I received the following email recently: “I have been playing a few years and consider myself a pretty good player. I consider myself Bob Dancer-trained and try to play accordingly. I have given up at least six royals going for the high pair. My question is how you overcome the mental anguish of missing the royal. It takes me days to get over it. I am retired, play 10 to 20 hours a week of 9/6 Jacks or Better or 8/5 Bonus Poker. Help me, please. Anguished in Ann Arbor.”
I did some calculation and my best guess is that this has happened to me between 600 and 700 times. But it’s a guess, because I have no recollection of it EVER happening. This guess is based on how many million hands I’ve actually played, on which types of games, and how many were on single line compared to Triple Play through Hundred Play.
We’re talking about a hand such as K♦ Q♦ J♦ 5♦ K♠, where the correct play depends on the game and pay schedule. If you’re playing Jacks or Better or Bonus Poker, like Mr. Anguished is prone to do, you hold the kings. If you’re playing Deuces Wild, you hold the suited KQJ. If you’re playing Double Bonus where flushes return 7 for 1, you hold all four diamonds.
If you hold the kings (whether it’s the correct play or not), once in 1,081 times the first two cards out will be A♦ T♦. Also, once in 1,081 times the first two cards out will be the 7♥ 3♣. As far as I am concerned, these two situations are equally relevant.
After I’ve held the kings and pressed the draw button, my “job” is over for this hand, and it’s time for me to start concentrating on the next hand. The best I can do is to play the hands perfectly. Going back and changing the past is not something I know how to do.
Although I prefer that I end up with four kings on this hand, I’m not too invested in that result. I know that I’ll get the 4-of-a-kind one time in 360 (more precisely three times in 1,081), full houses, 3-of-a-kinds, and two pair more frequently than that, but the hand will stay a single high pair more than seven times out of ten.
I have this type of draw numerous times every week. Sometimes I connect on the 4-of-a-kind and usually I don’t. Over the course of a year or two, it’ll average out pretty well, whether tonight is lucky or unlucky.
I suspect I’ve ended up with a 4-of-a-kind from this kind of position more tha 2000 times in my life. What this also means is that I’ve thrown away the royal more than 600 times from this same position. Drawing three cards to a high pair, you get any specific two cards (i.e. the cards that fill in the royal) one time out of 1,081 and you complete the 4-of-a-kind three times out of 1,081. Over the course of years, the numbers come out very close to this.
How many of this estimated 600 missed royals have I noticed? Exactly zero. Checking to see how the cards would play if I made an alternative, inferior, draw is a huge waste of time in my opinion. Doing this consistently would reduce my speed from 800 hands per hour to about 400. Why on earth would I want to waste that much time? Since I’m playing only when I have the advantage, this is slashing my dollars-per-hour win rate in half. It’s not only worthless information, but it’s expensive to gather. If you’re playing Fifty Play or Hundred Play, it could take several minutes at the end of each hand to work through all of this. Why bother?
Mr. Anguish seems to have the core belief that a missed royal is a tragic thing. He ignores the fact that trying for the royal every time (so that he can be assured of getting it when the cards are just right) would have cost him an extra 6,000 coins for every extra 4,000-coin royal received. He berates himself for not being clairvoyant enough to see the unforeseeable future.
The only reason Mr. Anguish takes the time to do this is to check whether he should feel really, really awful this time. One time in 1,081 he discovers that yes, indeed, feeling really, really awful this time is appropriate. The relief he feels the other 1,080 times is likely minimal.
To me, ignoring the specifics of a “what if” draw comes naturally. Perhaps Mr. Anguish is compelled to do this and can’t help himself. I don’t know. Offering useful advice on how you should deal with your compulsions is something I’m not good at. If this is something Mr. Anguish can learn NOT TO DO, I believe his life will work better.
Perhaps Mr. Anguish will find relief in this: If he held the 3 parts of the royal instead of the pair of kings he would have been pressing the draw button at a different microsecond and therefore would have drawn different cards. Of course now he will worry about what cards he might have gotten if he had not paused a moment to look at the waitress walking past. What fun! Mr. A – Play by the strategy and know you are doing your best.
Yeah. Mr./Mrs./Miss./Ms. “Woulda, coulda, shoulda” are always speculating on this stuff. Happens at table games too.
There are times when it is correct to break up the high pair if progressive jackpots reach a certain limit, I recently broke up a high pair to hit a $7K jackpot playing bonus poker.
Bob, I think you’re a little confused. When you’re drawing to the high pair there is 47C3=16215 outcomes and 45 of those outcomes is 4 Kings.(that equals 1 in 360 1/3)
He had it correct but just put it another way. 1081÷3=360.3333333…
I am having a horrible month, playing mostly FPDW, and down three royals. I am 0 for 55 on one-card draws to royals. I am also 1 for 93 on draws to 222. With “average” luck, I would have had one more royal and three more sets of deuces. I’d still be down. But in this rather awful cycle, there have been three instances where if I had misplayed the hand, I would have had a royal (that I knew about, because I still drew cards). I could beat myself up for somehow not “knowing” when to break up KKK to draw two to a royal. But that’s pointless. When you’re three or four standard deviations south of expectation, you just have to suck it up, then go outside, get hit between the eyes with the blinding Vegas sun, and go back inside and keep playing.
The upside is, I’ve been playing with a fifteen-royal bankroll, so the recent losses still have me well under 1% ROR. You can’t pay any attention to what happened today or this week or this month. It’s really all one long session.
Then you croak.
Mr. Anguish saying that he is ‘Bob Dancer trained’ and also worrying about what cards pop up after making the correct play is a contradiction. Maybe Mr. Anguish isn’t as Bob Dancer trained as he thinks he is.
I know a LOT of players ( some pretty good players) who get mad when they hit 4 natural aces playing deuces wild. They think they are unlucky because the 4 natural aces hit in deuces wild instead of double bonus. Somehow, they expect the highest paying hand to show up in the game with the biggest benefit for those games.
I recently played NSUD and had 14 paying hands in a row and increased my credits by about 75 coins. 14 winning hands in a row is a lot but I would have rather had 2 wild royals and 12 losers in those 14 hands. My credit meter would have increased more.
Bob has the advantage of having played millions of hands so he doesn’t worry about the what ifs or the dry spells. The more you play, the less you will notice the cards after the draw.
“After I’ve held the kings and pressed the draw button, my “job” is over for this hand, and it’s time for me to start concentrating on the next hand. ”
This. Right. Here.
I play BJ and this is where I’ve come to be. Whatever you’re playing, you play your advantage and whatever proper call that your strategy calls for and move onto the next hand. Recently had a a person sit next to me, chatter box who was expounding on why I should have raised my bet after winning a blackjack. I just told him the probability of winning two hands in a row doesn’t warrant the raise. Does it happen? Sure but I’m not playing on what coulda or woulda happened. I’m playing the statistics.
Second advice to anger person is to get themselves a stress ball or fidget spinner and put that “what if” energy into that. Works for me.
Holding KQJd from KQJ5dKs in Jacks on average costs 4530 coins per 4000 coin royal. By comparison, using maxEV strategy, on average it costs 4921 coins per royal and using min-cost-royal strategy, on average it costs 4880 coins per royal. Like the Kelly criterion, this is probably a controversial statement among gamblers, but it’s just math, you can see some details on the vpfree yahoo newsgroup FAQ under alternate strategies.