Ever since my 76th birthday in February, my body has been falling apart orthopedically — hip, knee, and shoulder. Most of my body’s systems are fine, but my skeleton, not so much.
The MRI on my right hip showed a number of issues, including arthritis. My orthopedist has convinced me that I need a new hip. “It’s a surgery that most people recover from in a few days,” he told me. “Nothing to worry about.”
Continue reading The Old Man and the C (asino)Recently in Las Vegas, there was a local pub offering a nice promotion between 1 a.m. and 8 a.m. several days a week. Not a great promo and not likely to be repeated, but I’m not interested in providing more details about it than I already have. Suffice it to say it was close enough to where I live and juicy enough that I arranged my sleep schedule so that I was there during the requisite hours most of the days it was offered.
Continue reading It’s a Matter of Priorities
In a recent blog post I wrote:
Another factor that is true for me that isn’t universally true for other players is that I have the ability to figure out and master strategies, and I enjoy doing so. Thinking about, writing about, studying, and playing video poker occupies a much larger part of my waking hours, even after about 30 years of doing this, than these things occupy in the lives of most other players.
Continue reading How Special Is It?I had a conversation with a strong player, and he posed a series of ethical questions. He estimated that if I asked this question in a crowd of people, at least 75% of players would claim they would do the right thing in each situation. But if nobody else were around, less than 50% would actually do the right thing.
I’m not sure about his percentages, but they sound approximately right, more or less. So, let’s look at the questions.
Continue reading What Would You Do?I recently posted a few blogs concerning some fine points for the strategy of 9-5 Triple Bonus Poker Plus. They discussed somewhat complicated decisions with relatively small financial impacts. After the second blog came out, a reader posted the following:
I’ve borrowed the late Merle Haggard’s 1981 song title to describe a conversation video poker players have heard hundreds of times. It’s often expressed as an argument where the premises go something like the following:
Continue reading Are the Good Times Really Over for Good?One of the hallmarks of the Dancer/Daily strategies, especially the advanced ones, is that they presume the player can follow simple logic.
Continue reading When Strategies Should Be RedundantA few weeks ago, I discussed the taxonomy of 3-card straight flushes. The first comment after it was published was “Dork Alert!” I assumed that I was being called a dork by someone who didn’t like the column. I was such a dork that I didn’t even know the meaning of dork! By the time I figured out what it meant, a couple of other readers defended me by saying that I was certainly not a dork, but the jury was still out about whether or not I was a nerd.
I’m so glad we got that straightened out!
Continue reading The Use of “fp or worse” in StrategiesThis is a continuation of last week’s discussion. You might want to check that blog out for context.
Consider the values of these combinations, playing 9/6 Jacks or Better for dollars, five coins at a time. Note that the value of these combinations can vary depending on the other two cards in the hands. In the examples so far, I’m considering the fourth and fifth card to be an unsuited 2 and 3.
Continue reading A Look at SF3+1, SF3+0, SF3-1, and SF3-2 — Part II of IIIn my opinion, much of the value of a strategy lies in the creation process — figuring out what makes this game different from the others; looking for the rare cases; figuring out how to transcribe those cases — not in using a strategy created by somebody else.
When I’m looking for the rare cases, I’m learning all of the not-so-rare cases automatically along the way. So much of video poker is playing the mundane hands correctly.
Continue reading The Value of Creating Strategies