Tag: video poker

I’ve written recently about running out of bankroll. Today’s blog is about running out of cash on hand, which is a different thing.

I was playing on Fremont Street. Primarily slots, but there are some video poker games there as well. Four Queens has $1 10/7 Double Bonus, and the three ONE casinos (Circa, D, Golden Gate) have linked progressives for games in denominations between 25¢ and $5 in several different games. 8/6 Bonus Poker Deluxe (98.5% at a 4,000-coin royal) is the highest-returning game in the mix and sometimes one or more of the denominations are positive. I’d prefer it if there were juicy $5 and $10 games regularly available there, but the situation is what it is.

If I knew going in that I’d be playing a $5 video poker game (say I knew the Circa progressive was at $38,000 last night and if it hasn’t been hit yet, that’s the game I’ll want to play), I pretty much know how much cash to bring with me. I’ve been playing video poker for 30 years and I have experience with such things.

But if I’m going to be playing slots, it’s hard to know how much to bring. Sometimes I’ll find a game for 75¢ a spin that I calculate is returning 120%. That’s not going to take a lot of money. Win or lose, the net result will be a few hundred dollars or less. But sometimes I find a game for $30 or $50 a spin. Even if I calculate that I have a significant advantage, I don’t know whether or not I will win this time — and I might be behind $10k or more before the bonus round pops.

Having too much cash on hand exposes me to risks I’d rather not face. While I’m in fairly good shape (current orthopedic ailments notwithstanding), I’m 77 years old and could be considered a target.

The game I ran into was an $8 per hand game that was positive. Although I had run into a $1,500 buzzsaw earlier in the day, I still had about two grand on me — which was going to be enough maybe 80% of the time. It’s impossible for me to know exactly. The game had four meters on it, and both of the bottom two were in positive territory. I’m figuring to play until I hit both of them. If either or both of the higher meters go off, I’ll be in hog heaven and will definitely have enough to go until I take down the lower two.

Luck wasn’t with me today. I went through my cash on hand. So, what to do?

I called over the slot supervisor and told him the situation. I’d lost $2,000 over the past hour and have no more cash on me. I have plenty of cash about 12 miles away. Will he lock up the machine for me for an hour and allow me to get more “ammunition?”

The slot supervisor was somewhat sympathetic, but he told me it was July 3 and the bosses said no machines could be locked up for the entire holiday weekend. It was 10 p.m. and there was no way he would call them at home over a matter such as this.

So, I started calling some gambling buddies. I have some friends who might be willing to help me out for either a percentage, a flat fee, or whatever they wanted. I’d tell them that I had plenty of cash elsewhere and they’d have their money back the next day at the latest. Plus, I’d owe them a favor down the road. A largely unrestricted favor is pretty valuable.

If we agreed to split the jackpot, that could be a bit tricky. Currently, I estimate my “position” has a value of about $2,200 going forward. The fact that I’ve already put in $2,000 is not relevant going forward. Whoever helps me out would be starting now.

It’s also possible that I could lose starting from right now. I could put in another $2,000 and the bonuses only add up to $1,500. An unexpectedly bad result possible. Whoever takes a piece of this needs to know that winning isn’t guaranteed, and they’ll need to be willing to take a piece of the potential loss as well. If they can’t stand the idea of losing, then their help is only worth 5% or 10% of the bonus rounds. The people I call will understand these things.

Before I started making calls, I put the screen to the $1.20 version of the same game. The meters were low, and no professional would play it. But there are always pros lurking around and I didn’t want to leave the screen showing the juicy game at $8. I’d be sure to get tons of “do you mind if I play that?” questions I didn’t want.

The usual first person I’d call was out of town, so calling him wasn’t going to be useful.

The actual first person I called was Richard Munchkin. He doesn’t play slots, but has a son that does and both know me well enough to trust me both for the money and the ability to calculate that it was a good game. Munchkin’s phone went to voicemail. He turns it off when he goes to bed. I didn’t have the phone number for his son.

The next person I called was planning to leave on an 8-hour road trip at five in the morning. Short of a life-or-death situation, which this wasn’t, he didn’t want to leave his house. I told him to go back to bed.

The third person I called was Bonnie, my 81-year-old wife. While I 100% trust Bonnie with money, she’s a little forgetful. Well, maybe a little bit more than a little bit forgetful. She could easily not remember at which casino I was waiting. My phone had about 5% power and could run out, so I had to be sure she got the complete message the first time. I made sure she had all the information written down and could read it back to me. 

She no longer drives but has taken Lyft enough that she’s reasonably comfortable with that. My biggest fear is that Bonnie is very friendly and talks to everybody. I could imagine her telling the Lyft driver that her husband has run out of money and she was bringing him $5,000. Depending on the Lyft driver, Bonnie’s safety might be at risk. The $5,000 would be the least of our worries. (I’m not bad-mouthing Lyft. I assume that Bonnie would be completely safe with 99%+ of all Lyft or Uber drivers. But you never know for sure that she wouldn’t get one of the rare bad apples.)

While I was waiting, basically nobody bothered me. I was sitting in front of one of several hundred slot machines in the place, and the screen that was showing wasn’t anything special. Which was good. I didn’t want to call attention to myself. When this was finally over, Bonnie and I would be two senior citizens with multiple thousands of dollars on us. Downtown after midnight can be a bit sketchy.

I’ll finish this story next week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Often, I’ve heard players tell a video poker story of a time when their score was positive on a given day, but then they “got greedy” and ended up with a negative result. The phrase is usually accompanied by some self-loathing. Perhaps, “Why did I let myself do that again. I know better!”

I almost never say that, although I’ve certainly had my share of experiences where my score went south after I was ahead for a while. Today I want to look at that term.

I’m not going Gordon Gekko on you and proclaiming, “Greed is good!” As I’m using it today, greed is a negative trait.

Let’s also accept in general that winning is good and losing is bad. Then losing intentionally would be a bad thing. One more premise we must accept is that gambling scores go up and down. We can all recount what happened over the last half hour. None of us can accurately predict what swings will happen in the next half hour.

To my mind then, so long as I am playing a game that exceeds 100% in theoretical return, and playing to the best of my ability, when I lose, it’s just a circumstance I cannot control. I know it’s going to happen sometimes. Frequently, even. I just don’t know if it is going to happen today or not. 

If I hated myself after each loss, then I’d be in a psychologically unhealthy profession. Losing is just part of the game.

Most players, of course, aren’t playing games where they have the advantage. They either can’t find good games, don’t know how to play them well, or possibly are in the mood to play and don’t really care whether or not they have the advantage. For players like this, if they’re just thinking about the royal flush without accurately considering the cost to get it, then yes, perhaps that could be said to be “greedy.” But that’s not the way most players use the term.

As best as I can tell, some players who use the term simply mean they lost and aren’t happy about it. Perhaps they’re telling what poker players refer to as a bad beat story. If that’s the case, no big deal.

Others, perhaps, are justifying their loss by admitting to a “personality defect” (i.e., greed) which has the effect of saying that this is not really their fault. They are still good people who have occasional lapses.

But the fact is that they are going to be losing again and again and again — interspersed by wins sometimes. Every gambler goes through this. Even winning ones. It isn’t that you’re greedy. It’s that you’re playing a game with ups and downs.

Perhaps they use the term because they are poor losers. While nobody likes to lose, getting really, really upset about it probably suggests you should consider not gambling. Knowing you’re going to get upset over and over again because that’s the nature of the game isn’t the healthiest way to lead your life.

I’ve read several authorities who claim that having regular sleep hours is the healthiest way to lead your life. Whether these experts are correct or not, I haven’t lived my life that way. For the past 30 years, my life has revolved around when and where the best video poker plays are.

If the point multiplier starts at midnight, I’ll be there. At 3 a.m.? That’d be okay. I’ll make it. An appointment at 8 a.m.? No problem. Another appointment at 1 p.m.? That’s okay. Meeting for dinner at 7 p.m.? Sounds good.

Obviously, I need to sleep some of the time. So, I sleep when I can, set the alarm as needed, and get to wherever I need to be. Friends and colleagues learn not to call me at such ungodly times as 10 a.m. or maybe 3 p.m. because I might be sleeping. It’s better to text me something like, “Call me when you’re awake.” Some days I take three different naps. And, because I’m a male senior citizen, sometimes I wake up more than once just to go to the bathroom.

I take a medication that makes me slightly drowsy. I’ve asked my doctor for a non-drowsy version, but he thinks the one he gives me is the perfect one for my health condition. So, I take it at night — just before I go to bed — but if I’m only sleeping three hours this particular night because of a promotion, the drug is still in my system — at least a little.

The net effect is that when my alarm goes off, my body doesn’t immediately become wide awake.. If I’m going to gamble intelligently (or do anything else intelligently, for that matter), I need to make sure I’m awake before I proceed.

My three methods of waking up are showers, physical exercise, and mental exercise — in any order, often in combination. Showers are self-explanatory. My go-to physical exercise for years was jumping jacks. When my hip joint deteriorated and eventually was replaced six months ago, that was out. Plus, now I’m going to need arthroscopic surgery on my left shoulder, so even though I can now jump up and down, sort of, swinging my arms over my head is painful and will possibly aggravate the tear in my rotator cuff that’s already there. Depending on the time of day, I often I suggest walking around a block or three with Bonnie — which is good for a number of reasons.

For mental exercise, I do a variety of things. If I’m going to be playing a video poker game for which I don’t believe my accuracy is at least 99.9%, I’m studying that game — both by looking at the strategy and practicing on the computer. I wish Video Poker for Winners still worked on my computer, but I make do with WinPoker. I select hard hands so as to review the hands that are the most difficult. Or, I start from particular cards so that I know all the exceptions. 

If I’m going to be making a slot run, I’ll review all of my strike numbers. I have numbers for more than 60 games. The ones I see every day I know by heart. But there are some games I only see occasionally — so I forget the numbers if I don’t review them.

If I’m playing a video poker game I know well, I might amuse myself on the website www.extremesudoku.info. It provides harder-than-average puzzles, and after I’ve done one or two, I’m awake.

I do drink coffee in the morning and take a slew of vitamins that I think are working, but there are those who say that vitamins are just a way to have expensive urine. I’m not sure.

If I’m driving to where I am going to play, I’ll often sing along to the songs I play. I don’t need my voice warmed up in order to play video poker well, but there’s something about waking up my voice that also wakes up my whole body.

And then I go to the casino — do my best — and take what I get.