Category: Advice for Players

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A Look at a Wheel Spin

Today’s column isn’t specifically about video poker, but it concerns a gambling situation that video poker players encounter in a casino. And most video poker players don’t care whether a $1,000 prize comes from a jackpot, a casino drawing, or a tournament.

Assume a casino is giving away money. If your name is called, you get to spin a fair wheel, where the possible prizes range between $5 and $1,000 in the following ratios:

 

Number of Prize
Occurrences Amount
1 $1,000
1 $500
4 $250
4 $100
5 $50
10 $20
15 $10
20 $5

 

If you add this all up, you’ll see there are 60 slots on the wheel, and the sum of the prizes adds up to $3,600. This makes the spin worth $60 on average ($3.600 / 60 slots = $60 / slot).  A few of the prizes are quite a bit larger than the average, and three-fourths of the prizes are $5, $10, or $20. To make the problem more interesting, assume the casino offers a $50 buyout. This is less than the $60 average, of course, but it’s a lot better than 45 out of the 60 prize and equal to another five out of the 60 prizes.

If somehow you were in the enviable position of being allowed to spin the wheel 400 times, you’d be a fool to take the buyout of $20,000 (400 * $50 = $20,000) rather than the average of $24,000 ($400 * $60 = $24,000) that would come if you spun the wheel every time. Spinning 400 times is close enough to the “long run” that you figure to hit the $1,000 and $500 enough times to make spinning pay off more than the buyout. It doesn’t HAVE to work out this way, of course, but the odds are in your favor.

The more interesting case is if the spin is “maximum once per person.” Now if we choose to spin and end up with a lousy $5, we have forever lost the $45 we could have gotten from the guaranteed $50. We will never get it back from this promotion simply because we wouldn’t be allowed to spin again, so the results could never average out. In this case, is it better to take the guaranteed $50 or spin for the prize with a bigger average (but a significant probability for a smaller result)?

To my way of thinking, whether we get the opportunity once or 400 times is not an important distinction.  I believe spinning is correct in either case. All of us have MANY gambles, and we are NEVER in balance in all of them. To the smart gambler, we take the advantage every time we can and trust/hope that it all balances out in the end.

If the numbers were “large” (which is personally defined), then it can certainly make sense to take the “bird in the hand”. For example, if we were guaranteed $5 million or could spin the wheel and get an average of $6 million, I would take the $5 million in a heartbeat.

Even though the math is the same, $5 million is such a potentially life-changing amount that there is no way I can feel comfortable gambling with it. But $50? For me that’s pocket change and I’m going with the math.

It’s possible that $50 is not ‘pocket change’ to someone in this position. If that’s a large amount to you, by all means take the sure thing if that will make you feel better.

Also, please note that I’m stipulating that the wheel is fair — meaning each of the 60 positions are equally likely to come up. In the real world, that’s assuming away part of the problem. You have to use your judgment here. In Nevada casinos, I’m going to assume the wheel is fair. I’m not sure I’m going to make the same assumption everywhere.

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Learning from Munchkin

My co-host on the Gambling With An Edge podcast is Richard Munchkin, a table games player who’s been successful at gambling for several decades.

We often answer listener questions on the show and if anyone asks about a table game, Richard is the go-to guy. Sometimes I’ll have a bit to add, but mostly what Richard says covers the subject very well.

He has used one particular phrase in his answers over and over again. The questions vary, but part of the answer stays the same.

For example, some blackjack player is using one particular count and is considering learning another count because it’s more powerful. Richard will discuss the features of each count, but say, “You’re stepping over dollars to pick up pennies. A slightly better count is NOT where the money is in blackjack. There are far more important things to spend your time learning.”

I’ve heard him say variations on this numerous times and I started to wonder if the way I tackle video poker makes me guilty of stepping over dollars to pick up pennies?

As many of my readers know, I try to learn most video poker games at the 100% level. In NSU Deuces Wild, for example, letting a W stand for a deuce, I play W 4♠ 5♠ 3♥ J♥ differently than I do W 4♠ 5♠ 3♥ J♦.

For the five-coin dollar player, if he holds W 4♠ 5♠ both times he is making a quarter of a penny error half the time. If he holds just the W both times he is also making a quarter of a penny error half the time.

I avoid this small error. I learned the game this well when I was playing $25 games so the error every other time is 6¢ rather than a quarter cent. I still have that play memorized even though the larger games aren’t available, insofar as I know.

Although this particular distinction is one of many many I have memorized, it is safe to say I’ve spent dozens of hours, probably more, learning these exceptions in the first place and reviewing them often enough to keep them memorized.

Have I gained enough to make the difference between learning these things worth more than even an additional $2 per hour over all the hours I’ve spent studying? Probably not.

Without spending this time learning these exceptions, could I have played games worth substantially more than $2 per hour and been better off financially? Definitely yes, insofar as finding games worth more than that.

So, is this a case of stepping over dollars to pick up pennies? Have I been violating Munchkin’s advice (never mind that I spent most of those dozens of hours studying that game before I ever heard Richard give that advice)? Maybe, but if so, as
they say in Traffic Court, I plead guilty with an explanation.

Although in the Dancer/Daily Winner’s Guides for both NSU Deuces Wild and Full Pay Deuces Wild, we distinguish between penalty cards and “power of the pack” considerations, for the sake of simplicity today I’m going to include both of these into the term “penalty cards.”

The underlying assumption behind the question “Is learning penalty cards worth it?” is that without studying the penalty cards you can play the penalty-free strategy perfectly. For me, at least, that assumption wouldn’t track with reality.

Just the study and practice I undergo to learn the penalty cards causes me to be practicing the basic strategy simultaneously. For example, the difference between W J♦ 9♦ 5♣ 6♣ and W J♦ 9♦ 5♣ 7♣, which is a basic strategy play, is probably ignored by all players who have not also made a serious attempt at learning all the exceptions. Even though this play is clearly shown on the Dancer/Daily Strategy Card and Winner’s Guide for this game, I suspect most players simply ignore it or don’t understand why the two hands are played differently.

So, while learning the penalty cards might only return $2 an hour on my study time, I also gain considerably more than that because I learn the basic strategy better during the process.

For me personally, since I’ve chosen a teaching career and a how-to writing career, there are additional income streams available to me for learning this stuff that wouldn’t be available to most others.

Plus, I like being a student. I was good at school and continue to try and learn new things. So even if learning penalty cards doesn’t make great financial sense, it brings me pleasure. Can you really put a price on that?

I’m going to conclude that Richard’s “stepping over dollars to pick up pennies” warning doesn’t apply to me in this particular case. And I make this conclusion knowing full well that others may disagree with my conclusion. That’s okay. I’ve made my own bed here and I’m perfectly happy sleeping in it.

Yes, I know I mentioned that certain hands were played differently than others, but I didn’t explain what the differences were. If you want to know, you’re going to have to look up the information for yourself. If that annoys you, so be it, but the learning process isn’t easy and you need to go through it to become a strong player.

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When 9/5 Was Better than 9/6

One of the very first lessons taught by virtually all video poker teachers, including me, involves the game Jacks or Better. We explain how the game pays 25-for-1 for all 4-of-a-kinds, 2-for-1 for two pair, and the difference between the good version and the bad version depends on how much you get for a full house and a flush.

The best reasonably common version is 9/6, returning 99.54%. The game in second place is 9-5, 98.45% requiring a similar but not identical strategy.

If you don’t know what I mean by 9/6 and 9/5, compare the two pictures at the bottom of this page. The one on the top is 9/6 and the one on the bottom is 9/5. The key numbers used in naming the games are shown in red.

Under normal circumstances, because of the approximately 1.1% difference in the returns, any player who played 9/5 when 9/6 was available is a player without a clue as to the winning process.

And, yet, for a couple of years ending a few years ago, I personally played millions of dollars of coin-in on a 9/5 game when 9/6 was available. As did many other knowledgeable players. What gives?

It had to do with “theoretical.”

Theoretical is the hold the casino expects to make from players as a whole. If a game is rated with a theoretical of 2%, it means that for every $100,000 coin-in the machine gets, on average the casino expects to hold $2,000.

The 9/6 JoB had a theoretical in this casino of approximately a half percent. For that same $100,000 coin-in, the casino expects to make $500. The “perfect” 9/6 JoB player only loses $460 for that play.

This casino had a policy that if you agreed to earn $5,000 in theoretical, they would give you $3,500 in free play as front money. If they figured the theoretical correctly, this would give them an expected profit of $1,500 on this much play to cover their expenses and profit margin. On the 9/6 JoB, this was no bargain for the player. Your expected loss was $4,460, even if you played perfectly, so while getting $3,500 back was certainly better than nothing, you were still in the hole.

For whatever reason, the 9/5 JoB game was assigned a theoretical of 4%. This meant that it took $125,000 coin-in to generate the $5,000 in theoretical. And playing that much on a 98.45% game meant that you expected to lose a little less than $2,000 on average if you played perfectly.

Losing $2,000 is no fun, of course, but the casino was giving $3,500 to ease your pain. That meant that you had a net expected profit of a little more than $1,500 each time you did it, plus your points were worth something, and there were significant other goodies as well, including a couple of free room nights. We could do this at least once a month, and sometimes twice a month. This was an inadvertent mistake by the casino. We hoped it would be several years before the casino fixed it.

Sometimes I’d lose $8,000 or so “earning” this EV, but other months I would win. Looking at individual months, you could sometimes question whether this was a good deal or not, but over time, it became clear that this was a moneymaker for the players who knew about it and exploited it.

I learned about it from someone who swore me to secrecy. I had to promise not to write about it. I honored that while that situation was still in effect. Now that it’s been over for more than a year, I believe it’s okay to shine a little light on it.

Eventually, the casino figured out that a 4% theoretical for this game was inappropriate and changed it to about 1.6%. Now it costs you almost $5,000 to earn $5,000 in theoretical, and if you get “only” $3,500 back, it’s no bargain. So, knowledgeable players don’t play that game anymore.

I used a 4% figure. Actually, it was slightly different than that and it varied slightly from machine to machine. And it could be “fixed” by the casino at any time. So after we played, we went to talk to a host and asked what our theoretical was. If it was under $5,000 we played some more. We wanted to get the theoretical high enough so that we’d keep getting the offers.

The time it came back as a theoretical of $2,000 for the normal amount of play, players knew that this particular party was over. Disappointing, but all good things end eventually. Calls went all over the player grapevine, and within a few days most of the players who played this promotion were notified.

I’m not mentioning the name of the casino where this took place. There will be many readers of this blog who know whereof I speak. Should any of them choose to comment on this article, please leave the casino name unspoken.

 

 

Royal Flush 250 500 750 1000 4000
Straight Flush 50 100 150 200 250
4-of-a-Kind 25 50 75 100 125
Full House 9 18 27 36 45
Flush 6 12 18 24 30
Straight 4 8 12 16 20
3-of-a-Kind 3 6 9 12 15
Two Pair 2 4 6 8 10
Jacks or Better 1 2 3 4 5
Royal Flush 250 500 750 1000 4000
Straight Flush 50 100 150 200 250
4-of-a-Kind 25 50 75 100 125
Full House 9 18 27 36 45
Flush 5 10 15 20 25
Straight 4 8 12 16 20
3-of-a-Kind 3 6 9 12 15
Two Pair 2 4 6 8 10
Jacks or Better 1 2 3 4 5

 

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Paying to Avoid Royal Flushes

Assume you are a 5-coin dollar player playing 9/6 Jacks or Better and are dealt 3♠ A♥ K♥ T♥ 5♥.  The only two plays to consider are holding three hearts to the royal flush and holding all four hearts.

If we check out EV, we find holding three hearts is worth $6.43 and holding four is worth $6.38. That nickel’s worth of EV has always been too much for me to ignore and I go for the royal every time.

BUT, I file as a professional player and get lots of W-2Gs. Let’s say you don’t get a lot of W-2Gs. In that case, each one that you do get has some serious tax consequences. What if you held the four hearts in order to prevent the W-2G?

Once every 1,081 times on average, AKT turns into a royal flush. If you gave up a nickel each of those 1,081 times and ended up getting one fewer royal flush, it would cost you $55 (rounding slightly).

This is probably not too high a price to pay because a $4,000 royal has far more than $55 worth of tax consequences.

AKT (and AQT and AJT) are the weakest 3-card royal flush draws for two separate reasons. First, the presence of the ace eliminates all straight flush possibilities and reduces straight possibilities. Second, the presence of a ten reduces the chances for a high pair.

If we compared the preceding hand to 3♦ A♣ K♣ J♣ 5♣, holding this 3-card royal flush is better than the 4-card flush by a little more than 17¢ and avoiding the $4,000 royal flush over 1,081 opportunities will cost you $185. That’s quite a bit more than the $55 we were talking about earlier.

Going for the flush from 3♥ K♠ Q♠ T♠ 5♠ costs us $683 over the 1,081 draws, and from 3♣ K♦ Q♦ J♦ 5♦, it sets you back $770. Finally, from 3♠ Q♥ J♥ T♥ 5♥ you’ll lose a whopping $1,095 over the 1,081 hands by going for the flush every time.

So where do you draw the line? I’m not sure. I go for the 3-card royal on all of these hands. You’re going to have to decide for yourself what avoiding a W-2G is worth.

Other factors: If it were a multiple point day and/or there was another juicy promotion which gave me a considerable advantage playing this game, I would be more inclined to go for the flush. After all, time is money and it could easily take 5-20 minutes to be paid.

If I were playing in a state where royals were penalized (say Mississippi which has a 3% non-refundable tax on W-2Gs), that would make going for the flush mandatory in our first example and a closer play in the others.

If I were playing near the limit of my bankroll — either actual or psychological — I would tend to go for the flush, which is a play with a much lower variance.

On the first hand, you get skunked about 70% of the time going for the royal and “only” 68% of the time going for the flush.  If I were someone for whom today’s score mattered, I might go for the flush.   I certainly don’t recommend that you worry about today’s score, but some players just can’t help themselves.

This wouldn’t happen to me because I don’t do this, but if you were picking up someone else’s free-play and a royal flush would be awkward and you insisted on playing dollars anyway because you were in a hurry, I would go for the flush every time on these hands.

There are other hands in this game and every other game where it could make sense to avoid the possibility of a royal flush if it could be done at a low cost. But you should look at them one-at-a-time BEFORE YOU PLAY so you know which “inferior” plays are cost-effective. Trying to figure it out at the machine is very difficult. It’s easy to over-compensate when you’re doing this without study beforehand.

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When the Rules are Not the Rules

The M Casino Resort is located along I-15 at the southern edge of the Las Vegas valley. The location was picked expecting the Southern Highlands development to explode, but that didn’t happen. The 2007 housing bubble hurt that development big time — and this casino as well.

I live about 8-10 miles from the casino, depending on whether I take the freeway or not. I know having a casino this close would be a luxury for many of my readers, but it’s actually too far away for me. Although I do drive and will drive, I do not particularly enjoy “spinning my wheels.” I much prefer playing at closer casinos if I can find suitable ones.

To make matters worse, it’s the kind of casino where you must come in and pick up your free play multiple times over the month. Sometimes up to 10 times.

For the past seven years or so, up until the end of 2016, I had a “special deal” at that casino. This consisted of me coming in once a month and doing all my play at one time. Usually the figure was $200,000 of coin-in played on a $10 single line 8/5 Bonus Poker machine.

In exchange for this, I received all my free play for the month in one lump sum and was guaranteed to receive 2x points (worth a total of 0.60%) each time I came in. If you included the free play and the benefits of being an ICON member (their highest tier), including a certain amount of food each month, this was sufficient to entice me to play there.

Although the arrangement evolved over time, for the last few years I was unwelcome at most drawings and invitational tournaments. The reason for this was that most tournaments included “second chance drawings” where players would play during the weekend event and, based on $5,000 coin-in for one drawing ticket, tickets would be drawn to give away money. The reason for the second chance drawing was to induce extra play out of the players. I was excluded from these drawings because the $200,000 I would play wouldn’t be extra play — it would just be normal monthly play. This would give me an unfair advantage, or so the managers believed.

In late 2010, the M was sold to Penn National Gaming, effective sometime in 2011, but the former owner, Anthony Marnell III, still had a management role. So, most of the special deals that were allowed when Marnell owned the place were still in effect. Eventually Marnell moved on to other opportunities and the new General Manager was a PNG employee with no ties at all to the way the casino was run in the past.

I was informed in November 2016 that my deal was going to end on December 31. I was still welcome to play but I would receive the normal mail for an ICON player — based on how much I continued to play. I would need to pick up my free play in whatever increments the other players got their free play and would be eligible to participate in tournaments and drawings should my play warrant it. If this wasn’t acceptable, I didn’t have to play there at all.

I appealed this decision to the GM, but to no avail. It took until about the end of January to get me back on all mailing lists. I had been manually excluded by the former Vice President of Marketing (because of my special deal), and each of those manual over-rides had to be found and removed.

For March, I decided to play on Thursday, March 2, primarily because there was a drawing on Friday, March 3. I figured my equity in the drawing would help make up for the inconvenience of having to travel to the casino so many times. According to an over-sized postcard I received in the mail, so long as my tickets to the drawing were activated prior to 7 p.m., I was in the drawing. So, I played more than $200,000, at a bigger-than-average loss, and activated my entries at 6:45 p.m.  Unfortunately, I was totally skunked in the drawing.

Since there were 75 names drawn and I probably had more tickets in the drum than anyone else, it was highly improbable that I didn’t get picked anywhere. A “top 10” finish was likely, I believed, with a decent shot at winning the $4,000 first prize. I didn’t think I was intentionally excluded from the drawing (although with the manual overrides the former VP of Marketing had instituted, it was possible that one forbidding me from participating in drawings was still inadvertently in effect). I thought the most likely explanation for me not being called was that they pulled the 75 names before my tickets were in the drum.

The following Tuesday I spoke to the man who was responsible for pulling the tickets the previous Friday evening. He told me he pulled them at 6:30 p.m., as he had been instructed to do. I asked him who told him to pull at 6:30 p.m., because that would be the first person I called — if I decided to follow up on this.

It was not clear that following up on this would yield good results. Using aphorisms, we can say the squeaky wheel gets the grease (which means I should definitely follow up on this), but we can also say the nail that sticks up is often hammered down (which means I should just let it go). Playing “aphorism roulette,” I decided to pursue this.

I left voicemail messages explaining what I wanted to talk about to two different Marketing Supervisors. Whether they were in town and received the messages or not, I don’t know, but they didn’t return my calls. So, I next directed a written email to Patrick Durkin, the Vice President of Marketing. I told him I didn’t want to go to the Gaming Control Board if I could avoid it, but I strongly felt I was short-changed.

He sent me a return email saying he would research the matter and get back to me by the end of the day. He did, although he said he preferred to talk face to face. We set up a meeting for the following week, but he also told me the written rules and the postcard sent in the mail had different information on it.

This was an unusual twist. The rules said to swipe before 6:30 p.m. and I didn’t read those rules until afterwards. The mailer — which included a LOT of detail including small print disclaimers — seemed to cover everything and contained what were certainly at least “pseudo rules.”

I hoped the casino wouldn’t argue that the written rules were the only relevant ones and the mailer wasn’t official. I’ve heard LOTS of strange arguments from casino employees through the years. I would just have to wait until the meeting.

I certainly didn’t know how the meeting would go. They could give me some free play. They could say “sorry Charlie.” Or they could restrict me in some minor or major way. I’ve seen variations of all of those. But I wasn’t going to get anything if I didn’t go to the meeting, so I went.

Insofar as the mailer went, I didn’t take it with me. I did, however, take an iPhone photo of both front and back and had that with me. (Years ago, some employees at the Suncoast, after it was purchased by Boyd, disputed that I had received a postcard invitation and asked to see it. I gave it to them and they took it into the back room. I never saw the postcard or them again. Since I couldn’t prove I received the postcard, the Suncoast’s official position was that I hadn’t received one. Although I didn’t think the M would operate in such a rinky dink fashion as the Suncoast, I wasn’t taking any chances.)

At the meeting with Mr. Durkin, he couldn’t have been more gracious. We chatted for 10 minutes or so — one professional to another. He had worked at several casinos over the years and I had played at many of them. We knew many of the same people. I am somewhat of a “special case” in the player community and he wanted to get to know me. He had only worked at the property for a few months and, although we had exchanged some emails and phone calls, we hadn’t met each other prior to our meeting.

When it came time to discuss whether I was going to receive any compensation for trusting the mailer, he told me the promotion had been designed by his predecessor, who now worked elsewhere. Although he and his staff checked the rules and the mailers, they missed the “6:30 vs 7:00” difference. Without admitting any error, he asked what would satisfy me. I, of course, would have preferred that he come up with a proposed amount of free play first. But at least we were finally talking turkey.

I won’t go into exactly how the negotiation to find the “right” number took place, but we came up with an amount of free play that both of us could live with. Maybe a better negotiator would have gotten more. Maybe some players would have gotten less. Being able to negotiate effectively when you have to is a player skill that is underrated.

I came away impressed with how Mr. Durkin handled this. He understood that his company had made a mistake and my grievance was legitimate — and he treated it as such. None of us can guarantee we will never make a mistake, but we can try and clean it up afterwards when we fall short. And that’s what Mr. Durkin did without giving away the store.

To my mind, the fact that I had lost a bit more than usual this time made it easier for him to award me free play. Had I hit a $40,000 royal flush and ended up considerably ahead on the play, it would have been more difficult for him to justify the additional payment to his bosses. So, you can be sure I mentioned my loss in the negotiation. Had I won during the play, he probably would have mentioned that.

While idealists can make a pretty good case that my results shouldn’t have mattered in this case, these things do matter. Thinking they don’t would be naïve.

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The Important Message

I’m a fan of The Moth podcast, in which people stand up without notes and give a 10-minute autobiographical talk about something interesting. Some time ago I thought I would try to be a performer on that show. I couldn’t use notes to tell the story live, but I sure as hell could use them to help prepare for the talk. So, I wrote out what I’d say about an incident that happened almost 40 years ago.

Sometime later I decided not to try out for The Moth, although I thought the story would fit well enough into this blog. I’ve already shared parts of this story with my readers, but not all of it, and certainly not the big secret I reveal at the end. So here is what I was planning to say:

In the 1970s, I was a professional gambler. My game was backgammon. It was played in discos, at least in greater Los Angeles, which is where I lived. I even took lessons learning how to disco dance so I could hang out in these discos without looking like a gambling hustler. I also played at an underground club near Los Angeles called the Cavendish West.

It isn’t hard being a successful gambler when the competition isn’t very good. And that was the way backgammon was for me in the mid-1970s.

I had first heard of the game from an article in Playboy, which I really only picked up because of the articles. I bought every book I could find on the subject, bought a board to practice on, and soon was in business. As bad as the books were at the time, my studying was more than my competitors did. Plus, I was smarter than average and had been playing board games since I was a pre-teen. I did well.

At the Cavendish, I became a regular.  In backgammon, you are not playing against the house. You are playing against other players and the house charges each player a rental fee for providing the boards and the place where other like-minded players can congregate.

No matter how good or bad you are, your success at backgammon is primarily determined by your skill relative to that of your opponents.  If you are the third best player in the world but always are playing with numbers 1 and 2, you’re going to be a loser.

For those who don’t play the game, it’s a board game where there’s a special device called the doubling cube. If you’re not playing for money — or perhaps trying to win a backgammon tournament — the doubling cube is irrelevant and kept in the box. If you are competing for cash, though, learning to use the doubling cube well is important. It’s every bit as important as learning to move the checkers well.

Without going into details about the cube, it can be used to increase the stakes of the game dramatically. If your opponent is too aggressive or too passive or too timid with the cube, so much the better. Systematic mistakes were exploitable. So, similar to reading poker tells, good players kept a catalog of sorts on the doubling cube practices of every opponent. If you saw your opponent make a doubling cube error, AND THEN MAKE IT AGAIN in another game, this was called “confirmation” and you had a potential gold mine. A single game of backgammon usually lasted less than 10 minutes — and we played for 6-8 hours at a time. There were LOTS of opportunities to get confirmation on these exploitable habits of others.

In 1979, I was a much better backgammon player than I was in 1975. But I was going broke. Gone was the regular infusion of bad players that were easy to find in the disco era and not so easy to find anymore. The players still in the game had been there for as long as I had. I was a good player, but I was mostly playing REALLY good players. This was not a recipe for success.

I started contemplating getting a job. This I viewed as an admission that I was no longer able to live off my wits in the gambling world. I was no longer able to accurately assert superiority over those doofusses who actually had to find a job in order to survive.  I was now going to be a doofus too.

This was very traumatic. I also didn’t know what I could do to earn money. Although I had a pretty good education and got up to the almost-PhD level in Economics, I had been fired five years earlier from a think-tank job in which I was a research associate. I hadn’t read any economic books or journal articles in five years. My skills were woefully out of date.

Since I had used some Fortran-based computer packages in my research-associate position years before, I decided to market myself as a computer programmer. The available jobs were in COBOL, a computer language I didn’t know at all. Still, I read a how-to-program-in-COBOL book one weekend and went on a job interview the following Monday. Before I did, I shaved off the beard I had worn for 10 years and got a haircut that made me look like a Republican. God! It was awful!

I was interviewed by two guys, both of whom liked to gamble. I talked backgammon with the first guy and blackjack with the second. Although my skills weren’t good enough to survive as a gambling professional, they were WAY better than these two wannabe gamblers. They were impressed with my abilities. The $25,000 a year job in programming I was applying for had been filled that morning, but there was a $35,000 a year job as a systems analyst available. It was now the week before Christmas and their budget didn’t allow another hire until after the first of the year. Was I interested in starting in two weeks?

I was, although I had no clue what a systems analyst did. I went to a bookstore, bought two books on how to be a systems analyst, and went home where I stayed in bed for two weeks. I’d come out of my room only to grab something out of the refrigerator or go to the bathroom. Otherwise, I read the books over and over again and was seemingly catatonic. I was sure I was going to be found out as a fraud and fired immediately.   When that happened, I didn’t know what I was going to do. The fact that I was having to get a job in the first place wasn’t helping matters any. And I liked my hippie look WAY better than looking like a Baptist preacher.  But that look was now gone. Not shaving for two weeks didn’t come close to making me feel better.

I was living with a lady named Betty at the time. I didn’t say a word to her for those two weeks. Not one word. She’d ask what she could do to help, or suggest I get out and exercise a bit, or maybe we could go see a movie or something, and I’d just lay there with my back to her, totally mute. I didn’t know what to say. There wasn’t anything to say. I was a doofus who looked like a Republican.

She kept the refrigerator stocked with good eating options, bless her heart, and didn’t get too freaked out by my behavior.

Two weeks later, Wednesday January 2, 1980, I was 10 minutes early to work. I came up with a couple of good answers to questions I was asked in the first week and somehow lasted on that job for three years — at which time I went out and found a better one. I can’t tell you exactly how I did it. I just don’t know. I suspect being in the right place at the right time helped a lot.

One year after I had started working, I received a phone call at three in the morning from a lady friend named Margo. Not a romantic lady friend — I was still with Betty — but a good friend nonetheless. Margo was contemplating going back to work. Margo was a nurse and had written some books on pain management. She had gone around the country lecturing to nurses about treating those in pain. But her 15 minutes of fame was now up. She no longer got enough attendees to come to her lectures. It was time for her to go back to work.

Like I had been, Margo was severely traumatized. She didn’t want to go back to work. She knew I had gone through something similar the year before and needed some good advice. And she needed it now! At three in the morning. What could I tell her?

She had just returned from a nightclub where she’d probably had several beers (or something stronger). I was sound asleep when the call came. I gave her the best secret I could come up with on the spur of the moment. I told Margo that I hadn’t spoken to Betty for two weeks prior to starting my new job and recommended she not speak to Betty either. Not talking to Betty, I told Margo, was the secret to my success, and now I was going back to sleep. Good night.

Flippant though it was, Margo took my good advice to heart. For the next 10 days or so, Betty and I would get messages on our family answering machine that said things like, “Bob, I’m getting ready to start working at a hospital a week from Monday. Don’t let Betty know. I’m not talking to her.”

Margo started her job and did well at it. This, my friends, is confirmation! You now have the magic secret of getting through whatever it is that you are fearing most. And that secret is: Don’t talk to Betty.

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But You Just Said the Opposite Ten Minutes Ago!

There were two separate incidents that occurred during a recent NSU Deuces Wild class I taught at the South Point. They are not related to each other at all — except they both happened on the same day and neither is enough to justify an entire column. So, I’ll combine them.

The first incident happened before the class. For the noon class, one of my helpers, “Larry,” gets there at 10:30 and together we set up the room. I had finished my part of the setup and was hovering near the back table where Larry was setting up strategy cards, Winner’s Guides, software, and books that I sell during the class.

Some guy, maybe 75-years old, came by and asked us what we were doing. When he found out I was going to be teaching a video poker class, he told us he already knew how to play video poker, so he didn’t need a class.

“Would you like to take the test we give at the end of the class and see how many you get right?” I asked gently. Unless the guy was a really good player, I knew he wouldn’t ace the test. There are a lot of things to know in order to play video poker well.

It didn’t matter, because he didn’t want to take the test. But he asked me if I wanted to earn $200 by just getting one joke correct — and I’d only have to pay $5 if I got it wrong.
“No thanks,” I told him, as did Larry. This had “sucker bet” written all over it and we wanted no part of it.

But this guy insisted on asking his joke anyway, namely, “What has ten wheels, flies, and it isn’t an airplane?” And he was still asking Larry and me if we wanted to play.

I told him I’m not paying off if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure there must be some type of jet that had ten wheels — which should qualify as being a correct answer whether it was the one he had in mind or not. He told me that wasn’t the answer, but if I wanted to guess for real and win $200 while only risking $5, he’d still let me.

Neither Larry nor I bit, so he told us the answer — namely “a garbage truck.” Cute enough. As he left, he told us we could make a lot of money from that making bar bets.
Doubtful. This guy was letting us take the bet AFTER WE’D HEARD THE QUESTION. The only time someone would/should take the bet is if he already knew the answer. If the guy was actually going to pay off if someone said “garbage truck,” this bet was a loser, not a winner.

It’s possible, of course, that were Larry or I able to come up with “garbage truck,” he would disqualify the answer somehow. We avoided it because it seemed like a sucker bet. After the guy left, I wondered who the sucker was.

Here’s the second incident: One of the test questions at the end of beginner level NSU class was how to play J♥ T♥ 7♥ 5♠ 3♦. This is pretty simple. Holding JT7 (the bold italics mean the cards are suited with each other) is clearly correct. I include it in the test because in Full Pay Deuces Wild, the correct play is JT, not JT7. For players who play all Deuces Wild games the same and learned FPDW sometime in the past, this would be a “tricky” hand.

But a guy who missed it, “John,” always sits in the front row and takes exhaustive notes. He regularly challenges me if he doesn’t understand something the first time. I don’t mind this at all. Usually I know the correct answer and can set him straight. Sometimes it requires using the Video Poker for Winners software. And a few times, he has caught an error which I took note of and corrected before the next time I taught the class.

But this time was different. John said, “I’m taking notes and I know that ten minutes ago, you said we never hold three-card straight flushes with two gaps in this game. I take good notes and I know you said it and now you’re saying the opposite!”

John was correct. I did say it. But he skipped a few words at the beginning of my quote, namely, “When there are one or two deuces in hand . . .” That is, letting a W stand for a deuce, W 6♣ 8♣ and W W 6♣ 8♣ are eligible to be held, but W 6♦ 9♦ and W W 6♦ 9♦ aren’t. This rule is specific to NSU. In many other deuces wild variations, the rule is different.

Video poker is full of those “read the fine print” caveats. And it takes a while to master them. It’s also possible that I didn’t utter the complete caveat when I was speaking about the strategy in the 2-deuces or 1-deuce sections. Within each section, it’s clearly understood that I’m speaking only about the strategy rules in that section.

At least it’s clearly understood by me. Maybe not so much by John. Which is why he asked the question.

Will I phrase it more accurately next time? I’m not sure. When I’m explaining the 1-deuce strategy, I’ll mention “1-deuce” three or four times in the five minutes it takes to go through that section in the beginner class (the 1-deuce section in the intermediate class takes much longer than five minutes). Mentioning it more than that gets tedious and sounds too much like legalese. I can never know exactly which of my statements will get transcribed into someone’s notes.

There’s a trade-off between giving enough information and giving too much information to the class as a whole, and whatever statement I make will be too much for some particular students and not enough for others. I’m sure other teachers struggle with this as well. So, I just use my judgment to pitch it where I think is appropriate and rely on student questions to let me know when they need more help.

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Dollars and Sense

This column is written primarily for beginners and low-intermediate players. Readers more advanced than that should give it a once-over as well. There’s a chart here you’ve likely never seen before.

You’re playing Double Double Bonus, receiving 45 for a full house. How much you get for the flush is irrelevant to this discussion. If you get only 40 for the full house in the game you typically play, you’re permitting yourself to play such a bad game that no amount of advice from me is going to help you be a winning player.

You’re dealt K♠ K♥ 6♣ 6♦ 5♠. You’re debating holding just the kings or holding the two pair. You’ve read from people like me that holding two pair is correct by a mile, but it’s counterintuitive to you. After all, you get the same “even money” for a pair of kings as you do for two pair and if you hold the kings you might get lucky and receive four kings. So why not go for it?

Let’s talk dollars and sense. Assume you’re playing dollar single line DDB, five coins at a time. Holding two pair, you have the following possibilities — and the value of those possibilities.

The frequency numbers from the chart may be found in Video Poker for Winners or other quality software. The dollar figures aren’t generally seen, although you do get the sum of them, shown in green. And notice I didn’t include columns for straights, flushes, straight flushes, or royal flushes simply because you can’t get one of those when you start out by holding a pair or two pair.

Let’s take the line corresponding to KK66. You have 47 possible draws, which is the normal number when you’re drawing one card from a 52-card pack and you’ve already looked at a five-card deal. You’ll end up with two pair 43 times and a full house four times. You can probably do this much in your head if you start with figuring how many full houses you can get. After all, the only time you’re going to get a full house is when you draw one of the two remaining kings or one of the two remaining sixes. In all other cases, you’re going to end up with the same two pair with which you started.

What’s new in this chart, shown in blue, is how much each of these hands is worth. The two-pair final hand contributes $4.57 to your total EV and the full house adds $3.83. Rather than give a definition for how I figured out those numbers, I’ll show you the calculations: $3.83 = (4 * $45 / 47). $4.57 = (43 * $5 / 47). The $45 and $5 in the formulas are the amounts you receive from a full house and two pair respectively in this game.

In the line corresponding to holding the kings, there are now 16,215 possible draws. For most of us, including me, there are way too many possibilities to figure this stuff out in our heads, or even with paper and pencil, with a high degree of confidence. Fortunately, software to do this for us is very fast, accurate, and inexpensive.
The number that really pops out at me on this line is the 69¢ that the chance at a 4-of-a-kind is worth. Yes, the quad is worth $250 when you get it, and that’s the number beginning players focus on, but you only get it a little less than one chance in 360. Multiply it out and it comes to 69¢.

Also, note that the chance for a full house is 47¢ when you hold a pair, compared to the $3.83 it’s worth when you hold two pair.

It’s easy to think of possibilities — like you COULD get a four-of-a-kind. It’s much harder to think of probabilities — which means how often does it happen percentage-wise. It’s even harder to multiply out the VALUE of the hands which means the probability multiplied by the pay schedule.

Players sometimes confuse this hand with A♠ A♥ 6♣ 6♦ 5♠. To put this into the above chart we need to add another column for four aces with a kicker. If we do that, we’ll find all the numbers in the chart stay the same, except the value of the four aces without a kicker is worth $1.63 and the value of four aces with a kicker is worth $1.48. Adding those together gives us $3.11 — compared to the 69¢ the kings were worth. This makes holding the aces worth more than holding two pair, aces up.

The strategy for this part of the game is AA > Two Pair > KK, QQ, JJ. If you can read the strategy and just follow it no-questions-asked, then you don’t need columns like this one. If you ever wonder “why,” and haven’t figured out the answer to this particular question, maybe this column will be useful to you.

As for me, I’m always wondering “why?” Once I figure that out (which I normally can do in video poker — not so much in certain other parts of life), it makes it much easier to keep strategies memorized.

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Are Women the Dutch Book?

Last week, as part of the celebration for International Women’s Day (March 8), a statue of a defiant girl staring down the Wall Street bull appeared. Count me among those who love the statue and hope it will stay. It is no secret that women are under-represented in many fields, including the AP world, as I discussed in an earlier post. Some APs have floated the idea that if the casino’s old-boy network underestimates the skills of women, women might actually have a strategic advantage relative to their fellow male APs. These ringer women will get away with murder, and will make huge profits before they are even suspected. Well, that’s the theory at least, but are women the Dutch Book? Continue reading Are Women the Dutch Book?

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Whom Do You Trust?

I’m showing my age, but I remember the “Who Do You Trust?” television show hosted by Johnny Carson before he got the Tonight Show gig. He always said later that the first word should have been “Whom” rather than “Who,” and if you can’t trust Johnny Carson, whom can you trust?

Many of the people who attend my classes are quarter or dollar players. It’s no secret that I play for higher stakes, at least some of the time. Usually once or twice a semester, someone says something like, “Although I would never play for the stakes you do, I’m really curious as to what games you play and where. Will you tell me?”

My standard answer is that I write about the places I play that I don’t mind you knowing about, and don’t write about the ones I would rather keep secret. So, if they don’t already know about one of my plays, I’m not going to tell them.

The reason for this is simple. Many plays can only support one or two competent players. Telling the world about such a play would be the kiss of death to the play. No thanks.

One player followed up with, “But I promise I won’t tell anybody, and I certainly won’t be playing those stakes myself. Don’t you trust me?”

Well, I’m not sure. I’d rather not put it to the test. If I trust 20 people and 19 of them never told a soul, the secret is still out. Is this guy one of the 19, or the one who says, “It won’t hurt anything if I mention this to my brother-in-law?” I don’t know beforehand, so it’s better that I keep quiet.

I’m not a proponent of the “Two can keep a secret only if one of them is dead” philosophy. If Richard Munchkin wants to know the where and why on any of my plays, I’m going to tell him. I trust him — even though he has the bankroll along with family members and close friends who could burn out any play I told him about. Among top gamblers, their word is their bond. If I told him, “I’ll tell you about it but you can’t play because of xxxxx,” I believe he’d honor that.

On the radio show, we’ve had blackjack team captains describe teams they were on where one of the team members ripped off the others. This is rare — but it happens — and it’s always a shock when it does. You can protect yourself from this by never telling anybody anything, but that’s going to be a lonely life you lead.

Trusting somebody has similarities with marriage. Although it ends badly some of the time (and I’ve experienced my share of that), overall, I’m convinced my life works better being married than being single.

I’d actually be more comfortable telling Richard about a play than I would be telling Bonnie! Bonnie is not a player at all and although she’s definitely on my side, if I tell her I’m going to be playing at the (pick a casino), it’s possible that she would inadvertently tell her sister, daughter, or a girlfriend where I’m playing. If I tell her over and over again, “This is a secret — you can tell no one,” she’ll honor my wishes. But she has no good gambling sense about what is a secret and what isn’t and she’s not really practiced in keeping secrets. It’s better not to tell her.

If I took her to a comped meal at the Wicked Spoon buffet at the Cosmopolitan, she would figure out that there was some play (now gone) that I had there, but she isn’t really capable of understanding why the play there was better or worse than playing at some other casino. She’s willing to listen and nod her head if I tell her, “The game pays xxx% off the top, with yyy% from the slot club, and zzz% from the mailers.  This other promotion they’re having now adds another vvv%, and there’s a pretty good chance I can talk them into www% worth of comps.”  These are just numbers to her and it’s all kind of gobbledygook.

Richard, however, would understand each of these things and if he didn’t, he’d ask me to explain further. And he could put the numbers into context of other plays he knew about. That is, a 100.5% play is pretty good if the best you can find otherwise is 100.3%. But if you can find a 101% play for the same stakes, a 100.5% isn’t such a good deal.