Category: Video Poker

One of the risks of gambling is losing more money than you can afford. That happened to me in 1979, when I lost a lot at backgammon. After I bailed myself out of debt, I vowed to never let that happen to me again. So far, I’ve been able to keep that promise to myself. But nobody knows precisely what the future holds.

Video poker is one of the easier games to successfully avoid bankruptcy. I didn’t say it was easy. I said it was easier. The reason it’s easier is because you can learn to precisely measure how much a particular game returns and how much the slot club pays. Those are key elements in avoiding going broke. And games are nicely denominated. You can play for quarters, dollars, etc., and after a bit of playing, you know how bad the bad days can be at that denomination.

In games like live poker, it’s hard to precisely know how good you are compared to your competition. And even if you can accurately quantify this, the nature of “no limit” and “pot limit” games is that you can lose everything you bring to the table every time you sit down.

An excellent starting place in avoiding going broke is to never play games where the casino has the edge over you. If you insist on playing games that don’t meet this criterion, play games that are small in denomination compared to your gambling bankroll. 

Easier said than done for some players. Most of the “fun” of gambling is playing for stakes where it hurts when you lose. If you’re a millionaire and always play for single-line quarters, no matter the pay schedule, you’ll never go broke. And you probably won’t have any fun either.

The Kelly Criterion, named after John Kelly, a theoretician at Bell Labs in the 1950s, is a method of sizing bets so that you will never go broke and, indeed, will grow your bankroll at an optimal rate. It’s defined as maximizing the logarithm of your wealth. For most of my readers, that definition is way too technical to be useful. 

What it means in very simple terms is that if you lose a significant percentage of your bankroll, you cut back on your bets. If you’ve been very successful at a particular bet size, the Kelly Criterion tells you to increase your bet size.

Unfortunately, exact bet sizes in video poker are rather limited. While you can play $1.25 per hand, $2.50, $5.00, and $25 on single-line games, you can’t play $17.34 on one hand. Also, at a given casino, the return on quarter games may be very different than the return on $5 games. At one casino I frequent, on their multi-denomination machines, you can get 8/5 Jacks or Better if you bet dollars, 9/5 Jacks or Better if you bet $2 denominations, and 9/6 Jacks or Better if you bet at the $5 level. They have a similar breakdown for all games on the machine, including Bonus Poker, Deuces Wild, Double Bonus Poker, Double Double Bonus Poker, and several others.

At this casino, you sometimes have the advantage if you bet the $5 game (i.e., $25 per hand), depending on various promotions, but you basically never have the advantage if you bet smaller than that. Playing $25 per hand is beyond the means for most players.

Video Poker for Winners has a bankroll calculator, but the program hasn’t been updated for several years and will not work on newer computers. Dunbar’s Risk Analyzer for Video Poker, available at Huntington Press, among other places, is probably the most useful tool out there for figuring out how much bankroll you need to play most games. It’s inexpensive and very useful.

When I was starting out playing $5 9/6 Jacks or Better (with 0.67% cashback and juicy promotions — those were the days!), it seemed to me that having a bankroll of 3-5 times the royal flush was a sufficient bankroll, assuming you were playing games similar to what I was. I published that “3-5 royal flushes” rule — and since then I’ve apologized several times for doing so.

The actual bankroll depends on how big the variance of the game is and how much of an edge you have. For the same return, a Double Double Bonus player needs considerably more bankroll than a Jacks or Better player does.

Today, the slot clubs are considerably tighter than they were 30 years ago, so you need considerably more bankroll to play the same games as you used to.

How much bankroll you need also depends on your age and your other responsibilities. I’m 77 years old now. If I go broke, there are very limited employment opportunities available to me. When I went broke in 1979, I was 42 years old. I was able to find a fairly lucrative job and was able to rebuild my bankroll. That option isn’t available to me today.

Your income stream, from whatever source, also affects how much bankroll you need. Possibly you have a job, or Social Security, or a pension, or an inheritance, or royalties of some sort, alimony, or whatever. Some players have none of these things. Everyone has a different income stream, which is why there is no “one size fits all” answer to “how much bankroll do I need.”

Avoiding going broke should be a strong priority to all successful gamblers. If you don’t pay attention to this, you may well end up in a position you don’t want to be in.

Most video poker players have some stories they like to tell about a few times they really got lucky. Perhaps it was three royals in one week in 2017. Maybe it was being dealt aces with a kicker twice on Ten Play at such and such casino in 2022. Or winning that car in a drawing with only three tickets in the drum while some players had thousands of tickets. My own Million Dollar Video Poker autobiography tells of a number of those situations that happened to me.

Some players are proud of a large jackpot — never mind how bad of a game they were playing. Untold dozens of students have come up to me in my classes showing me a picture of a royal flush on their cell phone. Frequently they would say something like, “It’s a game you would say I never should have been playing, but . . .”

If they said that, I would back off. They already know that I’m a stickler for only playing when you have the advantage. I don’t need to tell them again. They’re proud of their $4,000 jackpot and I tell them congratulations and change the subject.

Although the proper strategy varies a little between good pay schedules and bad pay schedules, being dealt a premium hand is just as easy on all pay schedules (assuming a 52-card deck and a standard format game.) Ending up with a score for the day of +$3,500 (as might be the case if you hit a $4,000 jackpot while playing with a good pay schedule) doesn’t feel noticeably different than ending the day with a score of +$3,200 (as might be the case playing with a poor pay schedule.)

Similarly, when the losing days come (which they will — guaranteed), losing $2,300 in a day doesn’t feel that much worse than “only” losing $1,900. At the end of the year, though, the player playing the good games might be ahead $20,000 or so while the player playing the same amount, with the same skill on lesser games might be down that much or more. It definitely adds up.

I start from the presumption that lucky hits are, well, lucky. And random. If our goal is to get lucky while playing good games, let’s look at ways to increase the odds of that happening.

1. Limit yourself to only playing good games. If the game, plus benefits from the slot club, mailers, promotions, etc., doesn’t exceed 100% in total return, don’t play. PERIOD. NO EXCEPTIONS.

You might find there are no such games in the casino closest to you. Okay. Don’t play there. 

Some of you will find this rule too restrictive. So be it. You’re doomed to being a long-term losing player, albeit with some lucky jackpots along the way. That might be acceptable to you — given the pleasure you receive from gambling. Or maybe you greatly value the casino freebies you receive. In any case, let’s continue our discussion for those of you who are still interested.

2. Become knowledgeable about several games and learn as much as you can about the slot club at every casino you frequent. At the five different casinos I play the most hours, I play five separate games. And these are not exactly the same games and casinos that I played a couple of years ago. Casinos add and subtract games and change the slot club and promotions. If you’re a stickler for playing only one variety of video poker, you’re limiting your options.  It’s difficult to become profitable if you’re committed to only playing one particular game at one particular casino.

3. Play a lot. Obviously, a player who only plays 10 hours a year won’t hit as many juicy jackpots as a player to plays 100 hours a year — or 1,000. And since you’re limiting yourself to games where you have the advantage, for the most part, the more you play the more money you make. There will definitely be swings up and down, but if you can survive them, you’ll do fine.

4. Network with other competent players. The more players who know and like you, the more likely someone will share something that will benefit you. This is a two-way street, of course. You have to be willing to share something you discover with someone who has helped you. 

Three of my current “best plays” were brought to me by someone else. One wanted a percentage (which I agreed to, after negotiation), one did it for free because I gave him a tip a few years ago, and the third is a host — whom I take care of.

5. Scout. You never know when your current plays will dry up. Everything ends after a while. If you’re winning, that might speed up the rate at which the games are removed. That’s just the way it works. If you find a play in another gambling community, check out the other casinos in that community every time. 

6. Consider more games than just video poker. There are many games in a casino that are beatable. (You might want to listen to the archives of Gambling with an Edge. We ran that podcast for more than 10 years. There were a lot of different games discussed.) While doing the podcast, I thought about sports betting — but decided advantage slots was a game I’d be better at — so I’ve spent hundreds of hours learning about that – and am continuing to learn more. I may change games after a while.

7. Build your bankroll. Gambling is one of those activities where it takes money to make money. Do this any way you legally can. One of the biggest ways to do this is to be very frugal and save whatever you can. If your goal is eventually to win big in the casino, you need to delay current gratification. Keep your car a few years longer than you otherwise might. Don’t be getting the latest and greatest anything. It’ll be cheaper in a few years. Treat your possessions with care and resell them on Craig’s list when you’re through with them. 

If you have a spouse or other full-time partner, it helps if you’re on the same page about this. After I became single in 2012 and eventually began considering who else to connect with, fiscal responsibility was high on my list of “requirements.” 

8. Don’t be shy. Sometimes you’ll find a game that is slightly beyond your bankroll. (Important caveat: We’re limiting this discussion to games where you have the advantage.) It might make sense to commit 10% of your bankroll, or so, to taking a pot shot on this game. If it works, you’re set. If it doesn’t, you still have 90% of your bankroll to keep going.
   
9. Know you’re going to lose sometimes. That’s part of the gambling game. Losing streaks end eventually. If you lose too much of your bankroll, it will make sense to play for lower stakes. If every losing session rips at your soul, you’re in the wrong profession. Losing on good games is NOT a reason to switch to bad games.