Category: Video Poker

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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.

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Digging for the Holes

Someone associated with a gambling site called casinoguru.com posted on gamblingwithanedge.com in response to one of my blogs:

You can’t really win money unless you bet everything at once during the first play and win. These games are somehow set to give casinos a certain advantage in the long-run. Otherwise, the owners of the casino would be losing money by running those games.

I strongly disagree with that and today I’m going to explain why.

The post presumes the house has a built-in edge “somehow.” Were that the case, every bet the player made would be negative EV. The more such bets the player made, the more EV he would lose, which over time equates to the more money he would lose.   

My whole philosophy of gambling is that sometimes the casino does NOT have the edge. I search for those times and only play when I believe I have the advantage. The slot departments and marketing departments of casinos are run by humans, and sometimes humans make mistakes of various sorts.

There are unlimited ways that casinos can make mistakes. Here, in no particular order, are areas where mistakes are made:

  1. Stacking Promotions — Most casinos have a number of promotions going on simultaneously. If your play can receive multipliers for one or more things, be eligible for three drawings, receive a free buffet, and earn bonus tier credits, plus there’s a hot seat promotion going on, it’s possible that no one promotion is enough to put you over the 100% threshold, but the sum is.

 

  1. New Promotions — If the casino has run the same promotion every April for the past seven years, there’s a good chance the bugs have been worked out and this is indeed a money maker for the house. But sometimes a new promotion is introduced into the mix. Players have one or two times seeing this promotion and finding errors before those errors are corrected. Now is the time to study the rules carefully.

 

  1. Change in Management — The new guy has some new ideas. Sometimes those ideas aren’t so well thought out. The old guy did it a particular way for a reason. If the new guy doesn’t understand those reasons, opportunities for the player can exist.

 

  1. Grand Openings — This is related to the previous paragraph. Some of my best results over the years have been when new casinos open — and the employees in charge were second-in-command at other places previously. Every second-in-command believes he is qualified to be first-in-command if only given the chance. Not all of them are correct.

 

  1. Assuming All Machines are the Same — Let’s say a casino’s average hold on video poker is 4%. It’s easy to conclude that if they offer a 2% promotion they will be okay, especially if they get a lot more business. The actual machine mix, however, includes some machines that hold 1% and some that hold 7%. Although the average is 4%, the players who receive a 2% promotion on a 1% game are going to come in and hammer those machines. It’s possible to lose money on this promotion even though they added a 2% promotion to a 4% floor.

 

  1. Assuming All Players are the Same — The original poster made this kind of mistake. He assumed all players were the same so that a casino could not make money by offering games that were “too loose.” In games based on skill, it is quite possible for the smartest players to have an advantage while overall the house makes money on a game.

 

  1. Different Times — Let’s say the casino day goes from 3 a.m. to 3 a.m. It could easily be that some promotions are geared to the casino day and some are geared to the midnight-to-midnight day. Between midnight and 3 a.m. promotions could be doubled up that the casino did not intend to be doubled up.

 

  1. Slot Department is Arguing with the Marketing Department — At the best-run casinos, video poker promotions are designed with the slot department and marketing department both having input. This isn’t always the case at every casino. If the slot director is shut out from those meetings, for one reason or another, this can lead to opportunities for the player. The player must know the floor and know which machines will best benefit from particular promotions. Befriending the slot director and listening to his problems some of the time can give you insight into this.

 

  1. Errors in the Rules — Writing accurate rules with no holes in them is not easy. Winning players study rules and look for things that can work in their favor. If you’re not reading the rules for every promotion carefully and more than once, you are leaving money on the table. Part of the preceding sentence includes being able to recognize an error when you see one. Not everybody can do this, but the ones who can do better than the ones who can’t.

 

  1. Player Tracking System Idiosyncrasies — Let’s say Wednesday is a point multiplier day and Thursday isn’t but has some other promotion going on. If your card remains inserted after Wednesday becomes Thursday, are you still getting the multiplier? Some systems yes. Some systems no. You have to figure this out for yourself.

 

  1. Extra Benefits for Free Play — Let’s say you earned $250 in free play on January 25 in a drawing and the free play is good for a month, and when you play off your free play you do not earn points. In February at this casino, if you hit a royal flush you get a logo jacket. It makes sense to wait until February to play off that free play. It’s the same amount of play either way but waiting gives you an extra opportunity to get that jacket.

 

  1. Wrong Pay Schedules — Every now and then you see an outlier in a casino where the casino has inserted a game that is a percent or so looser than every other similar machine on the floor. Probably a mistake. Probably won’t last long. But it can be an opportunity while it lasts.

 

  1. Video Poker Machines Set as Slot Machines — Many casinos pay different amount of player club points for video poker than they do for slot machines. (Hypothetically, video poker gets a 0.2% rebate while slots get a 1% rebate.) When the MGM Grand in Las Vegas made this mistake back in 2000, I played a lot and was awarded an extra $75,000 in free play along with two P.T Cruisers.

 

  1. The Promotion is Too Complicated for the Casino Employees to Administer Correctly — If one or more employee gives you more benefits because of misreading the rules, you keep going back to those employees.

 

  1. The Correction Mechanism is not Symmetrical — If employees make mistakes in the houses favor, players speak right up. If employees make mistakes in the players’ favor, players tend to keep quiet about it.

 

  1. Be Smarter than the Casino Decision Makers — It’s helpful if you are. Casino promotions are often a battle of wits between the casinos and the players. Playing video poker well certainly doesn’t require being a genius. Exploiting casino promotions to their utmost probably does.

 

  1. Sometimes It’s Better to Not Ask Questions — If you find a hole in the rules, it is usually a bad idea to ask questions about it beforehand. If it’s indeed a hole, the casino will say thank you very much, fix the hole, and you receive no benefit from finding that error.

 

If you go ahead and exploit that hole and then discuss it with them afterwards, you have a much better chance of getting paid. And you also have a much better chance of getting kicked out of the casino if they aren’t “good losers.” You need to make a calculation beforehand as to the likelihood of collecting how much money compared to the likelihood of being thrown out. If the error is big enough, go for it!

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He Screwed Me!

I rarely play two video poker machines at once. One exception is when the South Point runs their “Money Madness” promotion, where they have a casino-wide progressive that must hit between $10,000 and $25,000 (along with a smaller progressive as well.)

If you’re playing and somebody else hits the progressive, which is usually going to be the case, you still get $25 in free play as a consolation prize. So, playing on both my card and Bonnie’s doubles my chances for that $25 bonus. And if the game I’m playing generates relatively frequent W2Gs, that’s all the more reason to want a second machine.

One of those situations occurred last February 19, which was Presidents’ Day, and the casino was offering 2x points, which was worth 0.6% there. Other casinos were offering 6x points, which amounts to the same thing, but the South Point has a bigger variety of better games to play.

I got there about 2 a.m., planning on playing twelve or so hours if I could. When I was younger, I planned on longer shifts, but only being able to play twelve hours at a time now is hardly the biggest compromise I’ve had to make as a senior citizen.

There are several acceptable games to play on such a day. One of them is Ultimate X where they have two 25¢ Ten Play machines. It’s a lucrative pay schedule, but it’s $25-per-pull price tag and sky-high volatility makes it more expensive than many players wish to tackle. Still, they are popular machines with many players playing 5¢ or 10¢ variations which have considerably lesser pay schedules.

About 15 minutes into me playing both machines, a guy who I’ll call Ed, said, “You’re not really planning on playing both of those all night, are you?”

That’s not at all the same as saying, “May I play one of those machines?” to which my answer was always going to be, “Of course.” I appreciate that the South Point sponsors both my podcast and my classes and quite simply I’m not going to get into any argument on the floor that might encourage the bosses to conclude that I’m too much trouble.

Whether Ed’s question met my definition as a proper request, it’s possible he meant it as such. I asked him if he wanted to play one and he nodded, so I picked the machine on which I wished to continue, played off my multipliers on the other, cashed out, and consolidated.

After some initial pleasantries, I went back to playing my machine. Although I can play quite a few different games at a high level, one price of playing so many is that if I don’t concentrate on what I’m doing, I can easily get the strategies mixed up.

Ed, however, liked to talk.

Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.

Soon after he got there, somebody nearby got a jackpot, so there were extra casino workers around. He asked anybody who was listening whether they heard about the actress who stabbed her husband that morning? Nobody had heard. Ed said he thinks it was “Reese somebody.” The floorman ventured “Witherspoon?” Ed replied, “No silly. With her knife!”

Did I mention he never shut up?

After the initial couple of minutes, I simply hunkered down in front of the machine and ignored everything he said. He’d ask direct questions, such as, “Why did you play the hand that way?” or “I heard it was your birthday last week. Anything interesting happen?” or “Have you had any big jackpots on these machines?” I didn’t respond to any of these. I couldn’t make him shut up, but if I didn’t answer back, perhaps he’d take the hint after an hour or three.

He decided to tell me about a recent situation when he played two machines simultaneously at a casino in Laughlin. There was a hot seat promotion, where $100 in free play is awarded randomly every so many minutes, and he was playing on both his card and his wife’s card, even though she was 100 miles away.

He was asked to give up one of the machines and he said he was holding one for his wife. The player was persistent, but Ed wouldn’t budge. The player went to the shift manager, who came back and said that house policy was that you could only play one machine at a time if somebody else wished to play one. Ed’s name was now recorded by the casino and if this happens again, he will be restricted from the club.

So, Ed moved over and let the other player have one of the machines. The player inserted $5, played one hand, lost, and then stood up and told Ed, “That’s my limit. You can have the machine back again.”

“You went to all that trouble and you only wanted to play five dollars?” Ed’s voice became animated. Even so, I kept playing my machine without comment.

“This guy screwed me!” Ed ranted. “Five lousy dollars was all he wanted to play and now the casino has my name down as a trouble maker. It’s so unfair!”

While I was NOT going to discuss it with Ed at the time, which would have kept him going for another hour or two protesting how he got screwed, I think Ed brought it on himself.

He lied to keep an extra machine, basically taking a shot. Sometimes when you take a shot, things backfire. That’s what happened here.

You cannot wait until everything plays out and then demand a Mulligan in order to try again. You have to make your decisions before you know exactly what’s going to happen.

And if your decision turns out badly? Well sometimes gambling works that way and sometimes life works that way. Nobody screwed him. I think the phrase, “Hoist on his own petard!” is apt here. And since he wouldn’t shut up, I can’t say I felt sorry for him at all!

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The Cost of Tips

In mid-February, Andrew Uyal, a Las Vegas Strip casino pit boss, wrote in his Behind the Curtain column on the www.gamblingwithanedge.com site an article titled Who Actually Cares? It was about tipping. One of the comments made to his article was about my writing, so Uyal forwarded it to me to make sure I saw it. I’m going to address that today.

When Bob discusses how a given game in a given casino has a positive EV, I have never seen him factor in tokes in his highly detailed calculations despite his listing every other conceivable variable involved. It seems to me that giving up even $5 or $10 or more on big wins would have a substantial impact on beating the casino if one only hopes to beat the casino by ~.02%

Do APs refrain from toking, because it’s the only way to maintain a positive EV? If APs do tip when they win, why doesn’t Bob cost tips in his calculus for the EV of the games he plays?

I have written more than a dozen articles through the years about tipping. The Cliff Notes of my views are:

  1. Tipping is a personal matter. Everybody must decide for himself.
  2. I tip less than many other players.
  3. If I’m teaching at a casino, e.g. the South Point now but it has been other places as well over the years, I always tip at least $5 on every hand pay. I do not wish complaints about this to get upstairs which might affect my welcome.
  4. If I’m playing at a 15-machine bar, which abound in Nevada and very occasionally offer very lucrative games/promotions, the only casino employee on sight is the bartender. If the game is lucrative enough, I tip more generously in these situations than I would in a regular casino. (If the game is not that lucrative, I don’t play.) A bartender can easily complain to the boss if I’m “winning all the time.” If he is well-tipped, he has an incentive to keep his mouth shut in this regard.

So, without expanding on the Cliff Notes too much, let me see if I can find something new to say. The letter-writer to Andrew Uyal believes that video poker players only have a 0.02% advantage. Believe me, if that were the size of the advantage, I wouldn’t be playing. I need a significantly larger advantage than that.

To show how this is not nearly enough, I used Video Poker for Winners and looked at NSU Deuces Wild (returning 99.728%) and assumed a slot club of 0.3%. This gives the player a 100.028 game, which is actually quite a bit more than the 0.020% edge posited. A dollar single-line player needs a bankroll of more than $1 million to have a 99% chance of not going broke in the long run. I’ve never heard of a dollar player having anywhere near this size of gambling bankroll. Those of us who do have larger bankrolls typically play for larger stakes than dollar single line.

In his column, Andrew Uyal addresses tips from the point of view of table games. In table games, the dealer and the player are face-to-face all-day long. A good dealer can enhance the gambling experience. In places where “when to shuffle” is a dealer-decision, a well-timed tip can sometimes get you one more hand. But unless you’re betting $100 or more, a $5 tip will almost always be cost-ineffective, and anything less than that could be perceived as an insult.

In video poker, you rarely interact with the floor people except in the case of a W2G. The floor people bring you the money. Period. I’m nice to these people. I learn their names over time. But I don’t see normal jackpots as a tip-worthy event.

An exception to this would be a high-value promotion where there are LOTS of W2Gs hitting all the time. Then tipping makes sense because if the floor people have to decide who to take care of first, it’s human nature to help the tokers first.  Since time is money on these types of plays, “sharing the wealth” a bit is smart gambling.

So yes, video poker APs tend to tip less than recreational players. With that said, there will always be APs who honestly believe that toking well is simply a cost of doing business and that minimum wage floor people need the money more than a player who can afford to play $50 a hand or more.

I understand that point of view. I also understand the point of view that when you lose $10,000, floor people never offer to share your losses with you. It’s a one-way street. They only want to share your wins.

Both points of view make sense to some degree. You’ll have to balance them for yourself.

Finally, in most cases I tip zero, which is why I don’t explicitly list the cost of tips in my calculations.

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How Do You Figure?

Let me describe a hypothetical situation that is based in reality.

Let’s say the two best games for you at a casino are 25¢ Ten Play 9/6 Bonus Poker Deluxe (99.64%) and 25¢ Spin Poker 9/6 Jacks or Better (99.54%). Let’s also assume the slot club plus the various promotions adds a half percent.

You have a miniscule edge at JoB (namely 0.04% — 99.54% + 0.50% = 100.04%) and a slightly-less-miniscule edge at BPD (0.14%). In addition, the Ten Play game requires $12.50 per play while the Spin Poker game requires $11.25 per play.

The reason the difference in amount per “pull” matters is calculated by the advantage times the amount bet. In our example, the bet size for BPD is 11% greater than that for JoB, so that increases your edge.

Further, let’s assume you know both games well, like them both equally, bankroll is not an issue, and want to play the game where you have the bigger advantage. So far, that’s going to be BPD in the Ten Play version.

If that’s all there was to it, there would be no discussion worthy of a column. To make things interesting, assume that when you play the Ten Play machine rapidly, one out of ten hands doesn’t register. That is, for every ten hands played, instead of earning the 125 points (at $1 coin-in per point) you deserve, you only receive 112.5 points. Now what? Which game is better? The lesser game gets full points and the better game awards only 90% of the points you are supposed to get.

Go ahead and work out your answer. I’ll be happy to wait for you.

Since the JoB game works exactly like it’s supposed to, we know that has a 100.04% yield. The only game we need to work on is BPD.

For BPD, the game itself is still worth 99.64%, as it would be if you didn’t use your slot club at all. That number isn’t affected by the player tracking system and the slot club. It’s only the 0.5% slot club that’s reduced to 0.45% when you only get credit for 90% of your coin-in. So, 99.64% + 0.45% = 100.09%.

As I mentioned earlier, it isn’t the raw percentages we wish to compare, but rather the raw percentages multiplied by the coin-in. But since 90% of $12.50 per hand comes out to be $11.25, which is the same as you’re betting for Spin Poker, no adjustment needs to be done here to compare the two games.

The best play is still BPD. Is that what you deduced? This isn’t that difficult, although figuring out exactly how to calculate this is a bit tricky to some players.

The guy who told me about this had a totally different take on it. He argued, “The casino player tracking system shouldn’t be making this mistake. It’s like they’re cheating me. And since I don’t like being cheated, I’m going to avoid the game I’m being cheated on and go with the other game. That’ll teach them!”

Well, I don’t like being cheated either. The word “cheated” implies the casino is doing this on purpose. I doubt this is the case here. If you bring it to the slot director’s attention, in most casinos he will attempt to fix the problem.

Personally, even though I’m not afraid to address mistakes to slot directors when I think it appropriate, in this case I would likely keep quiet. In our example, we’re assuming this is the loosest game in the house. Those games make slot directors nervous. Since the fix to this problem would cause the casino to pay out more money for the same amount of play, the slot director might well decide to fix the problem but downgrade the game to 8/6 rather than 9/6. That wouldn’t be to my liking at all.

What I would do is play the BPD, even though the machine had a malfunction. Or maybe avoid the casino altogether because a 0.09% edge is just too skinny. But going all the way down to a 0.04% edge would never be my solution.

Just because there’s a malfunction doesn’t mean that the game should necessarily be avoided. You need to estimate the cost of the malfunction and proceed accordingly.