Tag: royal flush

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A Good Game Gone for About Five Years

Someone posted a picture of a $50,000 royal flush on wizardofvegas.com and that brought back memories. Although this particular jackpot was hit by someone else, I’ve had more than my share.

The game was called “Deuces Plus” and was a 10/4/4 version of Deuces Bonus with a 1000-for-1 royal flush. They were available at fewer than ten 15-machine bars in the Gambler’s Bonus system on the east side of the Las Vegas valley. Village Pub (more than one store), Rae’s, Doc Holliday’s, Franklin’s (which changed names several times), and maybe a few others. Not only was the game 100.35% by itself, these places had 0.10% or 0.20% slot clubs and pretty juicy bonuses. The bonuses were cash (up to $500 for hitting a royal flush on graveyard at one place), “points” (you’d get 20-coin to 50-coin bonuses for various things like four 3s, or maybe a full house including all royal cards, or whatever), and sometimes other things (like “squares” in an upcoming Monday Night Football game where winners got $100 or $500).

Plus, big players always were eligible to get two meals to go. These were 10-coin machines, up to $5, so a $50 bet could turn into $50,000. I hit more than 20 of these jackpots before eventually being 86’d from everywhere they were dealt. Some months later, the pay schedules were no longer offered anywhere.

One of the irritating things about the system back then was that you could download only $100 worth of points (i.e., accumulated free-play) per midnight-to-midnight 24-hour period. Even showing up at 11:45 p.m. and then downloading for “today” and then a few minutes later for “tomorrow” didn’t solve the problem because you easily could re-generate more than you downloaded if you played for several hours and/or hit some of the bonuses. I played on both my card and my wife’s card so I could get $200 before and $200 after midnight, but still I had several thousands of dollars of free play to download when I finally had no good-game places to play.

I ended up playing off $400 per trip at Gambler’s Bonus locations without the good games. It took a while, but downloading $400 “free money” per trip (even played on 98% games) made it worthwhile. Leaving the house at 11:30 p.m. wasn’t the most convenient, but you do what you have to do. Being “irritated” doesn’t sound like the right word to outsiders because, after all, it was a very juicy game and we were making bunches of money, but it certainly wasn’t as player-friendly as we would have liked.

This was before I had an iPhone, consequently I don’t have any pictures — so I “borrowed” the pictures shown below. Four deuces with an ace ($20,000), which occurred slightly more often than a royal, would have been worth a picture too. Maybe even the $10,000 “regular” four deuces shown below — again hit by somebody else — but I easily had more than 50 of them.

In one case I was dealt a royal flush — and had to hold the buttons because the (then) 30-year-old technology on the machines didn’t have auto-hold on royals. It took 20 or so minutes to be paid as the bars didn’t have that much cash on hand and drivers would come out and deliver the money. I know they paid you for $4,000 “five aces” jackpots from an on-property cash dispenser and had to call out for $10,000 “four deuces” jackpots. Whether the actual cutoff was at $5,000 or $10,000 I don’t know because the game I played never hit in that range.

When they had to bring in money from the outside, they paid you in $5,000 “straps.” One bartender liked to put the money into food take-out boxes as a form of disguise. One night I came home at about 4 a.m. and left the box containing $50,000 in the bathroom sink at home when I went to bed. My wife initially cursed me for leaving food un-refrigerated but screamed in delight when she finally opened the box to see what food I had brought home.

During one 18-month period, I probably was playing 20-30 hours a week on this game, mostly after midnight, spread out over as many locations as I was welcome — averaging about $250/hour profit throughout that period. Although the machines were old, I ran well for the entire time and did better than expectations said I should.

I generally do not tip very well on jackpots. At these places it was different. An 8-hour “shift” would give me an EV of about $2,000 every night — in front of the same bartenders over and over again. Tips in the range of $50 per night if I lost, or $100 if I won, and more than that if I hit for $20,000 or more, felt about right to me. I wanted the bartenders on my side as much as possible when the discussions came as to who should be kicked out.

Another idiosyncrasy of these machines was that if you hit a hand-pay, any points you had accumulated since the last time you pulled your card disappeared. Since this included wild royals ($1,250) and higher, you’d hit one of these taxables every 375 hands on average. The cards were “virtual” — meaning you had to enter your 6-10 digit account number and password on a keypad to go through the log-in process, unless you mis-keyed and then it would take maybe another 30 seconds to log off and log back on again. I used the rule of thumb that if I had earned $20 worth of points since the last time I logged out, it was time to do it again. That way I never lost too much due to this idiosyncrasy nor did I waste too much time logging off and on. It was a “compromise.” These points were valuable, but the rest of the play was more valuable.

If you want to criticize/condemn me for helping to burn out the game — knock yourself out. I plead guilty. I certainly was one of the people who did this. If I found this opportunity again, I very likely would play it the same way.  (And many would criticize/condemn me again.) You only get so many chances at such an opportunity. You know it’s going to end eventually. You know others are out there doing the same thing. You simply have to get while the getting is good.

A year or so after the play ended, I was in one of these places playing another promotion that was pretty good. Not $250/hour good, but pretty good. The manager (who knew exactly who I was) told me someone was talking about bringing back the old Deuces Plus game for high stakes somewhere and wanted a lot of action. Was I interested and could I help spread the word among other big players?

Yes and yes.

Then I thought some more about it. I speculated that this was going to be some kind of money laundering deal for whoever the owner would be. Even giving up 1.5% or so to the players (it would be less than that as there would be a lot of “normal” players as well who lost — but probably 75% of the coin-in on the $50-per-hand games was from knowledgeable players), he could still launder his money fairly cheaply. Assuming people who needed to launder money could very well be related to the mafia or maybe a drug cartel, I wondered if doing too well could be dangerous to my life expectancy. I was second-guessing my “yes and yes.” Well, it never happened so it’s all speculation on my part. It’s possible there was nothing shady about it at all — but in that case I couldn’t figure out how the owner could possibly be making money with this business plan.

I currently don’t have any plays this lucrative on an ongoing basis — although three times in the past two years I found such a game on a short-term basis. Players regularly complain that the games aren’t as good as they used to be. That is true, but this particular game lasted two years or so and ended only about five years ago, not 15 or 20. While some players knew about it, there were a lot of pros in Las Vegas who didn’t. (Even out-of-towners could have played while they were here. A $250 per hour play was likely more lucrative than their other options here. But for whatever reason, the play was kept reasonably quiet.)

It is not unreasonable to expect plays this juicy in the future. You just have to search for them, recognize them for what they are when you find them, learn the requisite strategy, and then play them for as much as you can afford for as long as they last. If “normal” video poker software won’t tell you how to play the game, you need to do your own programming or have a good programmer on call or on retainer.

Preserving your bankroll for special opportunities like this, which you may or may not find during your gambling career, is a form of “keeping your powder dry” for when you need it. Playing less than 100% games just because you can’t find anything better at the moment is the opposite of keeping your powder dry.

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When the Rules are Not the Rules

The M Casino Resort is located along I-15 at the southern edge of the Las Vegas valley. The location was picked expecting the Southern Highlands development to explode, but that didn’t happen. The 2007 housing bubble hurt that development big time — and this casino as well.

I live about 8-10 miles from the casino, depending on whether I take the freeway or not. I know having a casino this close would be a luxury for many of my readers, but it’s actually too far away for me. Although I do drive and will drive, I do not particularly enjoy “spinning my wheels.” I much prefer playing at closer casinos if I can find suitable ones.

To make matters worse, it’s the kind of casino where you must come in and pick up your free play multiple times over the month. Sometimes up to 10 times.

For the past seven years or so, up until the end of 2016, I had a “special deal” at that casino. This consisted of me coming in once a month and doing all my play at one time. Usually the figure was $200,000 of coin-in played on a $10 single line 8/5 Bonus Poker machine.

In exchange for this, I received all my free play for the month in one lump sum and was guaranteed to receive 2x points (worth a total of 0.60%) each time I came in. If you included the free play and the benefits of being an ICON member (their highest tier), including a certain amount of food each month, this was sufficient to entice me to play there.

Although the arrangement evolved over time, for the last few years I was unwelcome at most drawings and invitational tournaments. The reason for this was that most tournaments included “second chance drawings” where players would play during the weekend event and, based on $5,000 coin-in for one drawing ticket, tickets would be drawn to give away money. The reason for the second chance drawing was to induce extra play out of the players. I was excluded from these drawings because the $200,000 I would play wouldn’t be extra play — it would just be normal monthly play. This would give me an unfair advantage, or so the managers believed.

In late 2010, the M was sold to Penn National Gaming, effective sometime in 2011, but the former owner, Anthony Marnell III, still had a management role. So, most of the special deals that were allowed when Marnell owned the place were still in effect. Eventually Marnell moved on to other opportunities and the new General Manager was a PNG employee with no ties at all to the way the casino was run in the past.

I was informed in November 2016 that my deal was going to end on December 31. I was still welcome to play but I would receive the normal mail for an ICON player — based on how much I continued to play. I would need to pick up my free play in whatever increments the other players got their free play and would be eligible to participate in tournaments and drawings should my play warrant it. If this wasn’t acceptable, I didn’t have to play there at all.

I appealed this decision to the GM, but to no avail. It took until about the end of January to get me back on all mailing lists. I had been manually excluded by the former Vice President of Marketing (because of my special deal), and each of those manual over-rides had to be found and removed.

For March, I decided to play on Thursday, March 2, primarily because there was a drawing on Friday, March 3. I figured my equity in the drawing would help make up for the inconvenience of having to travel to the casino so many times. According to an over-sized postcard I received in the mail, so long as my tickets to the drawing were activated prior to 7 p.m., I was in the drawing. So, I played more than $200,000, at a bigger-than-average loss, and activated my entries at 6:45 p.m.  Unfortunately, I was totally skunked in the drawing.

Since there were 75 names drawn and I probably had more tickets in the drum than anyone else, it was highly improbable that I didn’t get picked anywhere. A “top 10” finish was likely, I believed, with a decent shot at winning the $4,000 first prize. I didn’t think I was intentionally excluded from the drawing (although with the manual overrides the former VP of Marketing had instituted, it was possible that one forbidding me from participating in drawings was still inadvertently in effect). I thought the most likely explanation for me not being called was that they pulled the 75 names before my tickets were in the drum.

The following Tuesday I spoke to the man who was responsible for pulling the tickets the previous Friday evening. He told me he pulled them at 6:30 p.m., as he had been instructed to do. I asked him who told him to pull at 6:30 p.m., because that would be the first person I called — if I decided to follow up on this.

It was not clear that following up on this would yield good results. Using aphorisms, we can say the squeaky wheel gets the grease (which means I should definitely follow up on this), but we can also say the nail that sticks up is often hammered down (which means I should just let it go). Playing “aphorism roulette,” I decided to pursue this.

I left voicemail messages explaining what I wanted to talk about to two different Marketing Supervisors. Whether they were in town and received the messages or not, I don’t know, but they didn’t return my calls. So, I next directed a written email to Patrick Durkin, the Vice President of Marketing. I told him I didn’t want to go to the Gaming Control Board if I could avoid it, but I strongly felt I was short-changed.

He sent me a return email saying he would research the matter and get back to me by the end of the day. He did, although he said he preferred to talk face to face. We set up a meeting for the following week, but he also told me the written rules and the postcard sent in the mail had different information on it.

This was an unusual twist. The rules said to swipe before 6:30 p.m. and I didn’t read those rules until afterwards. The mailer — which included a LOT of detail including small print disclaimers — seemed to cover everything and contained what were certainly at least “pseudo rules.”

I hoped the casino wouldn’t argue that the written rules were the only relevant ones and the mailer wasn’t official. I’ve heard LOTS of strange arguments from casino employees through the years. I would just have to wait until the meeting.

I certainly didn’t know how the meeting would go. They could give me some free play. They could say “sorry Charlie.” Or they could restrict me in some minor or major way. I’ve seen variations of all of those. But I wasn’t going to get anything if I didn’t go to the meeting, so I went.

Insofar as the mailer went, I didn’t take it with me. I did, however, take an iPhone photo of both front and back and had that with me. (Years ago, some employees at the Suncoast, after it was purchased by Boyd, disputed that I had received a postcard invitation and asked to see it. I gave it to them and they took it into the back room. I never saw the postcard or them again. Since I couldn’t prove I received the postcard, the Suncoast’s official position was that I hadn’t received one. Although I didn’t think the M would operate in such a rinky dink fashion as the Suncoast, I wasn’t taking any chances.)

At the meeting with Mr. Durkin, he couldn’t have been more gracious. We chatted for 10 minutes or so — one professional to another. He had worked at several casinos over the years and I had played at many of them. We knew many of the same people. I am somewhat of a “special case” in the player community and he wanted to get to know me. He had only worked at the property for a few months and, although we had exchanged some emails and phone calls, we hadn’t met each other prior to our meeting.

When it came time to discuss whether I was going to receive any compensation for trusting the mailer, he told me the promotion had been designed by his predecessor, who now worked elsewhere. Although he and his staff checked the rules and the mailers, they missed the “6:30 vs 7:00” difference. Without admitting any error, he asked what would satisfy me. I, of course, would have preferred that he come up with a proposed amount of free play first. But at least we were finally talking turkey.

I won’t go into exactly how the negotiation to find the “right” number took place, but we came up with an amount of free play that both of us could live with. Maybe a better negotiator would have gotten more. Maybe some players would have gotten less. Being able to negotiate effectively when you have to is a player skill that is underrated.

I came away impressed with how Mr. Durkin handled this. He understood that his company had made a mistake and my grievance was legitimate — and he treated it as such. None of us can guarantee we will never make a mistake, but we can try and clean it up afterwards when we fall short. And that’s what Mr. Durkin did without giving away the store.

To my mind, the fact that I had lost a bit more than usual this time made it easier for him to award me free play. Had I hit a $40,000 royal flush and ended up considerably ahead on the play, it would have been more difficult for him to justify the additional payment to his bosses. So, you can be sure I mentioned my loss in the negotiation. Had I won during the play, he probably would have mentioned that.

While idealists can make a pretty good case that my results shouldn’t have mattered in this case, these things do matter. Thinking they don’t would be naïve.

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Dollars and Sense

This column is written primarily for beginners and low-intermediate players. Readers more advanced than that should give it a once-over as well. There’s a chart here you’ve likely never seen before.

You’re playing Double Double Bonus, receiving 45 for a full house. How much you get for the flush is irrelevant to this discussion. If you get only 40 for the full house in the game you typically play, you’re permitting yourself to play such a bad game that no amount of advice from me is going to help you be a winning player.

You’re dealt K♠ K♥ 6♣ 6♦ 5♠. You’re debating holding just the kings or holding the two pair. You’ve read from people like me that holding two pair is correct by a mile, but it’s counterintuitive to you. After all, you get the same “even money” for a pair of kings as you do for two pair and if you hold the kings you might get lucky and receive four kings. So why not go for it?

Let’s talk dollars and sense. Assume you’re playing dollar single line DDB, five coins at a time. Holding two pair, you have the following possibilities — and the value of those possibilities.

The frequency numbers from the chart may be found in Video Poker for Winners or other quality software. The dollar figures aren’t generally seen, although you do get the sum of them, shown in green. And notice I didn’t include columns for straights, flushes, straight flushes, or royal flushes simply because you can’t get one of those when you start out by holding a pair or two pair.

Let’s take the line corresponding to KK66. You have 47 possible draws, which is the normal number when you’re drawing one card from a 52-card pack and you’ve already looked at a five-card deal. You’ll end up with two pair 43 times and a full house four times. You can probably do this much in your head if you start with figuring how many full houses you can get. After all, the only time you’re going to get a full house is when you draw one of the two remaining kings or one of the two remaining sixes. In all other cases, you’re going to end up with the same two pair with which you started.

What’s new in this chart, shown in blue, is how much each of these hands is worth. The two-pair final hand contributes $4.57 to your total EV and the full house adds $3.83. Rather than give a definition for how I figured out those numbers, I’ll show you the calculations: $3.83 = (4 * $45 / 47). $4.57 = (43 * $5 / 47). The $45 and $5 in the formulas are the amounts you receive from a full house and two pair respectively in this game.

In the line corresponding to holding the kings, there are now 16,215 possible draws. For most of us, including me, there are way too many possibilities to figure this stuff out in our heads, or even with paper and pencil, with a high degree of confidence. Fortunately, software to do this for us is very fast, accurate, and inexpensive.
The number that really pops out at me on this line is the 69¢ that the chance at a 4-of-a-kind is worth. Yes, the quad is worth $250 when you get it, and that’s the number beginning players focus on, but you only get it a little less than one chance in 360. Multiply it out and it comes to 69¢.

Also, note that the chance for a full house is 47¢ when you hold a pair, compared to the $3.83 it’s worth when you hold two pair.

It’s easy to think of possibilities — like you COULD get a four-of-a-kind. It’s much harder to think of probabilities — which means how often does it happen percentage-wise. It’s even harder to multiply out the VALUE of the hands which means the probability multiplied by the pay schedule.

Players sometimes confuse this hand with A♠ A♥ 6♣ 6♦ 5♠. To put this into the above chart we need to add another column for four aces with a kicker. If we do that, we’ll find all the numbers in the chart stay the same, except the value of the four aces without a kicker is worth $1.63 and the value of four aces with a kicker is worth $1.48. Adding those together gives us $3.11 — compared to the 69¢ the kings were worth. This makes holding the aces worth more than holding two pair, aces up.

The strategy for this part of the game is AA > Two Pair > KK, QQ, JJ. If you can read the strategy and just follow it no-questions-asked, then you don’t need columns like this one. If you ever wonder “why,” and haven’t figured out the answer to this particular question, maybe this column will be useful to you.

As for me, I’m always wondering “why?” Once I figure that out (which I normally can do in video poker — not so much in certain other parts of life), it makes it much easier to keep strategies memorized.

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There’s More to EV than Just EV

“EV” stands for expected value, which is a type of weighted average. The exact definition I’ll leave to the probability and statistics textbooks. As cut and dried as the definition is in the math books, there’s plenty of wiggle room in the way it’s applied to video poker.

Before we discuss this wiggle room, let’s talk about how EV is most properly used. EV gives you a “best guess” of how a situation will turn out — on average — if you play it out zillions of times. It’s not a guarantee at all of how things will turn out this time. If you’re flipping a fair coin 100 times, the EV is for 50 heads to show up. But sometimes only 40 heads will appear, and equally often 60. In actuality, ending up with exactly 50 heads out of 100 trials is an underdog to happen. If you’re betting on heads, you may well be upset that the actual result this time didn’t match up with the EV.

The definition of EV is about “how many times something happens.” In video poker, we often turn this into a percentage. For example, 9/6 Jacks or Better has a well-known probability of returning 99.544% when played perfectly. That means if we play $100,000 through a 9/6 JoB machine, our average ending balance will be $99,544, meaning the casino keeps $456 from our play. This will be true whether we play for nickels, quarters, dollars, or larger stakes. This will be true whether we are playing single line, Triple Play . . . or Hundred Play.

It is common among video poker players, but not universal, to add the return on the game with the slot club return and call the result EV. That is, if you’re playing 9/6 JoB at the South Point on double point days, the EV is 99.544% +2(.300%) = 100.144%. Adding the slot club return is reasonably certain, as almost always you know what it’s going to be before you play.

Adding mailers is a bit iffier, if that’s a word. If you know you are going to get mailers worth $80 for $40,000 coin-in, you can go ahead and add another 0.20% to the EV. But we are rarely that certain — or rather, the ones who are certain are frequently mistaken. Slot clubs change their parameters for mailers all the time, and usually these parameters are unpublished. You can get a feel for what the rules are if you talk to enough players, but it’s normally the case that players don’t keep good enough records to be useful.

Someone can accurately tell you that their mailer is $25 a week. But if you want to know how much they won or lost each month over the last six months, including how much was played during promotions and on which machines, that information is tougher to come by. And, at some casinos, how many times did the player come into the casino? And what “discretionary” comps were issued to this player? Some or all of this information is used by at least some casinos to determine your mailer. And most casinos don’t publish the formula they use.

Still other players (including me) add an estimate for the value of the current promotion into the EV calculation. I wouldn’t be playing at all at any casinos if it wasn’t for their promotions. (Yes, I could play 100% games for low stakes in Las Vegas for less than $10 per hour. And there’s money to be made playing video poker progressives. If that’s your thing, welcome to it. For me, no thanks.)

I was playing $1 9/6 JoB Spin Poker on a recent double point day at the South Point, when there was another promotion going on as well. There are higher-EV games there, but only for lower stakes. With good enough promotions, playing $2 single line ($10 per hand) 99.728% NSU Deuces Wild sometimes just isn’t as good as the 99.544% ($45 per hand) game.

Another player was playing $1 9/5 White Hot Aces on the same Spin Poker machine. I asked him why he chose that game instead of JoB and he responded “Higher EV.” Really? Not in my book.

The WHA game returns 99.572% which is certainly a tad higher than the 99.544% you get from JoB. But every time you get dealt a quad, the Jacks or Better game returns  “only” $1,125 which, importantly, is less than W2G range. Getting two or more quad 2s, 3s, or 4s, or even one set of aces, generates additional W2Gs.

For professional players who get LOTS of W2Gs, these are not particularly terrible things. We have learned how to “write off” a high percentage of them. Still, at this casino, on a double point day, it takes more than five minutes per W2G for a slot attendant to arrive and reset the machine. On a promotion that is worth, say, $36 an hour, not playing for five minutes costs you $3. Are you planning on tipping when you get paid for your W2G? If you typically tip $5, that’s $8 out of every W2G. That more than eliminates the difference in EV from the game itself.

You pretty much get the same number of royals in the two games, but you get more straight flushes in WHA. Why? Two reasons. First of all, you get paid $400 per straight flush rather than $250 so it only takes three to get a W2G rather than five. Also, the strategy calls for you to go for straight flushes more in WHA. For example, from a hand like 3♠ 4♥ 5♥ 6♥ 7♥, you hold five cards in JoB and only four in WHA. When you do catch a straight flush on the draw, usually you get three of them — and hence a W2G.

Instead of EV, I use a form of “expected dollars per hour,” which includes how many hands per hour I can play and at what stakes. Are my calculations different from those of other players? Maybe. Part of the calculation includes an estimate for the current promotion, and personal estimates differ. But for figuring out whether I should be playing at Casino A or B, I find the calculation very useful.

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Why Did You Print the Wrong Information?

I received an email from a player who told me that he found an error in Dream Card. I was definitely interested. If I verified that it was an error, I would send the information along to the folks at IGT (who manufacture the game), videopoker.com (who invented the game), and the player community. Whether IGT and videopoker.com chose to “fix” the problem in their next release would be up to them, but even if they did, older versions might still be out there and players should be warned about it.

Please note that this falls into the realm of “hearsay.” I didn’t see the error, and the man who told me about it said it happened to his son. There’s plenty of room in there for some misunderstanding to have taken place. Still, the situation is interesting on a couple of different levels which makes it worth talking about.

Curiously, I came away concluding that yes, there may have been an error with Dream Card in this situation, but it wasn’t the error I got the email about!

Here’s the situation. The player was playing 9/6 Jacks or Better Dream Card. Dream Card moves a 99.54% game to 99.56% — with a much bigger variance.

The dealt hand was A♠ K♠ Q♠ Q♦ DC, where DC indicates a Dream Card which is supposed to be the best possible card given the first four. The machine chose the T♠, giving the player a 4-card royal flush. The player wanted the Dream Card to be another queen, giving him 3-of-a-kind.

I told him that a 4-card royal was much superior to a 3-of-a-kind. I suggested he enter the hand A♠ K♠ Q♠ Q♦ T♠ on Video Poker for Winners and see that the 4-card royal is worth 92.34 coins. Then if he entered the hand A♠ K♠ Q♠ Q♦ Q♣, he would see the value of the trip queens is 21.51. If the reader hasn’t gone through the exercise of checking the value of combinations using VPW or other quality software, it’s an educational process to go through. It’s not difficult and it is eye-opening.

“So,” I asked, “why on earth would you prefer 3-of-a-kind to a 4-card royal flush? It’s not close!”

“Well, my son uses the Dancer-Daily strategy card and that card says 3-of-a-kind is better. If it isn’t better, why did you print the wrong information?”

Hmm, this could be embarrassing. I do have a good explanation for that but I can see where the confusion arose. The first two lines in both the Basic Strategy and the Advanced Strategy for that game are as follows:

 

RF5; SF5; 4-OF-A-KIND; FULL HOUSE; 3-OF-A-KIND; TWO PAIR

RF4 > FL5 and ST5 > any SF4

 

The top line of the strategy lists all hands in that game that are always held when dealt — with no exceptions. This list of hands is not the same for all games. There are games where from AAA44 or AA339 you just hold the aces, but Jacks or Better isn’t one of those games.

The second line lists those cases where a 4-card royal flush or a 4-card straight flush is in the same five cards as a dealt flush or a dealt straight. That is, from A♦ K♦ Q♦ J♦ T♣ you hold just the diamonds, but from Q♦ J♦ T♦ 9♦ 8♣ you hold all five cards.

A key underlying assumption for the strategy cards is that the combinations listed on the first line of the card are mutually exclusive with the combinations listed on the second line of the card. That is, you can’t have 3-of-a-kind and a 4-card royal in the same five cards. It takes at least seven cards to have both combinations.

I suppose technically you could argue the hand A♥ K♥ Q♥ J♥ T♥ is on the first line of the card, and any four cards from that combination are also on the second line of the card — hence the lines are not completely mutually exclusive.  But anyone who has trouble figuring how to play a dealt royal has no chance to understand my writings anyway.

If combinations are mutually exclusive, it doesn’t matter which order you list them in. Liam W. Daily and I recognized that using this underlying assumption allowed us to give completely accurate strategies with fewer rules. And we saw that as a good thing.

When you introduce the concept of Dream Card and you’re considering among alternative fifth cards, we can no longer hold with the assumption of mutual exclusivity while playing that version.

Simply put, the Dancer-Daily strategy card was designed for the “regular” version of Jacks or Better, not the Dream Card version. Since the machine almost always selects the correct Dream Card, you can continue to use the strategy card for the hands where Dream Card is not in effect.

With all that said, while the T♠ would be a much better choice than the Q♣ given the first four cards, the J♠ would be better still, simply because a jack presents three extra chances to end up with a high pair (namely the other three jacks) and a ten gives you no such chances.

Possibly the machine actually gave the correct card and there was a mix-up in the way the situation was presented to me. I assume IGT and videopoker.com can check on that easily enough. But whether there was or wasn’t an error, a discussion on an underlying assumption of the strategy card made this a conversation worth having.

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How Bad Is It to Be Greedy?

I assume you know what it means to be greedy. If I’m right about this assumption, then you’re ahead of me. I’m very confused by what the word means.

I Googled “What is greed?” It came back with the Oxford Dictionary definition, “intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power, or food.” It mentioned that greed was one of the seven deadly sins. And it also quotes Gordon Gekko, the Michael Douglas character in the movie Wall Street who said “Greed is good!”

Still not clear.  When does a desire become intense? I remember back in college that sometimes friends and I would go out seeking pleasant short-term feminine companionship. I would call those desires intense and selfish. Back then, fifty years ago, there was kind of a “boys will be boys” mentality about “cruising for babes.” Today it is considered to be far more predatory than it was then. There are a lot of names you could have called our behavior back then, but I never considered “greedy” to be one of them.

If a student athlete wants to be good enough to someday be drafted into the National Football League, he might undertake the following: he begins his workouts every day at 6 a.m.; he spends hours each week studying game film to improve his own skills and figure out the tendencies of whoever is going to be his college opponent next week; he avoids drugs; he’s the last one to leave practice every day. It’s fair to call this athlete very intense. Although he loves the game, the potential million dollar benefits are certainly a part of working that hard. He may well be looking forward to buying his mother a house, but most of his thoughts about using this money are personal and selfish.

I would call the behavior in the preceding paragraph appropriate actions for somebody with a plan. Laudable behavior. Give that kid a standing ovation for working so hard. The actions, though, meet the Oxford Dictionary definition of “greed” namely “intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power, or food.” I think it’s far better to praise this young man for trying to make something of himself than it is to castigate him for the sin of greed.

I have heard the term greed used in at least four separate gambling contexts recently. Perhaps you didn’t hear of these particular instances, but I’m confident you’ve heard of similar ones.

The first was on a video poker bulletin board where somebody posted a picture of a $1,500 jackpot on a quarter Triple Double Bonus Ultimate X game with the note, “Unfortunately the greed took over and I kept playing and ended up with only $700. I hate when that happens!”

The second followed a story about another Las Vegas casino planning on charging for parking. This comment by a player who was unhappy with the casino’s decision started off with “Greed! Greed! Greed!”

The third was a comment from a quarter player who was mad at all the five dollar players for being greedy and winning all the drawings.

The fourth was about a player who hit three royal flushes in two weeks at a casino after which the casino kicked him out. The comment from another player was, “Serves him right for being so greedy!”

These examples do not follow the Oxford Dictionary definition.  The first case resulted from normal swings in a game with sky-high variance. If the swings went up, the person would have felt intelligent, skillful, and proud. When the swings went down, the player blamed greed. To me, it’s a case of the player either not understanding the normal swings of the game or being a bad loser.

In the second and third example, we have somebody else taking actions that cause our lives to be a little more expensive. Since they did it to us, then they are greedy! I see the world as a bunch of moving parts where each person is trying to do what’s best for himself. I do not expect anybody else to roll over and play dead in order for me to succeed. If they block me going to the left, I go to the right. As our outgoing first lady said recently, “If they go low, we go high.” I do not see this as greed on their part. Or on my part for adjusting to what they are doing.

In the fourth example, the player was greedy because he hit three royals? I don’t know anybody who knows for sure when he’s going to hit his next royal, let alone his next three. Royals happen in their own good time. It is possible you’re going to hit three royals tomorrow. It’s possible it’s going to be months and months before you hit that many.

The player who hits three royal flushes in a short period of time is fortunate. But greedy? Like he did it on purpose just to spite the casino? I might well have some unkind words about a slot director who thinks getting royals quickly is a sign of great skill, but calling the player greedy? I don’t get it.

What would I call greedy? Well, if there was only so much food for, say, four people, then taking more than a fourth of it before others have had a chance to eat would be greedy. If some food was left over at the end, then that’s fair game. Or perhaps two roommates were both trying to get ready to go and they had a deal that 15 minutes in the bathroom at a time was all you got. Someone who took more than that is greedy, in my opinion.

What these examples have in common is that there’s a fixed amount of something and sharing is the name of the game. In this context, greed is refusing to share. In a game situation, where players compete against each other, refusing to share is often the sensible thing to do.

If you think of the world as a closed system and everybody from all lands are brothers, then you can come up with some sense of greed. In this context, you’ll see “green” philosophies, which basically try to save the environment for everybody. Within that context, people who refuse to save the environment are greedy.

But you’re not going to get universal agreement on this. I can easily support a “take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints” philosophy when visiting a national forest. Whether we should shut down a lumber industry to save an endangered species of owl is a topic of spirited emotions on both sides.

If you cannot or will not see the world as a closed system and you believe it is “every man for himself,” then greed isn’t well defined, at least to me. Or perhaps, Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good!” makes sense. I do not see the world that way, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out exactly where the lines of demarcation go.

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Lessons from Chip Reese

I was reading Mike Sexton’s new book, Life’s a Gamble, in preparation for interviewing Sexton on the radio. The Sexton interview will be taped before you read this and will be posted here (that link is to the filtered podcast archives) on Thursday, July 28. The book is autobiographical, with lots of anecdotes about Sexton himself and various other players. I already knew many of the stories (I read a LOT about gambling and have interviewed many players over the years), but many more were new to me. All in all, it’s a good read and of interest to any gambler, not just poker players. Continue reading Lessons from Chip Reese

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You Have to Work it Out Yourself

I get dozens of video poker emails a month from people I’ve never met. Often the emails are similar to the following:

“I play Double Double Bonus. From a hand like KK773, I hold the kings and a friend tells me to hold two pair. Which is right?”

I typically answer that it’s correct to hold two pair — and the answer would be easy to obtain using video poker software or by consulting a strategy card or Winner’s Guide. If they wish to get better at video poker, they need to be able to check these things out themselves. Continue reading You Have to Work it Out Yourself

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Being Good at Everything

I have two good friends, “Thelma” and “Louise,” who are married to each other. I’ve been friends with Thelma for more than a decade, Louise about half that long, and Bonnie and I happily attended their wedding last year.

Thelma is very bright and has been successful at a number of things. She’s also very well-off financially. She’s a pretty strong video poker player, but doesn’t concentrate on learning all of the smallest details. “Why spend hours memorizing rare hands that will save me a tenth of a penny once every two years?” she asks. “I don’t need the money and life’s too short to spend my time on shit like that.” (If you don’t like that language, take it up with Thelma — not me.) Continue reading Being Good at Everything

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Breakeven Point Analysis Leads to Some Strange Conclusions

A version of this article first appeared in 1999, but I haven’t written about it for a long time and many of my readers are newer to the game than that and didn’t see it the first time.
Continue reading Breakeven Point Analysis Leads to Some Strange Conclusions