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\u2019ve been able to keep that promise to myself. But nobody knows precisely what the future holds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Video poker is one of the easier games to successfully avoid bankruptcy. I didn\u2019t say it was easy. I said it was easier. The reason it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In games like live poker, it\u2019s hard to precisely know how good you are compared to your competition. And even if you can accurately quantify this, the nature of \u201cno limit\u201d and \u201cpot limit\u201d games is that you can lose everything you bring to the table every time you sit down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t meet this criterion, play games that are small in denomination compared to your gambling bankroll. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Easier said than done for some players. Most of the \u201cfun\u201d of gambling is playing for stakes where it hurts when you lose. If you\u2019re a millionaire and always play for single-line quarters, no matter the pay schedule, you\u2019ll never go broke. And you probably won\u2019t have any fun either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s defined as maximizing the logarithm of your wealth. For most of my readers, that definition is way too technical to be useful. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019ve been very successful at a particular bet size, the Kelly Criterion tells you to increase your bet size.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Video Poker for Winners <\/em>has a bankroll calculator, but the program hasn\u2019t been updated for several years and will not work on newer computers. Dunbar\u2019s Risk Analyzer for Video Poker<\/em>, 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\u2019s inexpensive and very useful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201c3-5 royal flushes\u201d rule — and since then I\u2019ve apologized several times for doing so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How much bankroll you need also depends on your age and your other responsibilities. I\u2019m 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\u2019t available to me today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cone size fits all\u201d answer to \u201chow much bankroll Avoiding going broke should be a strong priority to all successful gamblers. If you don\u2019t pay attention to this, you may well end up in a position you don\u2019t want to be in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019ve been able to keep that promise to myself. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15763,"featured_media":843442,"comment_status":"open","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":true,"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":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/spinach-2.png?fit=500%2C300&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861985"}],"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=861985"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":861986,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861985\/revisions\/861986"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/843442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=861985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=861985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=861985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}do<\/s> I need.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n