I recently posted a few blogs concerning some fine points for the strategy of 9-5 Triple Bonus Poker Plus. They discussed somewhat c<\/s>omplicated decisions with relatively small financial impacts. After the second blog came out, a reader posted the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
I have read posts from you before that refer to getting the best value from your time. Sometimes travel time is considered, sometimes how fast the machines are is considered and more. Have you ever considered the time to create and memorize these detailed parts of a strategy compared to the return for your time invested? Perhaps there is a game nearby that would return more per hour than the detailed strategy does or ever could.<\/mark><\/p>\n\n\n\n Dollars per hour is one consideration. There are a lot of other considerations as well. Different players will have different conclusions about this subject. I\u2019ll explain as best as I can why and when I learn every last penalty card situation — and when I don\u2019t. In the end, no matter how I do it, you\u2019ll have to decide for yourself how you\u2019re going to address this subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve had a lot of education, and enjoy studying for tests. Preparing to play video poker correctly has a lot in common with getting ready to take a test. On most tests I took in school, my goal was to score 100% on that test. That goal continues today. I understand many students\/players don\u2019t share that goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Currently I\u2019m able to create and master a strategy relatively easily — partly because I\u2019ve been doing this with video poker for almost three decades, following doing this with other games for almost that long. Someone starting from the beginning today would need to work a lot harder and longer to master a strategy than I would. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve been hired to teach a player this game and several times he has said something like, \u201cYour brain works differently than mine does.\u201d Probably true. Everybody addresses problems in a slightly different way. The strategies I create make sense to somebody who thinks like I do. It\u2019s not a big struggle for me to consider straight and flush penalties to a suited JT<\/em><\/strong> in the same five cards as one or more straight and\/or flush penalties to holding a solitary ace. For some people, that\u2019s too confusing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve been told that your brain is like a muscle — if you don\u2019t use it today, you lose the ability to use it in the future. I\u2019m currently 76 years old, and my brain is slowly deteriorating as I age. If I have to exercise my brain for something to ward off senility —why not this? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Age, combined with bankroll, also matters. If I were 22 years old with a relatively small bankroll, it might be worthwhile to take some risks to build up my bankroll. I would play every opportunity I can find returning more than 100% up to 16 hours a day, even if I don\u2019t know the strategies for some or all the games perfectly. If I go broke at age 22, there are a lot of ways to recover. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At almost 3\u00bd times that age, with a sizeable bankroll already amassed, if I go broke today it\u2019s a lot more serious. I can\u2019t move in with Mom and Dad. There are limited ways to re-accumulate bankroll as a senior citizen. It\u2019s hard to directly measure how much reducing or eliminating the chance of going broke is actually worth, but it\u2019s not trivial. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Triple Bonus Poker Plus is a game where mastering a strategy at the 100% accuracy level is feasible. NSU Deuces Wild is not such a game. There are so many exceptions in the latter game that virtually nobody, including me, plays perfectly. Playing that game at the 99.9% accuracy level is within my capabilities — and I can live with that. On games like Ultimate X, even playing at the 99.9% accuracy level is impossible — for me at least. Still the rewards from this game can be high enough that it can make sense to play this game at a lesser level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A friend\u2019s daughter is a high school sophomore, and she competes on her school track team in the shot put. In a meet, they heave 8-pound hunks of metal (four kilograms, actually, which means 8.8 pounds). In practice, she regularly tosses 12-pound shots (I think this is six kilograms, meaning 13.2 pounds) which is what the high school boys throw. Since she\u2019s practicing at a more difficult level than what she is competing at, when it comes to the actual meet, she does better than most of the girls she\u2019s up against. One of her goals is to get a college athletic scholarship at a good school. I see her over-preparation as similar to what I do in video poker strategy. For essentially the same reasons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In general, if I\u2019m going to be playing a particular game for several hundred hours over the next year or so, mastering it is relatively important. If I\u2019m going to be playing this game for one two-hour promotion, and then probably never playing it again, I\u2019m not going to be spending so much time on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Also, in general, if a game is found for low stakes only, I\u2019m not going to concentrate on mastering it as much as I would if I were playing it for higher stakes. Phrased differently, mistakes are a lot more costly when you\u2019re playing a $25 game than when you\u2019re playing a 25\u00a2 version of the same game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Using the wizardofodds.com video poker strategy calculator, you can get a figure for many games showing how much a basic strategy is worth and how much an advanced strategy is worth. This gives you a measure of the potential gain from learning an advanced strategy over using the basic strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The problem is, however, that most players don\u2019t even play the basic strategy completely correctly. Practicing the advanced hands gives you practice on the lesser hands as well, assuming you\u2019re using a computer to help you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to the two types of hands discussed in recent blogposts, here are the hands I practice:<\/p>\n\n\n\n These aren\u2019t very interesting hands to practice, but they are the meat and potatoes of playing video poker well. In the TBPP game I\u2019m playing, for a single coin, flush=5 and straight flush=100. This affects the value of every 3-card and 4-card straight flush, and the correct answers in this game are different than they are in any other game I\u2019ve played.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A lot of players argue that they\u2019ll just take the strategy with them and when they come across a hand they don\u2019t know, they\u2019ll look it up. That\u2019s all well and good if you can read a strategy correctly. You also have to know the strategy very well to know where the problem hands lie, so you can look them up. I know from my experience as a teacher, when every class ends with a quiz consisting of 20-or-so different hands, that even though it\u2019s an open-book quiz, almost no player gets all the answers correct. Just having a strategy in your hand is no guarantee that you will play the way the strategy demands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This might not be true for you, but I get paid for studying! Sometimes as a tutor. Sometimes as a blogpost writer. This is in addition to earning a higher return on the game because I know all the plays.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently posted a few blogs concerning some fine points for the strategy of 9-5 Triple Bonus Poker Plus. They discussed somewhat complicated decisions with relatively small financial impacts. After the second blog came out, a reader posted the following:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15763,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[601,557],"tags":[561,585],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840571"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15763"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=840571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840571\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=840571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=840571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=840571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n