)

I’m not much for New Year’s resolutions — but the previous paragraph is chock full of good suggestions for those of you who are.

People understand that football playoffs are big competitions and players and teams need to prepare for them. A lot of players don’t appreciate that gambling in a casino is a big competition as well. Successful players prepare for doing well at gambling just as football players do for the playoffs.

Video poker has its own flukes, of course. If you play half the time for quarters and half the time for dollars, being “under-royaled” for quarters and “over-royaled” for dollars is much more profitable than the other way round. When you were dealt that royal, were you playing on a single line game or Ten Play? If you play a game with multipliers (Super Times Pay or Ultimate X, for example), what kind of multiplier was active on your biggest hands?

If you want to think of video poker as just a game that you play just for fun, go right ahead. You’re in good company with millions of others. It’s okay to think of the game as a (somewhat expensive) hobby. If you have money to spend and that’s how you want to spend it, be my guest.

I choose to think of video poker as a tough challenge for which I need to mightily prepare (in the offseason, as it were). This preparation has paid off. To others it sometimes looks like I am very lucky. To me, it feels like I have planned my work and then worked my plan.