Author: Bob Dancer

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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

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Change Coming

More than four years ago I began co-hosting a weekly Thursday evening radio show called Gambling with an Edge. It took awhile to find our stride and settle on the best co-hosting partnership, but it’s now a popular show among both advantage gamblers and wannabe advantage gamblers. A surprising number of casino employees listen as well, partly to see what the players are up to. My co-host, Richard Munchkin, is knowledgeable about all sorts of gambling with the exception of video poker, which is where I come in. Continue reading Change Coming

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A Day at the Office

Saturday, March 27, was date night for Bonnie and me. We decided to go dancing to Wes Winters in the Grandview Lounge at the South Point and then have dinner afterwards. Wes Winters is our old “standby,” and we go there two or three times a month. I guess we’re semi-regulars.

Dinner was going to be nothing special. We had lots of food coupons to spend at the Silverton (three miles away from the South Point). These coupons were going to expire in a week so we were probably going to spend $35 worth of them in the coffee shop at the Silverton. It’s a nice-enough meal, but it’s not like we were looking forward all day to the delicious dinner there. Continue reading A Day at the Office

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A Legal Case Involving Auto-Hold

I know of no casinos in Las Vegas that offer auto-hold, a feature on some video poker games where the machine offers a suggested play which the player can either accept or change. Years ago when I was teaching at Barona Casino, near San Diego, they had auto-hold on their video poker which was particularly bad. On a hand like 35678 of mixed suits, it would routinely suggest tossing the 8 (which left you with only four cards that could complete the straight) rather than tossing the three (which left you with eight such cards). The machine would regularly recommend holding a suited ace-ten in Jacks or Better — which is a horrendous play. And the auto-hold would treat all 3-card straight flushes as being equivalent, no matter how many gaps the combination had. Continue reading A Legal Case Involving Auto-Hold

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How Happy Do You Get with a Royal Flush?

I recently read Michael Craig’s “The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King,” which was about a banker from Texas, Andy Beal, taking on the best poker players in the world, one at a time, in heads up limit Texas Hold’em poker.

For a discussion of the book, you can listen to the March 5, 2015 podcast of Gambling with an Edge, which is available for free download from both bobdancer.com and richardmunchkin.com. Today I want to talk about something mentioned in the book that we didn’t cover in the radio interview. Continue reading How Happy Do You Get with a Royal Flush?