Many of you know that I participate in storytelling events. I’ve been regularly attending a workshop to improve my skills.
Recently, after we had all practiced our stories online for the day, Pete, the leader who lives on the East Coast, asked me if I would be willing to take him around and show him how to play were he to come to Vegas.
Continue reading Unrealistic Expectations“S-U-R-P-R-I-S-E!” sixty people shouted as my wife Bonnie entered her sister’s house. Her 75th birthday party was off to a noisy beginning.
I sighed in relief. We had pulled it off. All the invitations and such had been sent out and responses received with Bonnie having no clue. I had ordered a cake from BabyCakes, the bakery within the M Resort, where I had a large number of comps.
Continue reading Two Sucker BetsIn Las Vegas, there was a 70-day break for the pandemic, assuming you played in the casinos on March 17 and returned on June 4. If you socially distanced before March 17, or didn’t rush back as soon as the casinos reopened, the break was longer.
Certain casino venues elsewhere in the country opened earlier or later than June 4, but for now, let’s assume we all had a 2¼ -month break, minimum. It’s close enough for today’s purposes.
Continue reading Are You Still Up to Snuff?I was out walking for exercise and my iPhone rang. Had I looked at the caller ID, I would have seen “UNKNOWN,” usually a tip to avoid answering, but I was busy doing nothing at all important so I hit the green button and heard a recorded voice saying, “Now is the time to refinance your home because . . . ” I never found out what the specifics of the offer were. I hung up after nine words.
I find such calls mildly irritating. They take up a few minutes of my day, but to me they’re not a big deal. However, I’ve been around other people who slam down the phone in anger and loudly curse the machine making the call, “Why don’t you take your &%#!@& offer and shove it up your dial tone?” Or something like that. As though the machine making the phone calls cares.
The machine is dialing numbers according to a list, or perhaps according to a formula. When the last person hangs up, for whatever reason and with whatever emotion, the next one is called. Whether the current person places an order or not, the next call will be made as soon as the current one hangs up or perhaps is transferred to a real person. The machine will keep on calling as long as it has numbers to call and it’s within the hours prescribed for it, which might be something like 10 a.m. through 8 p.m.
A video poker machine is like that. When a new hand is triggered (which might be by hitting the deal button), the machine looks at its internal clock (in nanoseconds), checks one other “seed” (which is required for a random number generator to work, varies by manufacturer, and isn’t important to this discussion), and deals the cards. Sometimes people will say, “The machine is in a cold streak.” Nonsense. The machine is just dealing cards. The fact that you haven’t won in a half hour is totally irrelevant to it. One lady I knew said things like, “Sixes are running today,” and usually when she played accordingly, it didn’t help.
Others will say, “I hit two royal flushes yesterday so it’s making up for it now.” Nonsense. The machine is just dealing cards. Or, “Because I’m (pick one or two: on a winning streak, on a losing streak, fat, Armenian, over-drawn at the bank, using a slot club card, divorced, voted for Trump), the machine is . . . ” Nonsense. The machine is just dealing cards.
I think that people ascribe human emotion or motives to video poker machines because these people are trying to understand their results. They lost today and they won yesterday so it must be because . . . They’ve lost six times straight, so the reason must be because . . . Or perhaps they use the machine’s “behavior” as a good reason to change machines, or denomination, or change games within a machine. Or instead of trying to understand their results, perhaps these people are attempting to assign blame. Such as, “It was not really my fault. The machine was colder than a witch’s elbow. Nothing I could do about it.”
Perhaps surprisingly, the last explanation above is one that I might use. AFTER a session is over, it is possible to assign descriptive terms to that particular session. You can say it was “hot” (meaning that you won), “cold” (meaning that you didn’t), “so so” (meaning it was so so), or whatever. MIDWAY though a session, you can describe what the session has been so far, but there’s no way in the world to predict how the rest of the session is going to go. The “best guess” of what the future will bring is the average of what this type of machine under these particular conditions (i.e., dollars, NSU Deuces Wild, at a casino that pays .25% cash back, on a day when double points are being offered, during a month when you get a jacket if you hit a royal flush) typically offers over a million hours of play, given your particular skill level. You ARE PRETTY SURE the “best guess” will be high or low this time. You just don’t know which (i.e., Will it be higher or lower than normal this time?), and by how much, until after you are finished.
To make your next year of play better than your last year of play, you can choose better games (e.g., if one returns 98.9% on average and another returns 99.6% on average, the second is “better” than the first), stick to the good game once you’ve identified which one is best, practice that game on a computer or by studying a Winner’s Guide for the game, play at casinos with good slot clubs, and do most of your play only during good promotions. Doing these things will help you. Believing in such things as “The reason this machine started to pay off is because it was on a dry spell and the dam finally broke,” won’t.
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.
My office at home includes a nice chair for reading and sometimes Bonnie will come in and read quietly while I’m working at my computer. It’s not “together-time,” but it’s closer than spending all our time in separate rooms. Such was the case on a recent Saturday when I opened an email from a friend inviting us both to dinner sometime before the end of that month.
“Bonnie, we’re invited to eat with Pete and Gladys. They have a nice comp they wish to share with us — and maybe another couple. Do you want to go?”
“Okay. When?”
“Don’t know yet. I’ll keep you posted.”
I sent back an email saying that in general Thursdays and Sundays were best for us. Pete asked about the Sunday coming up.
“Bonnie, other than the show at South Point we’re going to, is there any reason the Sunday eight days from now is out? So long as we leave the dinner by 6:45, we can easily make the 7:30 show time.”
Bonnie told me it was rude to accept dinner reservations and then leave early and we were more flexible timewise on the following two Sundays.
“But Pete suggested this date first. For some reason, this Sunday works best for them. Let’s try to make it work for all of us before we move on to another date.”
“I still think it’s rude. Gladys may not want to eat that early.”
“In that case, it’s up to Pete to say that and if he does, then we’ll move on to Plan B.”
“What is Plan B?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
I sent off the email saying that if we could begin around 5:00 and could leave by 6:45 so we could make the show, we’d be happy to attend. Pete shortly sent back an email saying that 5:00 worked perfectly for them and they were looking forward to it.
When I passed on the information to Bonnie, she told me that if I wasn’t going to listen to her, why did I even ask her?
I explained that I did listen to her response. Since her only objection to this Sunday was that it was rude to leave by 6:45, I decided that I was pretty sure Pete and Gladys could easily cope with that level of rudeness. If she had presented a different objection, it could easily have been a show-stopper and I would have aimed for another night.
“Whatever! Just do what you want. Don’t even ask me next time! I don’t care!”
I knew from experience that continuing the “discussion” that evening would be futile. So, I invited her for a walk around the block as long as the dinner invitation would not be discussed at all. By the next day, everything was fine and there was no lasting resentment.
At the risk of being called sexist, I’ve had numerous versions of that conversation with several women in my life over the years. While there’s plenty of evidence that my social skills are occasionally less than stellar, I suspect this conversation didn’t sound too unfamiliar to my readers.
There are direct analogs from what Bonnie and I went through there to gambling intelligently with a partner. In my current case, I am the only one doing the gambling and I have a partner in life. In other cases, the two partners may both be gambling on a common bankroll whether they are life-partners or not.
One of you is going to have to be the decision maker insofar as what, how much, and when to gamble. The other person can offer input, and sometimes that input is sufficient to change the plans, but one person has to be in charge. And once the decision is made, the other one should go along with it without mentioning that she disagrees with the decision every five minutes.
There must be trust between the partners. If you don’t trust each other with money, skill-set, or decision-making, it can make for an unhappy partnership.
In my case, it’s obvious who the decision maker should be insofar as gambling goes. Bonnie and I have been together less than four years and I was already a video poker professional when she came along. Also, I’m the one with the gambling bankroll. In addition, making logical decisions when there are a lot of competing variables is something I’m better at than she is. (On occasion, Bonnie might dispute this last one.)
In other partnerships, it’s not so clear cut who should be in charge. Should it be the one with the money? Should it be the most knowledgeable gambler? Should it be the one with the best organizational skills? Should it be the one who wants to be the leader the most? Should it be the only one willing to take on that role? Can you agree who’s best at it?
Well, each partnership is different and each must come up with its own way of doing things. We’ve had several “team captains” on the radio show explaining different ways they did things. It’s different if you have the same people in a long-lasting partnership than it is if you’re together only for a weekend for a 3-day play. (I know I’m riding roughshod over the difference between being a two-person partnership and a multi-person team. For today’s discussion, I don’t think that difference is important.)
Can it create hard feelings sometimes along the way? Of course. This depends at least partly on how abrasive the decision-maker is and how sensitive the other person is.
I’ve known of marriages that have broken up because of gambling. I’m not talking here about problem gamblers (who have their own set of problems and certainly many marriages have been ruined by problem gambling). I’m talking about winning players who couldn’t agree on things such as how much, how often, and when — and when you should get away from gambling for a while. Just having money coming in is not nearly enough for a happy life.
I’m glad my articles are now posted on the GamblingWithAnEdge.com website. That provides a forum and often people take the time to respond to what I’ve said — or to comment on other responses.
A while ago somebody posted there, “Is it wrong to see someone drop money and you don’t tell them?” I want to tackle that one today.
My answer today is probably different than it was twenty-four years ago. Twenty-four years ago, I was brand new to Las Vegas and had moved to town with $6,000 in cash. My car was in decent repair. I wasn’t broke — but I was one or two unfortunate incidents away from being broke. I was playing blackjack with a girlfriend-partner, and that $6,000 had to cover bankroll AND living expenses.
At that time, I would probably have kept my mouth shut, waited until the person who dropped the money had stepped away, picked up the money, and left the area. This exact scenario didn’t happen to me, but similar-enough situations occurred that I’m pretty sure that’s what I would have done. I REALLY was in survival mode. Not literally, but psychologically. Since I hadn’t caused the person to drop the money, I wouldn’t have felt I was stealing the money. I could have slept at night.
Today I’m in a different situation in life. When I see people drop something, I normally speak up — basically by reflex. It’s usually not money which is dropped, of course, but sometimes it is. Today, the pleasure I get from an “extra” $100 is usually less than the grief felt by the person who lost it.
Even when I was barely getting by, there would be situations where I would speak up. Such as: If a mother was struggling with three young children and one of the kids caused her to drop some money — even if I was in a survival mode, I would have spoken up. Whatever her financial status, a mother with three young kids is having a difficult time and I wouldn’t want to make it any more difficult. Keeping the money would forever have me worrying about, “What if she was getting medicine for one of the kids and that was the only money she had?” Best to play it straight and not have those worries.
Picking up money that has been inadvertently left behind has lots of analogs in a casino. You see credits left on machines. You see multipliers left on Ultimate X machines. You see players leave “must hit by $500” machines when the meter is at $498. Sometimes you know who left these things and sometimes you don’t. Collecting credits left on the machine may be against the law in some jurisdictions (usually you won’t be caught), but often there’s no law telling you what you must do. Often, you’re free to make your own judgments and decisions.
Is there a moral difference to what my actions should be based on whether I was poor or I was rich? Probably not, but the world sure looks different depending on whether things are going your way or not.
I like living in a world where random acts of kindness are not all that unusual. And to have that world exist requires that I do my share. So, I do.
Someone pointed me to an article in a West Hollywood publication about the Cavendish West. I was surprised to find that I was quoted in the article as the author never spoke to me. He did, however, paraphrase some things I’ve said on the radio show.
The Cavendish West is the place where I learned many lessons about gambling — from about 1975 – 1991. Although I did play a bit of contract bridge there for money, I was never a winning player at that game. My game of choice was backgammon, where I was successful — for a time.
In the mid-1970s, when backgammon was a sexy game, was played in discos, and was written about in popular magazines, I was sufficiently above average that I did quite well financially. Eventually the game passed out of favor and the Cavendish was left with only the good pros beating up on the not-so-good pros. I fell into the higher end of the lower category — and eventually, around 1980, I had to go out and get a job to support myself. It was awful.
I wrote a “Lessons from the Cavendish West” chapter in my Million Dollar Video Poker autobiography, but today I want to primarily address other things.
At the Cavendish, there were a LOT of good players. You could sit and watch them play, and so long as you were quiet you were generally allowed to look on. As Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” You could take notes and see how the big boys did things.
Sometimes they’d take three or so minutes to make a play and you could see what they finally did, but you had no idea of what their thought process was. For me, just watching was pretty boring. Playing was a lot more fun than watching. Still is. I basically had a free backgammon university education available to me, but instead chose to go and play backgammon against somebody over whom I had little or no edge. That led to a form of gambler’s ruin.
Today I hope I’m smarter than that. Video poker opportunities are less plentiful and less lucrative than they used to be. Studying, scouting, and waiting for the good ones are all part of succeeding these days. It’s easy to predict a day will come that I’ll be playing two hours a week or less. I’m preparing for that day. Perhaps you should too. Those who continue to play even though they are not the favorite will continue to lose.
Other factors that were drummed into me concerned sleep management and substance abuse. During certain periods in the 1980s, I worked 50+ hours a week in IT departments and then tried playing and/or studying 40 hours a week of backgammon. Both careers suffered — as did my social life. Today I can’t stay alert and play more than 6-8 hours at a time, although if I get a good four hours of sleep I can put in another session of that length. However much EV I calculate a play is worth, that calculation presumes an insignificant number of errors. If I play long enough, I make many more errors than I calculated and lose all my edge.
The Cavendish was housed in an office building and one flight up was a small roof that covered a portion of the building. Players frequently smoked marijuana or other substances on the roof and getting an invitation to join them was fairly easy. I didn’t do that very often, but when I did, my results suffered greatly. I am not someone who can smoke a joint and then concentrate on playing the way I need to in order to succeed.
Because of our last election, recreational marijuana is about to be legalized in Nevada. That’s fine for those of you who want that, but for me it’s poison. I’ll stay away. It’s possible that someday I’ll be in sufficient pain that I will take marijuana to help deal with it, but I’ll give up gambling for as long as I’m consuming.
The end of the article tells of the last days of the Cavendish, when voters of the then recently incorporated West Hollywood decided they didn’t want the club in their city. Previously, West Hollywood was a part of the City of Los Angeles. It was said around the club in the 70s and 80s that the mother of the DA (or was it the chief of police?) regularly played gin rummy at the Cavendish, so the club was safe from being raided. That was probably true, but I don’t know which public official, which mother, or even which jurisdiction this applied to. I was just happy that I could play there.
The Cavendish died a couple of years before I moved to Las Vegas. I was sad to see it go, although by that time it was just a time-killer for me. There were relatively few backgammon players at the end and, although I could get into a game where I was a slight favorite (I was a MUCH better player at that time than I was back in 1980 when I had to leave and go get a job), the house rake absorbed most of my edge. Still, it was a pleasant diversion one or two nights a week and I liked that.
When I got to Vegas, there was a backgammon club here. I briefly considered staying active in the backgammon scene, but I already knew I couldn’t support myself playing backgammon in Los Angeles and had heard it was tougher in Las Vegas. No thanks. I decided to stick to games I thought I could beat.
If you read the article, you’ll see a picture of a backgammon board at the top. This is a folding board, sold at toy stores with toy store dice. This is NOT what we used at the Cavendish. In a reply that I sent in response to the article, I explained what the differences are.
The picture is also missing the most important part of the game — i.e. the doubling cube. Without a doubling cube, backgammon is just a game. With a doubling cube, backgammon is a great gambling game.
I suspect my many thousands of hours at the Cavendish helped make me a better gambler today. After you’ve been through many many dozens of winning streaks and losing streaks, it’s easier to keep your balance when you’re in another one.
At the time, especially when I was losing and had to go and get a job, I thought I had “wasted” several years of my life. Today I believe I couldn’t have gotten to where I am today without going through that first. Among other things, the Cavendish introduced me to Richard Munchkin and for that I’m very grateful.
Bonnie and I recently cruised the Mexican Riviera on NCL, courtesy of Penn National — in particular M Resort. We’ve vacationed several times on the same cruise line courtesy of Harrah’s/Caesars, but this time it was from somewhere else.
I packed a lot of M logo shirts — of which I have dozens. Perhaps two or three times per week, M offers free gifts — such as shirts or alcohol, sometimes higher-end stuff. I rarely go down to pick up these gifts. It’s ten miles away; it causes another trip which can lower my mailer; and how much do I need another T-shirt anyway? A few times a year, however, they have a “Warehouse Blowout” event on a Sunday, where they “give away” unclaimed items. Depending on your tier level, you get one, two, or three tickets for free and you can earn another four tickets for play that day. If you do “play up” for extra tickets, you also qualify for a free Sunday lunch buffet — which is a quality meal at this casino.
Once inside, you spend your tickets on whatever you like — keeping in mind that the pickings are pretty slim (leftover alcohol rarely finds its way to these events). Often neither Bonnie nor I can find stuff we can’t live without, so T-shirts and polo shirts (for which you get two shirts for one ticket) are our default. More than once I’ve brought home eight or ten shirts.
On the ship, a senior couple, “Marge” and “Ed,” recognized the shirt I was wearing and told me they lived in Henderson, which is in the greater Vegas area. They played Double Double Bonus and told me the casino they played at, Emerald Island, had the 9/6 version on a 100-coin penny machine — a level at which they were comfortable. “We’re retired, you know, the casino is close to home, and they give us free food.”
“That’s fine,” I told them. “The game is costing you a penny a hand on average, assuming you play well, offset by whatever food they give you. It sounds like low-cost entertainment.”
“What do you mean ‘play well?’” Marge asked. “It’s pretty much common sense.”
“Every hand has a mathematically correct play. Let me ask you some basic ones,” I said. “How would you play A♠ Q♥ J♣ 7♦ 4♣?” I knew the correct choice was QJ, but many DDB players hold just the ace. Occasionally some players without a clue hold AQJ.
“I’d throw them all away,” Marge announced.
Whoa! This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the game is played. I wasn’t sure how to tell her that without insulting her.
“No,” I told her. “That’s not close. Sorry.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Computer programs tell you how to play every hand. Over time I’ve learned correct plays,” I told her.
“I’ve never heard of that,” Ed said.
“Do you guys own a PC?” I asked. They did. My computer, with Video Poker for Winners installed, was in my cabin. I was willing to spend a few minutes showing them — but if they hadn’t owned a computer there was no hope that they’d remember enough hints to make a difference.
When we got to my cabin, I let the computer deal hands just to see where they were. I had it set on “Advanced” so the hands were tougher than average. I didn’t do this to be mean — it’s just that they are more interesting. Having the computer ask them if they know how to play Q♥ Q♣ 7♦ 7♠ 7♥ is a waste of their time and mine.
One hand was K♠ Q♥ J♣ 9♣ 7♣. This is not a beginner level hand. Not all players would correctly play KQJ9. Some would hold KQJ and other hold J97. But not Ed and Marge.
“I’d hold king jack,” Ed told me. “Holding queens is always unlucky.”
“And I’d throw them all away,” Marge chimed in.
These were both awful decisions
Next was K♦T♦7♦ 6♠ 3♥. Ed held the KT and Marge held the K. Both wrong, but at least reasonable. They didn’t come close on three of the next five hands we tried.
There are some people who just aren’t smart enough to play intelligent video poker. I concluded I was talking to two of them. I didn’t suggest they buy the Winner’s Guide for the game because I think it would have been incomprehensibly difficult for them.
I did suggest they get the software. I told them that if they practiced a couple of hours a week before they played, and attempted to play like the computer recommended, they would save more than a thousand dollars a year.
Marge was doubtful. “I’ve seen people use strategy cards, including some with your name on them,” she told me. “They don’t do any better than anybody else.”
I asked Marge if she knew for sure how well she and Ed were doing gambling-wise this year. She didn’t. “Keeping records is too much like work. We’re retired, you know.”
I wanted to ask her how she could possibly know that somebody else was doing better or worse than she was if she didn’t even know how well she was doing? Surely, she had no strong knowledge of how the other person was doing either.
But I didn’t. I did tell them that strategy cards worked well if you practiced with them and used them regularly.
I also told her that I’d be teaching beginner DDB at the South Point, probably in January. I invited them and promised it would help them a lot. Although the DDB class is for beginners, they would probably still find it too difficult.
They left with a “we’ll think about it.” (I know what that means! It means I should assume 10-1 odds against them showing up for class.)
Playing video poker intelligently isn’t for everybody. It takes a certain level of the right kind of intelligence. Not everybody has a chance to succeed.
How many times growing up were you told to always do your best? How many times have you told it to your own kids or grandkids?
While it has a catchy ring to it, it is basically terrible, short-sighted advice that’s impossible to follow. Continue reading “Always Do Your Best” is Questionable Advice
