In July of this year, Gold Coast Casino in Las Vegas ran a “second royal in five days gets paid double” promotion. While that particular promotion inspired this article, that promotion had a particular set of rules that I’m not going to address.

The promotion I’m going to propose today doesn’t exist — it never has existed and may never exist. Still, when a good promotion is active, few pros want to discuss how to attack it. Consequently, it is sometimes best to discuss the attack strategy for a promotion “before” it gets announced. Continue reading A Change in Strategy

If your personal philosophy requires you to tell the truth 100% of the time, and anyone who doesn’t is going to hell, you’re not going to enjoy this article very much.

I married Bonnie, the widow of a career United States Air Force officer, in May of last year. Our planned European honeymoon needed to be scrapped because of a health issue for Bonnie which arose unexpectedly. This year we planned a make-up honeymoon consisting of four days in Paris, France followed by two weeks aboard the Norwegian Cruise Line Jade out of Venice, Italy. Continue reading Keeping the Story Straight

In May 2000 I was a guest in the home of my brother Dick and his wife Lisa, who at that time lived near Houston, Texas. My then-wife Shirley was off on a women’s religious retreat and I chose to spend time with Dick and Lisa rather than being a temporary bachelor in Las Vegas.

Without going into specifics and with me as the exception, my family is largely very conservative, especially when it comes to religion. I’m the only gambler in the group and in many ways have been a non-conformist compared to the others. On the second day of my visit, the discussion got around to video poker and my success — or lack thereof. Continue reading Risk and Uncertainty in Video Poker

I regularly read “how to win” discussions from a variety of disciplines. I was recently re-reading David Sklansky’s The Theory of Poker and came across the following:

“Any time you make a bet with the BEST OF IT, where the odds are in your favor, you have earned something on that bet, whether you actually win or lose on the bet. By the same token, when you make a bet with the WORST OF IT, where the odds are not in your favor, you have lost something, whether you actually win or lose the bet.” Continue reading Would You Rather Be Lucky or Good?

I’ve used the “animal versus animal” jungle metaphor to describe video poker in the past. Let’s play around a little bit more with that analogy today.

Some people think of the casino as the lion in the jungle and the players as the smaller prey, but I don’t think of it that way at all. I see the casino as the owner of the jungle, and the players are all animals within that jungle. The bigger animals have an easier time surviving than the smaller animals. Continue reading More Tails from the Jungle