Author: Bob Dancer

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Casino Credit — Good news or Bad?

If you can prove to a casino you are worthy of credit, they’ll lend you interest-free money. Frequently you don’t have to pay it back for thirty days–sometimes longer. How smart is it for you to use this casino credit?

First of all, you have to assume that the casinos provide credit to players because it is profitable for them to do so. On average, players with access to credit will play more — and hence lose more. Even allowing that sometimes the casinos have problems collecting the money, they come out ahead by offering credit. Continue reading Casino Credit — Good news or Bad?

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More Tails from the Jungle

I’ve used the “animal versus animal” jungle metaphor to describe video poker in the past. Let’s play around a little bit more with that analogy today.

Some people think of the casino as the lion in the jungle and the players as the smaller prey, but I don’t think of it that way at all. I see the casino as the owner of the jungle, and the players are all animals within that jungle. The bigger animals have an easier time surviving than the smaller animals. Continue reading More Tails from the Jungle

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Should Have Kept My Mouth Shut

I participate in a study group of bright gamblers. You’ve heard of Richard Munchkin who often attends the group. The others are not particularly well known to the general public and even if you’ve heard of them, for the most part they don’t want their names bandied about.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, there were only four of us there (Munchkin couldn’t make it that day.) The other three all graduated from prestigious schools that specialized in math and science. Continue reading Should Have Kept My Mouth Shut

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Almost

Over this past Mother’s Day weekend Bonnie and I attended a square dance convention in Reno. It’s a better than average convention, but the real attraction is that Bonnie’s daughter lives in the area. We arranged a long Mother’s Day meal/visit before flying home.

The dance itself is in Grand Sierra Resort. I haven’t established myself at GSR, but since I’m a Seven Stars player within the Caesars system, I can always get a free room at Harrah’s. This time my host was able to get me some free play and $100 worth of food to go along with the free room. So much the better. Continue reading Almost

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Going Broke

Recently on vpFREE, a man (I think) with the pseudonym “nightoftheiguana” (NOTI) posted “I think Bob Dancer has admitted to going bankrupt at least once. Perhaps he can say something on whether or not it is something he would risk doing again.” (NOTI regularly posts knowledgeable information regarding the Kelly criterion and various alternative strategies on how to best play video poker based on your goals.) When I wrote out the draft to my response, I saw it covered more than 1000 words, which made it more appropriate to run here than on vpFREE itself. It will likely get posted there eventually anyway. Continue reading Going Broke

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A Strategy Improvement in 9/6 Double Double Bonus Quick Quads

Creating good video poker strategies is as much art as it is science. Someone suggested to me recently that my 9/6 Double Double Bonus Quick Quads strategy was unnecessarily cumbersome. I ended up agreeing with him and the results are found below. He told me I could publish this if I wanted but under no circumstances did he want to be identified in print.

The area it relates to deals with “Quick Trips.” A Quick Trip, QT, is a 4-card combination consisting of a pair and two other cards adding up the rank of the pair. Two examples would be 8844 and 8853. Continue reading A Strategy Improvement in 9/6 Double Double Bonus Quick Quads

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More on Auto-Hold

Not too long ago I wrote an article about the auto-hold on Oregon lottery machines that was pretty poor. See it here

As stated in that article, I felt that the manufacturer had no obligation to guarantee that the hold was optimal unless such a declaration was posted somewhere on the machine.

Comments I read after the article appeared indicated that my opinion was in the minority among video poker players. Most of the players who expressed an opinion said that the holds should be correct on either a basic strategy or perfect strategy level. Continue reading More on Auto-Hold

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A Strange Play in 9/6 Double Double Bonus Quick Quads

I periodically check the wizardofodds.com strategy calculator to make sure I’ve gotten every one of the special cases mastered. The format used in that application isn’t as user friendly (to me) as I’d like, although I’m sure that for some players it is easy to understand.

For example, in discussing the hands where there is a suited AQ and an unsuited AQJT inside straight draw, he lists the following as all the cases where you go for the straight (although the site has it in one column not two, and the labels in front of each hand were added here by me so I could refer to them more clearly): Continue reading A Strange Play in 9/6 Double Double Bonus Quick Quads

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Shutting Down Machines

There was a post a few weeks ago on vpFREE that said: “To all of you cretins that shut down machines – that’s not the right thing to do and I NEVER shut down any machine. I even tell others not to shut down machines and let others play. If you need to put in a certain amount of action – get the torture over with and do it all in one play and keep the assembly line moving.”

I don’t agree. There are times when you have to look out for Number 1.
Continue reading Shutting Down Machines