Author: Bob Dancer

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Lessons from Backgammon, Part 2 of 2

(Editor’s Note) We’ve just discovered that, due to a technical glitch, last-week’s Bob Dancer blog wasn’t posted. We’re putting it up now and will resume the usual schedule this week.

Last week, I began a two-part article where I described important gambling lessons that I learned years ago while playing backgammon and that are still applicable today playing video poker. I suspect those same lessons would be applicable at most gambling games, as well as with other endeavors.

Continuing those lessons I learned at the Cavendish West:

6. Many players played too fast.
In backgammon, many rolls have one obvious play. Many other rolls offer several “reasonable” plays, each with pluses and minuses. It takes time to correctly evaluate which one is better. Often, you have a choice between two or more ways to play an ace (one). They might be equally safe on this particular play, but they differ in their effectiveness on the next roll or two.

You frequently must make a “pay me now or pay me later” kind of decision about when to take a chance. Sometimes you have to decide whether it is better to make a play that helps your offense or another one that helps your defense.

Sometimes, of course, players just plain don’t understand why one play is superior to another. But often they can figure it out if they spend some time. But spending a lot of time studying moves is hard work, and even harder if you’re tired.

A lot of players, including myself, played faster than was appropriate and paid the consequences.

7. Mind-altering substances didn’t help play. Whether we’re talking about legal or illegal substances, when you played someone a lot you could tell the difference in their moves when they were high compared to when they weren’t.

8. People could and did go broke.

It’s not some theoretical possibility that is pretty rare. If you don’t have a safety net (i.e. parents who will bail you out, a couple of million dollars in the bank, someone who is willing and able to support your gambling losses, etc.), you need to take bankroll considerations into account. Bankroll calculations are easier to make in video poker because the value of a game and the value of slot club are more easily figured out than they are in backgammon.

9. It was easy to forget when gambling that we were dealing with real money. In backgammon, we would deal with “points,” where each point was worth $1, $5, $20, etc. Psychologically being down 60 points wasn’t that much better than being down 90. You tried very hard to “get even,” even though how much you started with that day was a pretty meaningless number.

10. Losing streaks brought out the worst of people’s personality. If someone had any tendency to lie, cheat, steal, or a number of other negative habits, you’d likely see them do it more when they were losing. They might have been 100% trustworthy during normal times, but put them on a losing streak and they were different people.

11. People were crazy (and still are)!

In backgammon, the game is played against live opponents, many of whom have strong personalities that may or may not mesh with mine. I have my own personality quirks that don’t appeal to everybody.

Consequently, I concluded that to be a contented player, I needed a gambling game with less human interaction than backgammon. For that reason, I shunned live poker. I would NOT enjoy being across the table from a Mike Matusow or a Phil Hellmuth. It’s possible I could develop the technical skills to compete with them. (Possible — not certain. They both are VERY good.) But I don’t have the temperament to deal with yelling and screaming they bring to the table.

Compared to backgammon, the human interaction in video poker, although sometimes important, is minor.

This is one observation that fits into the “your mileage may vary” category. Other players do just fine in poker and backgammon and can deal with the personalities involved. This is not my strength, and a key part of success is figuring out what your strengths are and going with them.

12. Finally, a good memory and keeping records was very important. You needed to know whether a particular player was better or worse than you. If you had good records of his or her results when you played together, you had a pretty strong indicator.

There are players whose leaks are exploitable. Some passed doubles more than they should, so you doubled them early compared to the theoretically optimal point. Others took doubles much later than was advised. Against those players, it was never a good idea to double early.

Over time you played a lot of different players and you needed to have notes about all of them. A good memory is good — but written notes last longer and are better.

Keeping records for tax purposes is done in video poker but is largely not done in backgammon. There are no official records or W-2Gs in backgammon — save for the occasional tournament — and the majority of successful players “forget” to declare any gambling income.

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Lessons from Backgammon, Part 1 of 2

From 1974 through 1980, I averaged 80-100 hours per week playing or studying backgammon. For the next 12 years, I had a job (because I lost my bankroll playing backgammon) and reduced my backgammon time to an average of about 15 hours per week. In 1994, I began playing video poker and haven’t played significant backgammon since that time.

The success I’ve experienced at video poker is at least partly due to what I learned as a backgammon player.

I addressed this subject in my autobiography, Million Dollar Video Poker, in the chapter called “Lessons from the Cavendish West.” The Cavendish West was a bridge/gin/backgammon club in the West Hollywood part of Los Angeles. That was where most of my play took place.

That book was written more than 10 years ago, and I haven’t reread it recently. I won’t reread the chapter I mentioned until after these two articles are completed. I’m sure there will be a lot of overlap, but my perspective has changed over the last decade.

Video poker and backgammon are played quite differently. But in such things as preparation, looking for an advantage, and dealing with winning and losing, I was able to apply my backgammon skills to video poker.  The following are some of the things I learned from backgammon that continue to serve me well today:

     1.  Everybody won some of the time. Everybody lost some of the time. But one group of players won most of the time and another group of players lost most of the time. The losing players would explain to whomever listened that it was their bad luck that caused them to be losers. The winning players would pretend to agree with them. After all, without losing players there could be no winning players.

 

     2.  The strong players regularly played “propositions.” A proposition is when you place the checkers in an agreed upon position and play it out over and over again. Sometimes odds were offered. Sometimes not. Although there were some who did this because they were hustling, usually it was done in order to better understand the position.

Backgammon, at the time, had no computer programs that could tell you that this play was the best from this particular position. So, players had to figure it out, and playing propositions repeatedly was one way to do that. This was one way they studied, and if you put a gambling element into it, it was more interesting.

Today they have a number of computerized backgammon programs primarily developed by artificial intelligence. From a particular position, the program will tell you that this move gives you an EV of 51.2% and this other move gives you an EV of 48.1%. The program “knows” this because it plays each position over and over again until it comes up with an estimate. If you accept this particular program as being best, clearly the first move is superior to the second. Usually a play this close could not be determined with certainty by players at the table, but good players would often sense that the first play was better.

Players who play a lot against computer programs today get much better much faster than we did back when I played. Even though I had thousands of hours of experience and was a pretty fair player back in the early 90s, I would not stand a chance against today’s players. The computer programs have increased knowledge about the game considerably.

     3.  The biggest enemy of many players was their emotions. Backgammon has frequent situations where you can be way ahead and then a few rolls later you are hopelessly behind. Some players were devastated when this happened against them — and it happened several times every day.

Going “on tilt,” or “steaming,” were frequent results of that lack of emotional control. In backgammon there is a doubling cube, where stakes can be doubled mid-game, and then doubled again, and again, at later times. At each of these doubling occurrences, emotional control is necessary to correctly evaluate whether or not the doubling should be offered by one player and accepted or rejected by the other.

When players were steaming, frequently they doubled too early and/or accepted too late. It was a very expensive way to play.

     4.  It was important to evaluate your “opponent.” In video poker this is relatively easy, as your opponent is a game, such as 9/6 Jacks or Better or perhaps 7/5 Bonus Poker, which has a well-known return for perfect play. Perfect play is relatively simple given today’s software products.

In backgammon, your opponents are human beings — who have different skill sets and different emotional strengths and weaknesses. In addition, these opponents, like all humans, have good days and bad days.

Evaluating one person is difficult enough, but often backgammon is played in a version called a “chouette,” which means a game with three or more players in it. To properly evaluate a chouette, you need to know the strengths of each player — which is often an impossible task to do precisely.

Equally important was accurately evaluating your own skill level relative to others.

     5.  Hand in hand with opponent evaluation was game selection. To be a winning player you had to play in games where you had the advantage. In video poker it’s fairly easy to figure that out. In backgammon, it’s much more difficult.

If you were playing another player heads up, and you were better than him, it would have been fairly unusual for him to continue to want to play you. Social skills were important here. I observed charming players who could always find excellent games because they were so much fun to play around. I observed crabby people where the opposite was true.

I will continue this discussion next week.

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Which is Better?

Back when I was in graduate school studying economics, professors would often compare Model A versus Model B, where the two models were identical except for one specific difference. The professor then addressed a situation where the two models would yield different results, and so we learned what feature of the models led to what kind of results.

The real world isn’t like that, of course. Virtually any two things you could want to compare would differ in far more than one area. Still, it’s a useful type of exercise. Sometimes you can extrapolate the results of this kind of exercise and get real world conclusion, and today we’re going to try to do just that.

Assume there are two must-be-there-to-win drawings at different casinos at 7 p.m. next Friday. The casinos are similar in size with equivalent games and slot clubs, 10 winners sharing $xxxxx, the prize structure is identical, and it requires $500 coin-in to earn each drawing ticket. You know from experience that you can play enough so that you have a reasonable chance at being called.

The only relevant difference is that at Casino A, the first person called (and is present within 90 seconds) gets the top prize, the second person gets the second prize, etc. At Casino B, all ten winners pick an envelope so the order you were called is of no importance. Which structure do you prefer?

Before we can answer that, assume the actual number of drawing tickets from the players drawn this particular night, sorted from highest to lowest rather than in the actual order selected, is as follows:

1,003
127
83
60
51
47
31
28
19
2

If you’re the guy with 1,003 tickets, meaning you played more than $500,000 for this drawing and nobody else played as much as $70,000, it’s much better for you to compete in Casino A. You’re not guaranteed to be called first. In fact, before the drawing, you aren’t a lock to be called at all. But most of the time that you play this much you’re going to be picked early on and your prizes will be bigger on average at Casino A.

For similar reasons, if you are the guy with two tickets, you were extremely fortunate to be called at all. There were likely a few hundred entrants with fewer than ten tickets and you were the lucky one who was chosen this time. On those rare occasions when you do get chosen, you’re more likely to be one of the last ones drawn than one of the first ones. For you, Casino B represents your better option.

We can extrapolate from this. If you tend to play more than average, the better the Casino A structure benefits you. Conversely, if you tend to play less than average, the better Casino B structure benefits you.

Anyone who has paid attention to lots of drawings knows that occasionally the guy with one or two tickets wins the big prize and the guy with the most tickets more than occasionally gets completely shut out. There is a large random element to drawings.

While the preceding paragraph is undoubtedly true, don’t make the mistake of concluding that how many tickets you have in the drum is irrelevant. The more tickets you have, the better your chances are to win. You just need to recognize that having a better chance doesn’t mean you’re 100% certain to win, and having a slim chance doesn’t mean no chance at all.

Also, for those in the Casino B drawing:  The first guy gets his choice of all ten envelopes, the second guy gets to pick from the remaining nine, all the way down to the tenth guy getting whatever is left. Usually by the time the last guy gets his remaining envelope, the best prize is already gone. It can seem at that point like it would have been far better to be chosen first and have all ten envelopes to choose among.

And that is an illusion. Assuming the envelopes are indistinguishable from each other (a typical condition, but not one that’s guaranteed to be true every time), there is no advantage to going first. The last-drawn guy has the same 1-in-10 chance of getting the biggest prize as the first-drawn guy does.

As a final factor to consider I want to look at how well you’ve done at one of these casinos recently. If you’ve won first prize twice in the past three months at one of the casinos, then the other casino is a better option for the next few months. Do not fall into the trap of believing “Casino A is my lucky casino because I win more there.” A far bigger concern is casinos can and do remove your welcome when you win frequently.

Players can argue until they’re blue in the face that these kinds of things shouldn’t matter. But in the real world they do. So, act accordingly.

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Can You Do Everything Correctly in Video Poker and Still Go Broke?

The “system” I promote for winning at video poker has two main steps to it:

  1. Only play when you have the advantage over the house. This includes the base return on the game, the slot club, promotions, mailers, drawing entries, and possibly other things.
  2. Play for small enough stakes that your bankroll isn’t overly endangered. (Some simplify this to only play for what you can afford to lose.)

Do this, I tell gamblers, and in the long run you’ll very likely prosper.

Calling this an actual “system,” or suggesting that I invented it, is ludicrous. It is, however, the methodology I suggest is the best way to win at the game.

In last week’s column, I wrote that it’s conceivable that even when I think I have the advantage over the house, I’m actually the underdog. I don’t believe that happens very often, perhaps never, but it’s conceivable.

If you’re playing a game for stakes where your bankroll is going to be safe 99.99% of the time, one in 10,000 people who does this is going to end up broke. That’s what 99.99% means. It’s like when certain polls said Donald Trump had a 25% chance of winning the presidency at a certain point a few years ago, the polls weren’t wrong. A 25% chance means that there’s a 1-in-4 chance for it to happen, and in that election, the 1-in-4 “longshot” came in.

In truth, calculating exact bankroll requirements is essentially impossible. The two best programs for this, Video Poker for Winners and Dunbar’s Risk Analyzer for Video Poker, will tell you that if you play a particular game with a particular slot club forever and ever, your required bankroll for a 1% (or 0.1% or 0.001% or whatever) is such-and-such.

The thing is, available video poker games change over time. Slot clubs change over time. Many of us play a variety of different games at a variety of different casinos — and next year will have a new set of games to play as things evolve. Calculating exact bankroll calculations in this environment is essentially impossible — partly because we don’t know what games and slot club conditions will be available next year.

To work with this, many competent players (including me) take this approach: “Play with an advantage, with what seems like an appropriate bankroll, and hope for the best.” We all know that “hope for the best” isn’t a strategy, but in the face of such an insolvable mathematical problem, sometimes that’s the best we have. Under-betting your bankroll is safer than over-betting.

There are those who talk about Kelly betting, which is a system of bet-sizing that will grow your bankroll at the maximum rate while essentially reducing to zero your chances of going broke. I’m not going to go there because bet-sizing in video poker is often very limited (as in such-and-such a pay schedule is only available for quarters and this other pay schedule is only available for $5 Triple Play, Five Play, and Ten Play) and your actual edge has some guesswork in there since you’re never positive what your mailer is going to be next month. You can make an educated guess — but sometimes you get surprised.

So, occasionally, somebody can do everything right and still go broke. It’s fairly rare, but it does happen. And if it does happen, they can correctly call it bad luck. A 1-in-10,000 (or whatever it was) case of bad luck.

Those people who do go broke playing video poker, however, usually aren’t victims of this kind of very unusual bad luck. It’s far more likely that some or all of their play was on games where they didn’t have the advantage. Or when they had an advantage if they played every hand perfectly, but they made too many playing errors.  Or sometimes they played while under the influence of one thing or another and they didn’t actually have the advantage during those times. It’s far more likely that even if they did have an edge, the edge was too small relative to their bankroll and the stakes they were playing.

Let’s say we have heard that “Joe,” a guy we thought was a pretty good player, actually went broke while playing video poker. What we will almost certainly never know for sure is:

  1. Exactly what games was he playing?
  2. With exactly what slot club?
  3. With exactly what other promotions going on at the time?
  4. Under what state of sobriety, alertness, and psychological readiness?
  5. What was his starting bankroll?
  6. Did he make any major withdrawals from his gambling bankroll for anything else (perhaps a car, house, vacation, medical bills, helping out relatives, a mistress, drugs, etc.)?
  7. How close to perfectly did he play?

Not knowing this kind of information (in addition to the fact that this particular Joe is hypothetical, so the information is even more unknowable), my personal conclusion would be that it is far more likely Joe violated one of the two numbered conditions at the start of this article than it would be he just got unlucky.

Knowing about a few such people doesn’t shake me from my belief that the “system” works. Call it a Bayesian probability approach, if you will.

I know others who take the approach that “If it could happen to Joe, it could happen to anybody. There’s no guarantee. It’s all random luck.” To those who believe that, I say I believe the math is on my side, but I understand that you are inconvincible.

Some people are more comfortable investing in the stock market rather than gambling. That’s a good bet. A considerable portion of my bankroll is in the stock market. But there’s risk there too. Ten years ago, the market took a 50% dump. For people who owned stocks on margin, it could have been a 100% or 200% dump or even bigger. If you’ve held on since then, the market has recovered and then some. But many people didn’t have the nerve or the wherewithal to hang on.

This column is not about politics, but with the chances of a trade war and/or nuclear war are arguably higher than they were two years ago.  Who knows what the prognosis of the stock market is over the next few years? With video poker, you can know before you make each bet.

(One anecdote isn’t proof of anything, but this one is close to home for me. My father, born in 1915, was 92 years old when the 2007 stock market crash happened. He had about $60 million invested in the market in 2007 — a considerable lifetime achievement — much of it on margin — because he was obsessed with making $100 million before he died. Everyone told him that what he was doing wasn’t prudent at all — but he wouldn’t listen. He felt that he had built up all that money, we hadn’t, and that proved he was smarter than us. He ended up losing everything — and the shock of going from a multi-millionaire to penniless and depending on his children for support was devasting. He ended up losing his mind and dying a few years later.)

Owning your own home has traditionally been a good investment. Many parts of the country, including Las Vegas, had a huge real estate recession 15 or so years ago. Some home owners are still upside down. Long term, if they can hold on, the prices will probably come back. But there will always be people who couldn’t hold on and lost everything with this “good” investment.

Any other investment vehicle you can name has had some ups and downs. I’m somebody who believes the ups and downs of video poker are lower than those of other investments — IF you follow the two rules set out at the beginning. Most people who fail at video poker broke one or both of those rules.  

I’ve been told that I’m responsible when somebody goes broke playing video poker because I encouraged them to play. To that I say I’ve been issuing the same caveats for years. I strongly recommend that if you don’t have the edge, don’t play. If you choose to play anyway, I don’t see how that is my responsibility at all.

On my father’s bookshelf when he died were numerous publications on making money in the stock market. The authors of those publications didn’t suggest he invest the way he did at all. Was it their fault that he went broke? Not in my opinion.

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Is It Even Possible to Play Perfectly?

In a recent comment posted on www.gamblingwithanedge.com about my March 27 “He Screwed Me!” column, Liz wrote, in part,

“And, mathematically speaking, we can never be 100% sure that even Dancer always has the edge. I’m willing to believe he knows all the maxEV strategies cold including penalty cards, but that’s not the same thing as playing in a casino environment and never making a mistake.”

To that I respond: “Apples and oranges!”

If Liz wants to suggest that sometimes I don’t know strategies perfectly or sometimes mis-key or not carefully examine all the options before I make a play, I’ll plead guilty. I still play at a 99.9% accuracy level, probably higher, but that number is gradually lowering as I advance more into my senior years.

But not playing with the maximum possible edge is not the same as not playing with an edge. Let’s say I calculate a play is worth 100.4% but I only play at the 99.9% accuracy level. That lowers the return to 100.3% — but it’s still an edge.

A far more likely source of possibly playing without an edge is making the wrong assumptions. If I assume a drawing is worth 0.5% and it’s actually worth only 0.05%, that could turn what I think is a play-with-an-edge into one where the house has the advantage.

Usually, I won’t ever know for sure what a drawing is worth. Estimating how many actual tickets are in a drum is tough. Estimating how many virtual tickets are in a virtual drum is tougher. All I will know is whether or not I got called THIS TIME. That’s not really useful information insofar as what the drawing is worth.

Over time, if I learn that when I’ve played $100,000 coin-in at this casino I’ve been called 40% of the time, then it’s easier to make a reasonable estimate. But you need a lot of data points. Having friends who play at about the same level as you and who share information with you is useful.

But since it takes time to gather this information, for some period you’re “flying blind.” You can make a “best guess” without a whole lot of confidence in that number. This can lead to you playing a game where you think you have the edge, but after you collect more data, you’ll find out you don’t.

How much is a slot tournament worth? You can get some idea based on the number of entrants and the total prize pool — but you frequently don’t know until you’re already there. A video poker tournament is different. I’ll triple or quadruple the average prize simply because I can play faster and make better decisions than many of the other entrants. I’m still going to need to hit some hands to win, but I have a better chance of doing that than many other players.

Inherent in most plays is the assumption that you’re going to be getting so much cash or free play in the mail. If you play the same amount every month and get the same mailer each month, it’s easy to put that into percentages. If your play varies and your mailers do too, it’s tougher. You usually don’t know if your mailer is based on three months, six months, or who-knows-what.

Sometimes there’s a “win too much and you get cut off” factor in the mailers. If you think you might be approaching that limit you basically have too choices — play like hell until it’s over or stop playing for three months or so which will dilute your wins-per-month.

When the SLS opened, they had way-too-loose high limit video poker. I played $25 10-6-40 Double Double Bonus, which is a 99.96% game, plus slot club, plus comps, plus mailers, and I got $3,500 show-up money because I had an offer that size from Caesars Entertainment and SLS was matching offers. My score went up and down, of course. When I was behind $30,000, I felt as though I should keep playing because I was likely to get great mailers. Then I hit two $20,000 jackpots and two $10,000 jackpots in short order and I was now up. Still, the score was close enough to even, given I was playing a volatile game at $125 per hand. When the royal came, putting me ahead $120,000, I knew it was time to quit. I figured I wasn’t going to get any mailer — so why continue to play? Even with a 0.2% slot club, the edge was pretty small for such a volatile game. I still had an edge in this game, but the edge was too small to interest me.

Sometimes you just plain have no way to guestimate how much each item is worth.  But if you’re close enough to 100%, have a couple of drawings, some mailers, and maybe reach a higher tier level, you can make a reasonable assumption that you have the edge. Will you always be correct? No. But usually. There’s a lot to be said for the feel that experienced players obtain over time.

So, when Liz says sometimes I’m not positive I’m playing with an edge, I’d have to agree that could occasionally happen when one of my guesstimates is way off. But it’s extremely unlikely that I’m playing at a disadvantage because I’m making significant playing errors. If my total edge were small enough so that a 0.01% playing error could take me from positive to negative, I would have considered that unplayable to begin with. There are quarter Deuces Wild players in Las Vegas who play long hours for a game that is worth less than $10 per hour to them. Good for them. But I need a bigger hourly potential to jump in.

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Do APs Cheat?

Internet forums, by their nature, are filled with disparate opinions. Recently, another blogger in the LVA stable wrote a comment in response to a blog I posted in late March. He disagreed with me. And, as you’ll see, I disagree with his disagreement.

The distinction you’re missing is that advantage play almost never violates the casino’s rules, written or implied. A player playing a VP machine or blackjack well is not playing it any differently from anyone else, except he/she is making better decisions. There’s no rule against that.

It must be nice to live in such a world where everybody in the group you identify with is a good guy! Especially when you’re a quarter player and have no idea of what goes on at higher stakes

Advantage play consists of regularly beating the casino. The players who do this tend to be smarter than average, sneakier than average, and more knowledgeable than average about casino games. Each player goes about being an AP in a slightly different way.

Such players see the casino as their adversary. It’s not a huge stretch for them to see the casino as their enemy — and against whom all sorts of things are fair game.

Some of us attempt to play fair. I do, at least at this point in my life. Years ago, when I was hungrier and had less to lose, I cut some corners that I wouldn’t cut today. I cannot say I always walked the straight and narrow. Can you?

Let’s look at some areas where APs haven’t been known to have the highest integrity.
At some casinos, it’s okay to play on your spouse’s player’s card, and some where even that is frowned upon. There are players who shuffle 30 or more cards at a casino.

If you receive comped tickets and give them away to family members, surely it’s well within the spirit with which they were given. But if you receive comped tickets and sell them, then that’s considered over-the-line. Same with extra hotel rooms.

In some table games, it’s against the rules to show others your cards. Some players do. Some players develop elaborate systems to reveal their cards to teammates at the same table.

What if you’re playing two machines, telling others that you’re holding the second machine for your wife who is upstairs. What if she is actually nowhere nearby, but you say the same thing?

One casino has drawings where you do not have to be present, but you need to claim before midnight or the prize is forfeited. Players form groups and text the winning numbers to each other. This may not be illegal, but it is certainly against what the casino had in mind.

If you’re on vacation and cannot pick up your free play, the casino wants you to forfeit it. Many players allow their friends to pick it up for them.

An AP will at least consider all of these things. Many everyday players won’t even think of them. Some of these things are perfectly legal; some are gray areas; some are definitely over-the-line. Whatever line the courts decide is the right one, there will always be players stepping over that line.

I believe APs are better than lesser players at figuring out these things. Once figured out, some APs cross the lines and some don’t. There is no way to say that “All APs xxxxx” and be accurate. Different players use different tactics.

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A Measure of Success

On the website gamblingwithanedge.com, there are numerous things posted — including my blogs and all of the GWAE podcasts. There are other bloggers on that site as well. One of the features of that site is that there is room for comment.

In a comment to my March 27, 2018 blog, “Liz” wrote, in part:

Many gamblers think they are “advantage players”, meaning they think they have an edge. I see six classes:
1. Gamblers like Dancer who have the edge but won way more than average
2. Gamblers who have the edge but won way less than average or even lost because they didn’t play enough or ran out of money

The remaining categories dealt with those who do not have an edge. When I first read this, I wondered if indeed I was in the first category and, if so, what did it mean. That’s what today’s blog is about.

However you define these things, there’s got to be a category in the middle of these two. The first one says “way more” and the second one says “way less.” Surely there are APs who have won less than “way more” and more than “way less.” This middle category is likely bigger than the other two put together.

How much you win each year is income. How much you’ve won and held onto is gambling bankroll which is a measure of wealth. I assume Liz was speaking about accumulated bankroll.

Accumulated bankroll is a lifetime achievement award. I’ve been doing this since 1994. I have been successful since then and have continued adding to my accumulated wealth. It stands to reason that I would have accumulated more than someone who started in 2015.

How much you started with surely is a factor. I started with $6,000 back in 1994. Many other players have started with more.

How good of a saver you are is important. In the years that I’ve been playing, it’s been both me by myself and me with two wives (at different times.) All three of us are very frugal. For every $100,000 we brought in, we spent perhaps $40,000 and invested the rest. Over decades, that added up.

Without going into details, going through a divorce is detrimental to the bankroll.

Someone with extra income that they deposit into the bankroll account makes that account increase faster than someone without extra income. That income could be from a job, alimony, inheritance, sale of an asset, royalties, or selling your services. Social security or disability payments or retirement income may be added in as well. I’m sure there are other sources of income that I’m leaving out, but those who have some accumulate bankroll faster than those who don’t. And the mix of income sources is different for every player.

Your investment strategy (and results) matter. Timing matters. If you invested $100,000 in the stock market in 2003 you have quite a bit more than if you invested that same amount in 2000. Even so, if you’ve kept that money in until today, in either case you have more than $200,000 today.  

How good are you at avoiding taxes? Tax avoidance is legal. Tax evasion isn’t.

If you’ve had “average luck” over your playing career, your results will be average if that average result happened on all of your stakes. But if you’ve been very lucky for quarters and somewhat unlucky for dollars, overall you might be in the hole. In my Million Dollar Video Poker autobiography, I wrote of a six-month period where I was luckier than average on pretty large machines.

There’s always the question of skill versus luck and I don’t know how to come up with an exact number. In drawings, I’ve won more than $1 million over the years. But I’ve participated in a lot of them. I only entered when I thought it was a good deal. I’ve read the rules closely and paid attention to ways to gain an advantage over players who haven’t read the rules. I’ve bent tickets in casinos where that seemed to work. I put physical tickets into full barrels just before the drawing took place, knowing full well that the drum was too full to thoroughly mix the tickets. I’ve played for the drawings when other things were going on as well — such as point multipliers, or additional drawings, or earning annual tier credits, or something. How can anyone say how much luck was involved in my results and how much skill?

There are no records anywhere of exactly how many tickets have been in each barrel and whether my results have been better or worse than average in drawings. There are also players who play $500 a week and enter the same drawings where I play $200,000 a week, and to those people, it appears that I’m the luckiest guy in the world.

Keeping your welcome in casinos is a big part of success. Over time, all successful players lose their welcome at various places.  Avoiding or delaying your exodus is valuable, as is talking your way back in.

Belonging to a relevant network of informed players is valuable. There’s a balance between sharing enough information to stay networked and sharing everything. There are people you can swear to secrecy and those you can’t.

Just plain scouting is valuable. In every casino, things are different today than they were a year ago. If you’re not aware of those differences, you can’t make informed decisions.

Players differ in their risk aversion. For a given bankroll, some players will bet bigger than others. Some of these bigger players get wiped out, but most don’t. The smaller players won’t get wiped out, but they won’t earn very much either. There are disadvantages to wherever you position yourself on this.

I’m going to talk about this more next week, including how close to the cheating line you are willing to go. Do you ever cross it? Some players have prospered using techniques that the rest of us consider “foul play.” But they have prospered nonetheless.

Liz’s paradigm has some merit, but it’s impossible to figure out these things exactly. Every AP has a different game plan than every other one, and their results are very hard to compare.

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Farewell to Dotty’s — Part II of II

In last week’s blog, I discussed the W-2G promotion at Dotty’s and how they have removed the best games for playing that promotion. I suggest you read that blog before you look at today’s, because today I’ll continue the discussion without much review.

Compare this promotion on 9/6 Bonus Poker Deluxe with 9/6 Jacks or Better:

 

9/6 BONUS POKER DELUXE
Hand Name Payout Frequency % Prob. Occurs Every % of Ret. Promo min bet
ROYAL FLUSH 4000 61.767093 0.00% 42076.77 1.90% 0.019% $5
STRAIGHT FLUSH 250 283.32655 0.01% 9173.02 0.55% 0.006% $24
4 OF A KIND 400 6132.7776 0.24% 423.7819 18.88% 0.189% $15
FULL HOUSE 45 29861.008 1.15% 87.03524 10.34% 0.103% $135
FLUSH 30 28901.832 1.11% 89.92371 6.67% 0.067% $200
STRAIGHT 20 33213.804 1.28% 78.24939 5.11% 0.000%
3 OF A KIND 15 192559.08 7.41% 13.49695 22.23% 0.000%
TWO PAIR 5 333687.73 12.84% 7.788599 12.84% 0.000%
JACKS OR BETTER 5 549065.74 21.13% 4.733422 21.13% 0.000%
NOTHING 0 1425192.9 54.84% 1.823585 0.00% 0.000%
Total Return 99.642%

 

9/6 JACKS OR BETTER
Hand Name Payout Frequency % Prob. Occurs Every % of Ret. Promo min bet
ROYAL FLUSH 4000 64.345748 0.00% 40390.55 1.980% 0.020% $5
STRAIGHT FLUSH 250 284.08995 0.01% 9148.37 0.550% 0.006% $24
4 OF A KIND 125 6140.1617 0.24% 423.2722 5.910% 0.059% $48
FULL HOUSE 45 29919.766 1.15% 86.86431 10.360% 0.104% $135
FLUSH 30 28626.273 1.10% 90.78932 6.610% 0.066% $200
STRAIGHT 20 29184.676 1.12% 89.05221 4.490% 0.000%
3 OF A KIND 15 193489.19 7.45% 13.43207 22.330% 0.000%
TWO PAIR 10 335990.7 12.93% 7.735214 25.860% 0.000%
JACKS OR BETTER 5 557697.91 21.46% 4.660157 21.460% 0.000%
NOTHING 0 1417562.9 54.54% 1.8334 0.000% 0.000%
Total Return 99.544%

 

For me, the critical numbers are highlighted in red. JoB returns 0.098% less than BPD, and the W-2G promo is worth 0.130% more on BPD. That’s a 0.228 “shortfall” on a game that already had a “too skinny for comfort” edge. The reason for the greater value of the promo on BPD is that this game returns 80-for-1 for quads while JoB only returns 25-for-1. JoB “makes up” for this by giving more for two pair, but two pair isn’t part of the W-2G promo and quads are.

For other players, the numbers in green might be significant. Because BPD returns 80-for-1 for quads, you could get a $1,200 W-2G by betting $15 per hand. You’d need to give up the 0.006% for straight flushes, but that’s not such a big deal. In JoB, because of the paltry 25-for-1 for quads, you need to bet $48 per hand to get the same $1,200 W-2G. There are players for whom $15 per hand is within their comfort zone and $48 per hand isn’t.

I could, I suppose, undertake a “scorched earth” tactic and play $200 per hand on 40-coin $5 JoB until this game is gone as well. The W-2Gs I’d earn for flushes and full houses would make up for a lot of the missing EV. Still, I’d be getting W-2Gs every 40 or so hands and it takes five minutes to be paid. Each place would run out of $100 bills after a while. I could move on to the next Dotty’s, and the next, and the next. While most Dotty’s have 9/6 JoB, not all of them have it in $5 denominations, which would be required to get up to $200 per hand.

My tactic would last a day or two and then those games would be gone as well. I wouldn’t be getting many hands played because of the lengthy W-2G process and my edge would be very small. Playing with large stakes for only a small edge strikes me as way too much gambling for my taste. I prefer the plays where I grind out the advantage over time.

In addition, this would burn out the 9/6 JoB game while I would only be gaining a small, short-term edge. There will be players who want to play this game in the future whether I think the game is playable or not. If I were gaining a sizeable edge, say $20,000 or more, I wouldn’t care much whether the game remained for others. Since my expected win is significantly less than that, the “saving it for others” consideration rises in my list of priorities.

There was another tactic to play the W-2G promotion, also now obsolete, that some players used. In many Dotty’s, there were machines that would offer the double up option on every win. These players would continue to double up until they either got to $1,200 or lost.

The best stakes to play this for was $75 per hand. Doubling $75 became $150, and then $300, and then $600, and then $1,200. If the game paid you 4-for-1 for a straight, this was $300 which only had to be doubled twice. If you were playing this option, JoB was much superior to BPD because in JoB you ended up with two pair every 7.7 hands which “only” had to be doubled three times to reach $1,200 — which happened 1-in-8 times. Two pair on BPD had to be doubled four times for the same W-2G, which was only successful 1-in-16 tries.

Since the bonus on $1,200 W-2Gs was worth $12, a 1-in-8 shot at this was worth $1.50 and a 1-in-16 shot at this was worth $0.75. That means JoB led to a $0.75 higher bonus every 7.7 hands. This is a significant amount to me. Maybe not so much for others.

If you played the double up game, you basically never got any mailers. That’s the way Dotty’s punished you for playing that way. Still, although it varied depending on the game you played, any game that returned more than 99% was a positive play when you played this way.

Today they still have signs on machines that says the double up option is enabled, but the signs are incorrect. The feature is turned off and the bartenders are not allowed to turn it on.

I enjoyed my run at Dotty’s. But as most successful players know, good things never last indefinitely.

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Farewell to Dotty’s — Part I of II

There are hundreds of 15-machine Dotty’s outlets throughout Nevada, along with a few larger facilities. I have played at Dotty’s for the past few years and have written several articles about this.

Although they still have far looser video poker than most 15-machine outlets, the games have been tightened sufficiently that I find them no longer playable for me. However, it’s still interesting to see how they ran their W-2G promotions.

Before I start on this, let me preface it by saying a W-2G promotion requires playing for significant stakes. Some of my readers, including the undisputed biggest troll on gamblingwithanedge.com, are quarter players who get annoyed when I discuss bigger stakes. Such players should consider skipping this week’s blog.

The way the promotion works is that on 10% of the W-2Gs, players receive a 10% bonus. For a $4,000 jackpot, in the following week you have a 10% chance of getting a $400 cash bonus. To calculate the value of this, I assume you get a $40 bonus every time. On average it comes out the same.

In the first example let’s look at NSU Deuces Wild, which existed at Dotty’s until the end of 2016. Consider the following data, which comes from WinPoker, although the last two columns were added by me:

NSU DEUCES WILD
Hand Name Payout Frequency % Prob. Occurs Every % of Ret. Promo min bet
ROYAL FLUSH 4000 59.80633 0.00% 43456.27 1.84% 0.018% $5
4 DEUCES 1000 485.2523 0.02% 5355.894 3.73% 0.037% $6
ROYAL FLUSH W/2 125 4955.473 0.19% 524.4626 4.77% 0.048% $48
5 OF A KIND 80 8078.709 0.31% 321.7049 4.97% 0.050% $75
STRAIGHT FLUSH 50 13350.26 0.51% 194.6748 5.14% 0.051% $120
4 OF A KIND 20 158634.9 6.10% 16.38328 24.42% 0.000%
FULL HOUSE 20 67873.23 2.61% 38.29139 10.45% 0.000%
FLUSH 15 53961.85 2.08% 48.16292 6.23% 0.000%
STRAIGHT 10 149013.2 5.73% 17.44114 11.47% 0.000%
3 OF A KIND 5 694409.8 26.72% 3.742689 26.72% 0.000%
NOTHING 0 1448138 55.72% 1.794691 0.00% 0.000%
Total Return 99.728%

 

The important numbers are the base return for the game, 99.728%, and the addition to the return (“Promo”) as stakes are increased. You could play $1, $2, and $5 machines from five to fifty coins and receive the proper payout for all pay-schedule categories.

If you played $5 per hand, you got a bonus only on the royal — and it took the return from 99.728% to 99.746%, because the royal bonus adds only 0.018%. If you increased your bet to $6 (by playing six coins on the $1 machine), you also brought in the four deuces bonus, which added another 0.037%.

You can get the maximum bonus at $120 per hand and higher – e.g., 24 $5 coins – which brings the bonus to 0.205% (0.018% + 0.037% + 0.048% + 0.050% + 0.051%). When you add this to the return of the game, it becomes 99.951%.

The game comes with a 0.20% slot club if you play during the right hours. The cash back mailers range between 0% and 0.4%, depending on your score recently, and they have a variety of other periodic bonuses worth 0.1% or so. It was a positive play. But you needed an impressive bankroll to play it.

I played $125 per hand and whenever I hit a royal ($100,000) or four deuces ($25,000), I’d stay away for four months so my cash mailers could regenerate. It seemed as though they used my last four months of results to determine how much free play I’d get.

If I had been losing recently, my 4-week mailer would come back something like $205, $294, $363, and $481. The numbers were always “weird” amounts and they increased over the month. If I had hit a $100,000 jackpot in the past few months, my free play mailer would become $1, $1, $1, $2. They always remembered to give me more the last week of the month!

Due to a number of $100,000 royals by me and others, they finally decided the game was unprofitable. The best games now were 9/5 Super Double Bonus (99.695%) and 9/6 Bonus Poker Deluxe (99.642%). I’ll let you work out the SDB amounts for yourself, but here we have the numbers for BPD.

             

 

9/6 BONUS POKER DELUXE
Hand Name Payout Frequency % Prob. Occurs Every % of Ret. Promo min bet
ROYAL FLUSH 4000 61.767093 0.00% 42076.77 1.90% 0.019% $5
STRAIGHT FLUSH 250 283.32655 0.01% 9173.02 0.55% 0.006% $24
4 OF A KIND 400 6132.7776 0.24% 423.7819 18.88% 0.189% $15
FULL HOUSE 45 29861.008 1.15% 87.03524 10.34% 0.103% $135
FLUSH 30 28901.832 1.11% 89.92371 6.67% 0.067% $200
STRAIGHT 20 33213.804 1.28% 78.24939 5.11% 0.000%
3 OF A KIND 15 192559.08 7.41% 13.49695 22.23% 0.000%
TWO PAIR 5 333687.73 12.84% 7.788599 12.84% 0.000%
JACKS OR BETTER 5 549065.74 21.13% 4.733422 21.13% 0.000%
NOTHING 0 1425192.9 54.84% 1.823585 0.00% 0.000%
Total Return 99.642%

Although this one was just as lucrative as NSU if you played $135 a hand or more, there were additional factors. A jackpot of $5,000 or more required special procedures and every jackpot of $10,000 or more required the supervisor to come in from elsewhere. At $135 a hand, every 4-of-a-kind paid $10,800. These jackpots come around every 424 hands on average, which is more than once an hour. I figured this would cause way too much “excitement,” and would number the days the game was still around.

So, I played $60 a hand, meaning 4-of-a-kinds returned $4,800, which was just underneath the $5,000 excitement threshold. This brought the game return up to 99.642% + 0.019% + 0.006% + 0.189% = 99.856%. With the other promotions this was positive. While less than the 99.951% that NSU paid before the other promotions, it didn’t knock me out of business as often. Now only a $48,000 royal flush (every 42,000 hands) would shut me down for four months. The downside is that playing only $60 per hand instead of $125, even with the same return, would cause the total to be cut in half due to the lesser coin-in.

Another problem at Dotty’s is that each outlet had a limited number of $100 bills, perhaps $50,000 to $100,000 per week or so. If you hit enough $4,800 jackpots (plus other players were hitting jackpots as well), you began to be paid in $20 bills. And then in $5 bills. It was a bit of a problem to handle these.

I’d go in dressed in cargo pants and often come home with my pockets stuffed with twenties. One way to recycle these twenties was to take them to other casinos where I played enough and then use them to buy ‘purchase tickets’ to use during my play. That is, I would take $20,000 in twenties in and they would sell me four $5,000 purchase tickets that I could insert into the machines.

If you’re not a big enough player at a casino with this technology, you’d have to manually insert the money into the machine. The Dotty’s machines would take up to $3,000 at a time. Obviously, it took five times as long to insert 150 Jacksons than it did to insert 30 Benjamins. (If I had a choice of machines, I’d pick the one under a light so I could read while I inserted the bills into the acceptor.) Whether or not this is worth putting up with depends on what other opportunities you have to play positive games for interesting stakes.

Eventually that game was pulled as well. Possibly it still exists in some stores, but I’ve looked at more than twenty of them. It lasted longer at the Hoover Dam Lodge (25 miles away from my home) than it did at other properties, but eventually it was pulled from there as well.

They still have 9/6 Jacks or Better there. Even though it sounds like it’s only a tenth of a percent tighter than 9/6 BPD (99.544% compared to 99.642%), the W-2G bonus affects the games differently. You can work it out if you like. I’ll tell you more about it next week, along with another way that some players chose to play this promotion, until that too was countered.

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Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

I’ve been teaching video poker classes for more than 20 years. A key part of each class is answering questions from the students. Some questions indicate the student is just starting out on the playing-video-poker journey, and some only come from students who have been studying for a while.

The questions I want to mention today are ones that indicate the students are looking in the totally wrong direction for useful hints on winning.

Some might consider these questions “stupid.” I don’t. If you’re trying to figure out how to do something, it’s appropriate to look in all directions. Smart students listen to the answers, make a decision about whether whomever answers the question is knowledgeable or not, and then decides whether to use the information.

Here are some of those questions:

     1. How much money do you win or lose before changing machines? — Not a factor in my decision. I’m looking toward expected win in the future and not at actual results in the past.

     2. How much money do you put in at one time? — It doesn’t really matter. I put in “even” amounts to make record-keeping easier — like $200 or $1,000 or maybe $5,000, depending on the stakes. For tax and other reasons, keeping good record is important.

     3. If you cash out tickets before they get too big, does the machine think a new player has just sat down? — The machine doesn’t care who’s playing. It’s just dealing cards.

     4. Do you use the amount of cash the last player cashed out as any kind of measure for whether or not this is a good machine to play? — No. Especially since it doesn’t have to mean anything at all. Someone could have inserted ten $100 bills into a machine and immediately cashed out. (I’ve done that to create tickets while I’m waiting for a hand-pay.) The machine would read it cashed out for $1,000, even though no hands were played. How is that useful information?

     5. What is your favorite game to play? — It depends on how much the game returns when played perfectly?  How closely to perfectly do I play? What does the slot club return? Are there any promotions going on?  Do I need to play a certain amount to reach a tier level or earn mailers? Etc.

A key part of this answer is that each game type (Deuces Wild, Double Double Bonus, etc.) comes in a variety of pay schedules — a few good, most bad.

I am sympathetic to those who take the approach, “If I try to learn more than one game I get mixed up, so I always play Jacks or Better whatever the pay schedule is.” For some people, this might well be the most intelligent approach. Only you know your strengths and weaknesses insofar as learning several pay schedules go.

     6. What is the best time of day to play? — This is a more insightful question than the previous ones. The machines themselves are the same, but I prefer playing the graveyard shift because it’s often easier to get the machines I want since most people are in bed, it’s less smoky, and the atmosphere in the casino is often more relaxed. I understand that for some people, playing at 3 a.m. is completely out of the question, whether it works for me or not. But if your life and schedule is flexible enough to play during those hours, I recommend it.

     7. What’s the best casino to play at? — Again, a good question, but not one that has a unique best answer. No casino is better than every other casino at all games and denominations. Some casinos have better games but lesser restaurants. Some casinos include child care. Some casinos attract blue collar patrons while others make white collar patrons feel more at home. Since I’m a senior citizen, married, and a player who is more comfortable playing for higher stakes than many others, whatever place is best for me may or may not be best for whomever is asking the question.

     8. How much am I giving up if I always play KK from KK446? — (This is far more specific than I intend. I get hundreds of this type of “What does it cost?” kind of question.)  The short answer is “It depends.” A more specific answer necessitates knowing the game, pay schedule, and stakes you’re playing. In general, I’m not a fan of the “What’s the least I can do and still get acceptable results?” approach.

This is also a question that you should learn to look up yourself. Good video poker software is readily available and inexpensive. There are 2.6 million different starting hands in hundreds of different games. It’s simply too much information to obtain and store without using some electronic support.

Although 2.6 million is a pretty big number, there are a lot of “apparent” duplicates — including 144 unique ways to have KK446. The actual number of completely unique hands is 130,000+, and even then you’re going to have more than one case of KK446.