If someone were attempting to describe my “system” of winning at video poker, a reasonable 20-second summary would be:
- Only play when you have the advantage.
- Play within your bankroll.
- If you do the above, over time your bankroll will increase.
Tag: video poker
Winning a Drawing
I get inspiration for columns from all sorts of places. This was a question sent in to [email protected] for Richard and me to answer on the podcast. I will answer it there the next time we have a “Bob and Richard answer their mail” show (which is usually when we haven’t been able to schedule a guest for that week), but I’ll answer it here first.
Continue reading Winning a DrawingThings are Always Changing
Most of the specific video poker games I played two years ago are gone. The reason for this is that either casinos have downgraded the machines (e.g. changed the full house from paying 45 to paying 40) or downgraded my welcome in playing that game.
Continue reading Things are Always ChangingWhat I Saw at G2E
Every year, the gaming industry holds its biggest show-and-tell convention of the year in Las Vegas, called the Global Gaming Expo or G2E. And every year, I go and look at what’s coming up in the near future.
Continue reading What I Saw at G2EI’ve Heard This One Before
In my classes, I often get out-of-town students. Whether I am teaching Quick Quads, Ultimate X, Deuces Wild, or whatever, there are often students who decided long ago that they are going to take at least one Bob Dancer class — and this is the week they’re in Vegas.
Continue reading I’ve Heard This One BeforeWhen You’re No Longer Welcome
Let’s assume that your local casino has taken away your player’s card, meaning you can no longer receive most of the benefits from playing there. For the sake of today’s discussion, you are still allowed to play there without a card if you like. Further, assume that you insist on playing with an edge or not at all.
What do you do now?
First, sometimes you can talk your way back into being able to play with the card. Not often. But sometimes. If winning the drawings too many times was the reason for your ouster from the club, for example, perhaps agreeing to not enter certain categories of drawings will be enough. Perhaps agreeing to not play certain machines will work, or not playing on certain point multiplier days. Whatever. Being in the club is better than not being in the club if this option is possible.
If this is not possible, you need to look closely at whether there are games you ignored before that could be playable at least some of the time. The most likely candidates for this would be progressives. Sometimes a 9/5 Double Double Bonus machine (97.87% at reset) with one or more progressives can be a profitable game to play when the progressives are high enough. Not every day. Certainly not every time you check. But sometimes.
The best book on how to evaluate progressives is Frank Kneeland’s The Secret World of Video Poker Progressives. Some of the information presented in the book is dated, but I don’t know of any better source. If you can find and hook up with other pros playing progressives, perhaps they can show you the ropes.
In general, you need a bigger bankroll to play progressives than you do playing games with a 4,000-coin royal flush simply because a higher percentage of your return is in the relatively-rare royal flush. You lose much faster between royals than you do at games that start out with a higher return. In addition to the physical bankroll, you need a psychological bankroll to survive at this. Losing streaks will be longer. If you were barely scraping by financially before you got restricted, progressives are likely not a good option for you.
On the other hand, sometimes progressives get big enough that you’ll have a 2% or larger advantage while playing them. You virtually never get advantages this high playing machines without progressives.
Advantage slots are another possibility. Sometimes it has to do with progressive meters. Sometimes it is a “must hit by” progressive and the meter is very close to the maximum. Sometimes it’s looking for a certain number of a particular kind of symbol, and when you find that condition, the game is beatable. How to recognize the games that are beatable is found on several sites on the Internet. Which of these sites provide the best information is something I can’t share with you simply because this is not an avenue I have pursued.
There are players being kicked out of casinos for playing advantage slots these days. Since my face is relatively well known as a sharp machine player, I will get extra scrutiny if I play slots. And I expect my welcome will be short-lived. So, I haven’t even gone through the effort of learning which machines to play.
Particularly in Las Vegas, there are a LOT of players seeking out and playing advantage slots — which seriously reduces the likelihood of you coming across a playable game at any particular time. Success requires scouting — and sometimes being in the right place at the right time when someone leaves a machine that is in an advantageous state, but it can be done. In other locales, slot hustlers are less common, and you can do well at this.
Another option is to simply stop visiting this casino and patronize others. If you live in a place where there are a lot of casinos, this is no problem (assuming you haven’t been run off by too many of the other ones as well.) If you live in a place where there aren’t many casinos, this is tougher.
Some high limit players need to resort to playing dollar machines in order to keep playing. They have the bankroll to play higher, but they might not have the welcome or full benefits at the places that have the bigger machines. At a smaller level, some dollar players may need to resort to playing for quarters at other casinos to stay in the game.
Going the other way (meaning formerly playing quarters but being forced to play dollars at another casino in order to have an edge) doesn’t happen as frequently. Comparatively speaking, few quarter players are restricted at casinos. (It absolutely does sometimes happen, however.) If you are forced to move up in stakes, make sure you have the bankroll to do so. You can check bankroll requirements using the Video Poker for Winners software, or Dunbar’s Risk Analyzer for Video Poker. The products yield similar results using very different methods of analysis.
Traveling to play is another option. Players in Las Vegas can travel to several locations in California, Northern Nevada, and elsewhere if they are out of places to play at home. I’m not going to tell you to go to the XYZ casino in such-and-such a city simply because publishing the play will likely kill it. These plays are out there, but you’re going to have to scout and network to find them. Players who have developed networks with other winning players will find out about these possibilities much faster than those who are starting from scratch. Traveling takes time and is not cheap. Some players do not have the time, interest, or resources to pursue this avenue.
A final option is to give up video poker and take up bowling — or any other activity you’re interested in. Some people will not be able to find beatable games within their bankroll. When this happens, some tough decisions need to be made. Using the suggestions in this article, however, will sometimes postpone for another day having to make that decision.
A Scholarship Offer
In last week’s column, I reprinted a seven-year-old article I wrote about Edward Thorp saying that gambling is a tax on ignorance, which I would amend to being a tax on the ignorant and the lazy.
Soon after I wrote that, John Chang (former long-time manager of the MIT blackjack team) appeared on GWAE and commented that while he agreed that gambling is a tax on the ignorant and the lazy, it also provides a scholarship for the smart and hard-working!
That’s exactly the way I look at gambling, although I accept the words “ignorant” and “lazy” as being relative terms and not absolute.
Simply put, beating a casino is difficult. You need to have some moxie. And even then, you need to spend a lot of time figuring out how to succeed. But that was largely what last week’s article was about. Today let’s talk more about what I mean by a “scholarship.” How do you get it? How do you keep it?
What I mean by scholarship is that if you do it right, the casinos pay you to come in and play intelligently. They do not do this on purpose. Their goal is not to support professional players. But that’s the way it works out.
Casinos do compete with each other and they do offer promotions to attract players. Some of these promotions are beatable. Some of the games are beatable. Play those!
Casino marketing people are not always savvy about doing the math on all promotions. This is a simplified generalization and not always true, but marketing types tend to be creative right-brained people while the ones who can figure out the math for promotions (for casino employees AND players) are left-brained people. When the promotions are developed by the right-brained marketing people, that is the time for you to play!
Casinos basically recycle money from the losing players and give it to the winning players, while keeping a small percentage to cover their own expenses and profit. If the casinos have enough losing players, they can afford to have a few winning players.
Why knowing this is important is that if you want to win, you have to treat the losing players with respect! They pay for your golden goose! If you go around insulting them because they are playing 8/5 Jacks or Better when there’s 9/6 Jacks or Better a few aisles over, you’re jeopardizing your scholarship!
(Yes, I know that my teaching others to identify good machines and play well hurts the players who already know how to play, and wish to keep the “secrets” to themselves. Whether anybody likes it or not, this is one of my chosen missions in life and I plan to continue on that mission indefinitely.)
The casino needs to make its profit somewhere. If nobody played the bad games, they would find it wasn’t profitable to offer the good games. If losing players got insulted when they came to the casino, that would take a lot of their pleasure away. It’s already an expensive activity for these players. If it isn’t fun, many will stop donating to your scholarship fund.
One key to keeping your scholarship is to not keep rubbing it into the casino’s face. There are players who keep playing until the casino kicks them out. For players who are comfortable being on the road all the time and always going to new places, that might be an okay procedure. But for those who want the golden goose to keep paying and paying, this is not a good plan.
This means that if you get significantly ahead, stay away for a while. If you win more than one drawing in a short period of time, don’t enter any more for a few months. This also means, if you’re a winning player, don’t be loud and obnoxious or otherwise a pain in the ass to the casino. They will put up with unpleasant behavior if you’re a loser. But if you’re a winner, this gives them one more reason to kick you out.
Video poker players have an additional edge over other types of advantage gamblers in that we lose most of the time! Royal flushes are relatively rare. The time between royal flushes will usually consist of negative scores. A video poker player who wins every day is largely unknown — unless something fishy is going on. That lets casinos believe that your royal flushes are mainly luck and you’ll give it all back. And it lets losing players have their memory of that one night in 2016 when they hit two royal flushes. These players will return over and over trying to catch magic in a bottle again.
A Tax on Ignorance
This article was originally published by me on July 24, 2012. Someone recently commented on it to me and I went back to check it out. I feel the article has stood up well over the past seven years and is worth revisiting, partly because many of my readers today weren’t readers way back then. Plus, I wish to extend the story next week.
I was reading a 2011 interview of Edward Thorp, a mathematical genius who created the first widespread blackjack card-counting system (Beat the Dealer) some fifty years ago, and then published a methodology for investing in various markets (Beat the Market) a short time later. He is widely credited with being the first “quant,” which is someone who uses advanced quantitative models for deciding where to invest.
He was interviewed by a group called “Investment Management Consultants Association” as part of their “Masters Series.” This organization is associated with both the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. This is a group of academics with top-notch credentials.
Most of the interview concerned financial investing, but there were a few gambling questions as well. In particular, Thorp was asked why losers at gambling don’t simply quit.
Thorp said, “It seems to me that people are not just wealth maximizers but seeking to maximize something else, whether they do it accurately or inaccurately, whatever their total satisfaction is from whatever they’re doing. I imagine that’s the explanation for why people will gamble and lose money. They supposedly get an entertainment payout. Part of it, though, is that gambling has a tax on ignorance. People often gamble because they think they can win, they’re lucky, they have hunches, that sort of thing, whereas in fact, they’re going to be remorselessly ground down over time.”
Thorp was not speaking about or to advantage gamblers. Although there are a lot of smart gamblers that read my articles, Thorp was addressing a group of people who were accomplished in financial investing, but likely were not particularly knowledgeable about gambling. These people probably believed the house ALWAYS had the edge. For the vast majority of gamblers, this is a realistic thing to believe.
Although it’s possible that Thorp has never played video poker and almost certainly was not thinking of that game in particular when he addressed these writers, I found myself thinking about how Thorp’s comments applied to recreational video poker players.
There are “smart” recreational gamblers. These players know they are taking the worst of it but enjoy what they are doing and don’t mind paying for it. This is actually a rational way to act for some people. These players believe becoming skillful is too difficult, too time consuming, too boring, or too whatever. These players pay for their gambling excitement. Thorp wasn’t talking about this group of gamblers either because these players are not ignorant about their chances.
There is a large group of video poker players who simply do not believe that pay schedules matter very much and that strategy is mostly common sense. These people believe they will win if they’re lucky and lose if they’re unlucky.
These players often use systems to limit their losses. Some of them believe that if they refuse to lose more than $100 each time they go gambling — but their potential win is unlimited — that this, then, is a good money management system. Others use variations on the Martingale systems. These systems can usually book a small win, but the occasional big losses wipe out far more than those accumulated small wins.
Still others believe in changing machines if either the machine has just hit a jackpot or has been too stingy in paying out jackpots recently. Both reasons are equally fallacious.
These people are not necessarily stupid (although some are). They have their strategies for playing as they do. They just don’t have the knowledge to realize that their strategies are largely worthless. And they don’t understand that this lack of knowledge dooms them to being a long-term loser.
A lot of these players defend their strategies and will argue with anybody who attempts to explain what modern experts believe is the correct way to think. In the days of Internet forums, everybody has the right to post what they believe. If you’re just beginning, you don’t know who is knowledgeable and who isn’t.
Gambling’s tax on ignorance is quite high. It is especially high for those who don’t believe it exists or think that they are immune to it. Most people who know they aren’t knowledgeable play for small stakes relative to their total wealth. To lose a lot, somebody either really must think that their system works or that they really know the right way to do it. And when the ignorant bet big, the results almost always involve getting into a financial hole that keeps getting bigger and bigger over time.
Take Care of Your Money
As I told you last week, I was recently reading Colin Jones’ new book, The 21st Century Card Counter, preparing to interview him for the GWAE podcast. Although Colin is addressing his comments towards blackjack players, a lot of the general information is useful to video poker players as well. Today’s column was inspired by his Chapter 7: Traveling as a Card Counter.
The first thing I want to address is how much money you should take with you to a casino. If you have access to markers (casino speak for IOUs) at the casino, then you take as little as possible. If you collect money at the start of your play and turn it in at the end, there is less chance for it to be stolen from you between here and there.
But markers are a major difference between video poker players and card players. If you play big enough to use markers, in video poker you’re going to be getting W2Gs that require you to show ID. Therefore, showing ID at the cage is something video poker players have to put up with in order to do business. Many times, blackjack players do not play rated — meaning they do not give their identity to the casino. These people are not willing to show ID at the cage, so that precludes getting markers. For some reason casinos do not respond well to a request such as, “I’m not going to tell you who I am, but I want to borrow $20,000 in cash for a few days.”
So, let’s assume for the current discussion that we are not talking about markers. You’re going to be playing a game where, even if things go really badly, there’s a 99% chance that you will lose less than $5,000 today. (You can get such numbers from the Video Poker for Winners software, or another good product is Dunbar’s Risk Analyzer for Video Poker.)
If that’s your only play today, it’s unnecessarily risky to start the day with $10,000 in your pocket. Nothing good can happen from having that extra money on you, and we all can think of plenty of bad things. One time in a hundred you’re going to run out of money with “only” $5,000. (That’s basically what having a 99% chance of it not happening means.) Unfortunate, but a cheap enough price to pay for the unpredictable, but real, chance that you could lose that money to either carelessness or malfeasance on the part of others.
Another point on this subject that Jones drives home is to be aware of your surroundings. If you get paid for a big jackpot, it can be noticed by others who want to separate you from your winnings. For this reason, if I hit a jackpot of $8,000 or higher, I ask if I can be paid “in private,” which can mean different things in different casinos. Having a slot attendant loudly counting out, “One hundred, two hundred, three hundred . . . “in front of anybody in the vicinity creates some risk.
In the era of cell phones, it’s very possible for somebody to text, “A 40-something guy in a green shirt with brown pants is carrying a lot of money. I’ll let you know when he’s heading towards the parking lot.” (That would not be me. It’s been decades since someone identified me as being 40-something, and it’s extremely rare that I wear brown pants.) So, your attacker may well be someone who wasn’t present when you were paid, but who found out from somebody else.
After a big winning session, I frequently stroll through the casino, zigging and zagging, too see if anybody is following me. Many times, I’ve approached a security guard and said, “I would like an escort to my car, and if you bring along another guard, I have tip money for both of you.”
If there is a parking garage elevator and there’s another guy waiting there who I don’t know, I’ll frequently “remember” something to do just as the elevator comes and let him go up alone. If there’s a large group in the elevator, I feel safer. If you’re healthy enough, walking the stairs in a parking garage is safer than taking the elevator, plus it’s rare enough that you can easily see if somebody is following you.
If you are mugged in an elevator, be sure to report it to security. Many casinos have cameras in the elevators and that can go a long way towards verifying your story and possibly apprehending the culprit.
There were certainly more things in this chapter that are worth remembering, but these were the items that tickled my “I haven’t written about that recently” button. Thank you, Colin.
How Often Do You Test Yourself?
I was recently reading Colin Jones’ new book, The 21st Century Card Counter, preparing to interview him for the GWAE podcast. Colin has been on the show a number of times and runs the Blackjack Apprentice Group which teaches players how to win at blackjack.
When referring to while he was running a blackjack team, he wrote: “We settled on having our players test out one another every month and requiring that management test them out every three months. What we discovered is that it’s easy to let your game slide over time.”
Bingo! If I ran a video poker team (probably never going to happen!), that sounds like a policy I’d implement.
I suspect very few video poker players test themselves very often. Maybe at the beginning when they first are starting out, but how about later? If you’ve been playing NSU (for example) for two years, and you haven’t tested yourself recently, you’re probably making quite a few errors.
Video poker is arguably more difficult than blackjack. Learning one video poker variation (say, Jacks or Better) is certainly easier than counting cards proficiently, but learning Jacks or Better, Double Bonus, Double Double Bonus, Super Double Bonus, Deuces Wild, Super Bonus Deuces Wild, etc., etc. is more difficult.
There are players who only play one game, of course. If that works for them, fine. But if you play at several casinos, and you want to play the best game at each, you’re going to have to learn several games. Sometimes that includes the same game with different pay schedules.
In Blackjack, there are adjustments when you switch from a game where the dealer hits soft 17 to a game where he doesn’t, but those adjustments are few. In video poker, when you switch from Double Bonus to Double Bonus Deuces Wild, there’s a huge difference in the way the games are played.
So, assume you’ve been playing Double Bonus almost exclusively for several months, and for whatever reason, that game dries up and now you’re looking at Double Bonus Deuces Wild. Assume you played the latter game reasonably correctly a year ago, but not since. How do you get yourself ready?
This might not work for everybody, but this is the way I would handle such a situation (and variations of this situation have occurred more than a thousand times over my career).
First, I consult my strategy sheet. Every advanced strategy I’ve ever created is in a computer folder. I find the right one and go over it line by line.
Second, I put the game into WinPoker and use the “Hard Hands” feature, where I have it deal all hands when the first and second plays are closer than 2¢. And then 1¢. And then smaller than that.
I set WinPoker to “show” rather than “warn.” Where the W indicates a deuce, on a hand like W A♠ 3♠ K♥ 8♥, I don’t need practice pressing the buttons. I just need to know whether the correct answer is the deuce by itself, the deuce and the ace, or perhaps something else. So, I call out (sometimes out loud, sometimes silently) what I believe is the correct answer (the deuce by itself in this case) and hit the button to see if I’m correct. If not, I look up why not. If my strategy doesn’t differentiate this case from W A♠ 4♠ K♥ 8♥, where the correct play is W A♠, I either adjust my strategy or make a determination that this is too petty to worry about.
After I do this, I switch to Video Poker for Winners and test myself on both the Advanced level and the Intermediate level, as they deal according to different criteria. Sometimes this will identify hands I was misplaying where the difference between the best and second-best play was too large to be found by using the WinPoker Hard Hands technique.
If it’s a game where there is a Dancer/Daily Winner’s Guide, I take the tests found there. I helped write those about 20 years ago, but my memory is imperfect.
Sometimes I go to the Wizard of Odds video poker strategy calculator and look at the exceptions to the basic strategy. That program uses a very different notation than what I am used to but forcing my brain to look at this from both his notation and mine gets my head “into the game.”
At this stage in my career, this takes me maybe an hour or two to accomplish. When I was less experienced, it took me much longer — because sometimes it was the first time I played a game and I needed to create an advanced strategy using various tools.
After I’ve done these things, it is now time to go into the casino. And if I must change games again in the near future, I do this all again. There are a few games, like 9/6 Jacks or Better, that I have down pat because 1) I’ve been playing it professionally for 25 years, 2) it’s the easiest game to play perfectly, and 3) I’ve taught a class in it more than 100 times.
There are other games, like NSU Deuces Wild, for which I go through this procedure about once a year. Simply put, even though I’ve been playing it for 20 years and have gone through this exercise dozens of times, it’s a much more difficult game than Jacks or Better. Since it’s easier to make mistakes, I review it more often. It’s not like I’ll ever forget it below the 99.9% accuracy level, but I prefer to know the game better than that.
How long it takes you to go through this process depends on you. How much experience do you have? How willing are you to ignore minor errors? How important is winning to you? How good is your memory? And a whole bunch of other things.
I strongly believe, however, that if you don’t do some version of this regimen on a regular basis, you’re playing at a lesser level than you think you are.