A ‘participation award’ is one you get just for being there — whether you win or lose. There are people who believe that when raising children, winning and losing isn’t so important, but participation is. With that in mind, there are some sports leagues for children where every player gets a trophy at the end of the year.
I’m not here to argue the merits of such a program and I’m not here to tell you how to raise your kids or grandkids.
What I want to talk about today are video poker’s participation awards. It’s possible you didn’t know there are any such things. But there are!
They are called jackpots!
A royal flush, which is the top award in most video poker games, is really a participation award. Show me a player who has hit 20 royal flushes in the past two months and I’ll show you someone who has played a LOT. Show me someone who hasn’t ever hit a royal flush, and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t played very much at all.
If you want to change the discussion to four aces, or maybe four deuces depending on the game, or dealt quads, or some other hand that pays well, be my guest. If you play long enough, you’re going to get these hands. If you don’t, you won’t.
But, do I hear you say, in the sports league for children that awards trophies to everybody, your skill level doesn’t matter. Surely, it’s different in video poker where you need to make skillful choices.
Well, yeah, sort of. On a hand like K♦ K♠ Q♠ J♠ 4♦, there are games where you should hold the kings and others where you should hold the spades. If you hold the spades, rightly or wrongly, on average you’re going to end up with a royal flush once every 1,081 of these hands. If you hold the kings, you’re never going to get a royal flush on this hand.
So, if the computer says to hold the kings on this hand but you actually held the spades and the 1,080-to-1 shot came in, would you consider that skillful? If you take a picture of the royal flush and show it to your friends, do they ever ask what cards you threw away? Or what game you were playing? Doubtful. Mostly they congratulate you on your good fortune and wonder what it’s like to be such a winner as you!
I participate on several Internet forums related to gambling. On some forums, you’ll see players posting pictures of dealt royals when they’re playing 8/5 Double Double Bonus, which is a game that returns less than 97%. There are other games shown in the pictures as well, yielding approximately the same thing.
Other posters on the forum line up and immediately congratulate the poster on the good fortune. My personal feeling is that anyone who plays a 97% game is clueless about the winning process. Clearly this is a losing player who got a participation award to briefly provide them with some ammunition to play more. To me, posting jackpots on such a bad game announces to the world that you are not a knowledgeable player. Why not keep this secret?
If I actually post such a comment, I get my head handed to me. People want to celebrate their participation awards. People want to be praised for how good they are. They tell me (correctly!) that it’s okay to be a recreational player and rejoice in their successes when they come.
So, I generally don’t comment on these jackpot pictures anymore. But I take note of who posted them. When that person enters into a later debate on some matter on the forum, I’ll understand going in that their opinion does not carry the same weight with me as the people who are actually knowledgeable players.
In my own case, I’ve hit more than 500 jackpots of $20,000 and larger. Are they all participation awards? Absolutely! Every last one of them! The only thing that number of jackpots tell you is that I’ve been playing a long time for higher stakes than many others play. It doesn’t tell you anything about how good a player I am.
Until you know why a player was playing a particular machine on a given day, what slot club benefits and promotions were available, and the accuracy of the strategy used, you have no idea how good that player is. You cannot say with confidence that someone who has hit 200 royal flushes is a better player than one who has hit four — although you CAN say the former has participated a lot more than the latter.
It seems to me that the better analogy to participation awards is slot club points and benefits. Everybody gets them, as a reward for simply playing, skill and results being irrelevant.
Royals aren’t participation awards, because the machines don’t scan your slot account and say, “Hey, you’ve been playing for a while, and you haven’t gotten a royal. Here’s one as a reward for your participation!” Would that they did! (I might not have had that 220,000-hand drought I had last year.)
There’s another reason, by the way, not to show disdain for some recreational player (that foul epithet) who is showing off a royal. You probably don’t know the context. There could be any one of a number of perfectly valid reasons for him to have been playing a “bad” game, including laundering free play. Assuming that someone who plays 8/5 DDB or whatever is a clueless rube is probably accurate, but possibly not.
Exactly. That guy playing the 97% game, might be getting enough extra back to where he’s making more than that 99.73% player is with his extras.
I can’t help but briefly watch other players make their choices while they are playing. Trust me, NO ONE knows how to play. That may be even more true here in California. And that includes any high limit rooms. I can count on one hand players I’ve seen that obviously know what they’re doing. In a casino I most frequent, for years, I have NEVER seen another “player”. Not one. And in Vegas, I’m going to assume there are more good players, but knowing people, that may be a big assumption. They don’t exist. I’ll bet even Bob Dancer could make an intelligent estimate as to how many really sharp players are in Vegas, and I’ll bet that number is too big. They must be a myth.
Think of all the trip reports you see online. Not only do they post pictures of 8-5 DDB, but they also post pictures of food. lol Big deal, a plate of food. Gee, I’ve never seen food before.
Vegas has a lot more good players in one place than most other locales do.
One way that I recognize an at-least-semi-strong player is he keeps showing up playing the same machines I do for the same promotions. He could be stalking me (doubtful), but if he isn’t, his thought processes on what makes a good machine and a good promotion are similar to mine. And, at least in my opinion, makes him a candidate for being a strong player.
Some of those players turn out to be fairly weak. It’s a different skill to identify what a good play is than it is to play the game accurately — but these skills are correlated. If he knows where and when to play, my working assumption is he’s pretty good.
I agree with Kevin Lewis on two points. First, royals are not participation awards. Participation awards are those in which all participants get the same ONE reward (same size or amount) at the same time. But with royals, we all get different numbers of royals, we get them at different times and frequencies, and we get them in about 6 different denominations, meaning that our payouts are different. Second, the fact that someone is playing a 97% game usually tells us that the player isn’t playing the best VP possible, but not always. In addition to the reasons already listed: 97% may be the best game the person can find at their local casino, and because of health or money, they can’t travel to Las Vegas; or they may really really want to sit next to a particular person (such as a spouse); or they may have FreePlay to use but higher-payback machines won’t accept FreePlay. On a different point, the notion that the numbers of royals gotten correlates to one’s amount of play is not so true; it took me 21 years of infrequent play, probably more than 300,000 hands (I estimate), before I got my first royal.
On a different point, the notion that the numbers of royals gotten correlates to one’s amount of play is not so true; it took me 21 years of infrequent play, probably more than 300,000 hands (I estimate), before I got my first royal.
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You’re confusing the concept of correlation with absolute predictability.
If you had the data to plot the number of royals received versus the number of hands played by each player, you’d see a very strong trend line. Would there be outliers as in your case? Of course. But that trend line would indicate a strong correlation.
It seems that all the “intelligent” gamblers who have commented thus far have missed the article’s point. Hint: it ain’t about spot-on analogies nor about bad players who hit happen to hit royal flushes periodically. The point, very simply, is that the more you put into video poker (or any endeavor for that matter), the more you’ll get out of it. Whether it be time, the most important element, and/or the effort to learn, or even master the task at hand, those who participate more–TO MORE PROFOUND EXTENTS–in the end, get more “trophies.”
The bad player who plays many hours will over the course of any given time period hit more jackpots than good players who hardly play. Hence, if that same bad player somehow finds out to pay attention to pay tables, then he or she will then hit even more jackpots over the same period of time. And, if our heretofore bad player then decides to master his or her favorite game’s basic strategy, more frequent jackpots will occur.
In fact, the concept is so simple that most of us learn (or at least hear) it as children but the truth is, though most of us convince ourselves we fully understand it, very few practice it unconditionally. This is why 90% of us fail at every endeavor we try and are then forced to work jobs we don’t like or out-and-out hate–then have the almost laughable temerity to pretend (at least publicly) that we are perfectly okay with having been self-relegated to the disingenuously-revered subsection of mankind known as “the salt of the earth.”
Like my 91 year old neighbor who reads and writes on a third-grade level and speaks like he’s chewing on nuts and bolts, these people tend to say things like “I worked hard all my life, I’m proud of myself.” No, mister 90 percenter, the nice house and fancy clothes you now brag you had most of your adult life you were only able to enjoy because you were lucky enough to have married a pretty good businesswoman who was smart enough to know to take over the financial reigns early in your relationship. You, on the other hand, are too mentally ill-equipped to realize that smart persons never confuse hard work with hard thinking.
Eagles 34, Patriots 20
And you missed my point. Just because someone is on a so called “bad pay table” doesn’t make them a poor player. Take blackjack for example. Many card counters scoff at 6:5 games but the “complete” player checks out EVERYTHING!
Not true. First of all, persistence (in ANY endeavor) does not necessarily lead to positive results. Doing something nonproductive or minimally productive over and over just mean you’re digging a deeper hole. That includes absolutely mastering that nonproductive activity. As far as video poker is concerned, learning to be a complete expert at, say, 9/6 DDB is not going to be productive, nor are you going to get any rewards for persistence.
Also, yes, obviously, you get more royals the more you play–even we “intelligent” folks understand that–but getting royals is not the object of the game. WINNING is. In fact, bad players often get more royals than good players, all other things being equal, because they go for royals when doing so isn’t the best play. So mastery of a given VP strategy will usually result in LESS frequent jackpots.
As far as we 90% who fail at everything are concerned—well, I can only marvel at how you’ve managed to put up with us surrounding and annoying you all your life without jumping off a bridge.
I assume you’d be willing to book a few $1000 bets to back up your prediction. I’ll take the Patriots +13.5. Should be a moneymaker for you 🙂
Yah, case in point, if your goal is to get royals (like it would be in a lot of tournaments), you should play royal only strategy and you’ll average a royal every 23,000 hands or so, instead of the 40,000+ it takes with “by the book strategy”. “Bad players” are probably playing too aggressively for the royal and hence get more royals than so-called “good players” who go by the book. Yet another reason why the casino policy of backing off players who get taxable royals is stupid. (Royal only strategy: 5RF>4RF>3RF>2RF>1RF>draw 5)