After 14 months of playing sinlge line, triple play, five play, and
ten play machines, I finally hit a royal on a 25 cent triple play
machine for $1000. I netted a win of $130 for the evening. I posted
a pic of it in the file section. The link is listed below, beware
56k dial up users. The file is named Aug2_04 TriplePlayRoyal. Good
luck. TomSki
http://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/YJoPQTDSIcxIrJLyWFjAvMIi4BDy-
ivZbqDdv9y_tWVZWsVMtbQ3INSJ3ybZUPC2fRoVcvFgjSTYQHfez6MdqDBykm2r4g/Aug
2_04.JPG
tomskilv@yahoo.com wrote:
After 14 months of playing sinlge line, triple play, five play, and
ten play machines, I finally hit a royal on a 25 cent triple play
machine for $1000. I netted a win of $130 for the evening. I posted
a pic of it in the file section. The link is listed below, beware
56k dial up users. The file is named Aug2_04 TriplePlayRoyal. Good
luck. TomSkihttp://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/YJoPQTDSIcxIrJLyWFjAvMIi4BDy-
ivZbqDdv9y_tWVZWsVMtbQ3INSJ3ybZUPC2fRoVcvFgjSTYQHfez6MdqDBykm2r4g/Aug
2_04.JPG
Tom, I tried to piece this together and then repost a TinyURL, but I can't manage to get it to come up. By now, I would have thought that _everyone_ would know about http://www.TinyURL.com (and there are other similar sites out there like smallurl.com and littleurl.com). I keep TinyURL right on my toolbar, so with just a click I'm there. The way I see it, if I'm going to go to the trouble of posting a link, it's because I wan't people to successfully view it. I even shorten URLs that are still one-liners, because they eventually fragment when the arrows are added during repeated replies in a thread. I'd never even _dream_ of posting a link like the above without shortening it. End of lecture. 
Anyway ... CONGRATULATIONS on your triple Royal!! Now go hit another one, and remember: "TinyURL is your friend."
Cheers.
Bill Velek
Yahoo! looks like it may be throwing a monkey wrench into the works
when it comes to copying and pasting a link to the file area. I'm
having similar problems to what Tom and Bill had.
Tom's photo of his 3-play royal can be found in the Files section of
the vpFREE website:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vpFREE/files
The filename starts with the letter "A" (Aug), so for now, it's listed
at the top of the listing.
------
Nice hit at long last, Tom -- which may be of small consolation :(.
It's a pretty neat "wrap around" royal, just one position off of a
sequential. (Seems like you deserved a dealt sequential!)
Love those photo posts -- but what's with the fuzzy picture? That
long drought didn't cause you to trade down from that nifty camera
(CoolPix, if I recall right) did it?
- H.
Harry Porter wrote:
Yahoo! looks like it may be throwing a monkey wrench into the works
when it comes to copying and pasting a link to the file area. I'm
having similar problems to what Tom and Bill had.Tom's photo of his 3-play royal can be found in the Files section of
the vpFREE website: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vpFREE/filesThe filename starts with the letter "A" (Aug), so for now, it's listed
at the top of the listing.
Now that I was able to reach it, here is the TinyURL link which I just tested and it works for me:
http://tinyurl.com/4tysz
Cheers.
Bill Velek
Now that I was able to reach it, here is the TinyURL link which I
just
tested and it works for me:
http://tinyurl.com/4tyszCheers.
Bill Velek
Bill,
I tried that link and it did not work for me. I then went to make
one on my own and this one worked for me. However, it might not work
for anyone else. I have noticed that happens sometimes. Oh well.
TomSki
Link to royal flush pic:
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, Bill Velek <billvelek@a...> wrote:
After 14 months of playing sinlge line, triple play, five play,
and
ten play machines, I finally hit a royal on a 25 cent triple play
machine for $1000. I netted a win of $130 for the evening. I
posted
a pic of it in the file section. The link is listed below, beware
56k dial up users. The file is named Aug2_04 TriplePlayRoyal. Good
luck. TomSki
You must have been getting the living crapola beaten out of you
during this time, weren't you?
I had a six-month one-royal drought (1,100,000 hands) in 2002/2003
that cost me $19,000 playing QUARTERS. Ecch. The only consolation is
that when I broke out, it was with five royals in a week, and a
+7,000 month. Still, I've only drawn even as of June 2004, inclusive
of results of 2002/2003. Sure glad I had that thar advantage
everyone says I had!
I suppose the picture would look a little brighter if I corsidered
earned (and consumed) comps, at a value of at least $300/month.
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, tomskilv@y... wrote:
tomskilv@yahoo.com wrote:
> Now that I was able to reach it, here is the TinyURL link which I
just
> tested and it works for me:
> http://tinyurl.com/4tysz
Aha!! The above link still worked for me until I hit the refresh button on my browser; now it no longer works for me, so it worked only while it was in my browsers history. And your new link, below, doesn't work for me, either. This obviously has something to do with the way Yahoo! does stuff. So much for TinyUrls for such things. Oh well, it was worth a try.
Cheers.
Bill
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, Bill Velek <billvelek@a...> wrote:
Bill,
I tried that link and it did not work for me. I then went to make
one on my own and this one worked for me. However, it might not work
for anyone else. I have noticed that happens sometimes. Oh well.
TomSkiLink to royal flush pic:
Yahoo! is preventing hard linking to the file that you
are trying to create a link to. The links that it
creates are dynamic. This prevents somebody from
posting a file on Yahoo! Groups and then using
Yahoo!'s bandwidth to download the files (such as
programs). They figure that letting group members
access a file area will prevent unlimited use of their
bandwidth and server processing capacity.
If I may suggest that you follow this link instead. I
placed a copy of the picture in the photo album.
While you won't get to the photo directly, you will
get to the album where you can click on the photo. In
reality, photos should probably be placed in the photo
album since Yahoo! creates smaller thumbnails of them
for faster browsing:
http://photos.groups.yahoo.com/group/vpFREE/lst
-or-
--DB in SD
While the picture is no doubt thrilling, I'm more interested in
knowing the extent of the drought in number of hands. My wife is
royal-less for 22 months, but she plays only occasionally and it
comes to about 4 royal cycles. I suspect you play more.
Was this one of those streaks that defy the odds? I love a good train
wreck story.
Geez, Velek, here the man has a major emotional event in his life,
kind of like having a son born or something, and all you want to do
is complain about how he handles his url. Don't you know, urls don't
want to worry with all that stuff, urls just want to have fun 
Just kidding, of course. But I really mean it when I say congrats on
the royal. TomSki, how long was your drought in hands, approx? I had
two consecutive long waits early in the year, 108K and 96K hands, and
even though I knew better they had me questioning the whole premise
of advantage play. You can tell yourself all day long that the odds
against you being the guy on the bottom of the bell curve are
astronomical, but the fact remains that there is a certain discrete
percentage of people who will go 300K, 500K, 750K, even a million
hands without a royal, and that will usually bust any bankroll
(psychologically if not physically).
In honor of TomSki's drought-busting, let me post the odds for
droughts of various lengths:
drought odds against x:1
40,000 2
100,000 11
200,000 147
300,000 1,807
400,000 22,028
500,000 268,378
750,000 139,034,738
1,000,000 72,027,404,761
(assuming 40K royal cycle, and also assuming that there are no
rounding errors in the calcs behind the longer odds - I'm using MS
Excel so I don't have full control of the numbers myself and that
last one, 72 billion to one, would be extrememly susceptible to small
rounding errors if any exist - I'd be grateful in anybody knows how
to check that)
BTW, when my second drought ended, it was the start of a 4-in-60K
streak that had other good things mixed in as well. Hope you
experience a similar rebound.
On urls and pics, it's always helpful to know a good way to do
something around here, so thanks to all for the info and the
experiements you did. I've got a webshots account already set up and
several more like it, so it sounds like if I want to post a picture
it would be best to do it in one of those accounts. Is that right? On
the tiny URLs, one question, is there a time limit on how long they
are good for? I've been reading back through the archives and many
tiny url links are busted - of course, that could be because the
original item has been removed.
Also, one other advantage to the actual URL for those who get around
is you can often tell if you've seen or care about the item in
question by looking at the url. And for us on dialup, I believe the
original may be faster? Any other advantages?
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, tomskilv@y... wrote:
After 14 months of playing sinlge line, triple play, five play, and
ten play machines, I finally hit a royal on a 25 cent triple play
machine for $1000.
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "rockofjello333" <rockofjello333@y...>
wrote:
I had a six-month one-royal drought (1,100,000 hands) in 2002/2003
that cost me $19,000 playing QUARTERS.
Hey, rock, gimme details. I collected some royal drought numbers off
vpMail back several months ago, when I was going through my piddly
little drought of one royal in 200K hands, and the longest anyone
reported there was zero in 300,000 hands. If you had one royal in 1.1
mil, you've got at least the top spot and probably #1 and #2 in my
personal little collection.
You also come perilously close to what I had considered (almost)
impossible, the million hand drought. Unless Excel is deceiving me in
its inner workings (see my other post), the odds against that ever
happening are 72 billion to one. What happened to you has lower but
still mind-boggling odds of 32 billion to one, assuming you play
Jacks, or 0.4-1.7 billion to one if you play games like Double Bonus
or Deuces. However, coming to think of it, it's very possible that
there have been 32 billion royal cycles played, which is the relevant
unit of time here. Possibly several times that number. And whoever
would endure that long a drought would certainly be a dedicated VP
player, so I guess it's not surprising that the author of such a deed
would be found on this message board.
Here's my odds table repeated from the other post:
Assuming 40K royal cycle
drought odds against x:1
40,000 2
100,000 11
200,000 147
300,000 1,807
400,000 22,028
500,000 268,378
750,000 139,034,738
1,000,000 72,027,404,761
Having 1 royal in 1,100,000 hands, if I calculate it right, has odds
against of about 31,908,323,925 to 1.
(Note, all these odds are highly sensitive to small changes in the
inputs. If we assume a 45,000 hand cycle like DW, the one royal in
1.1 million hands event has odds of 1.7 billion to one, not 32
billion. A 48,000 hand cycle like Double Bonus is 400 million to one.
A 32,000 hand cycle like most high-value progressives is a number so
huge it makes my head hurt.)
Okay, now, the world record holder interview, if you don't mind.
To confirm what you said alread, you said the time frame was 6
months, you were playing mostly quarters and for the period you had a
net loss of $19,000 (I assume this is after cashback but before
comps - right?).
Other questions are:
Where did the one royal fall (what hand#)?
Were you playing mostly JOB or DW or what mix of games?
Are there any extenuating circumstances - like you hit 15 on short
coin but aren't counting those, or you hit a bunch in dollars but are
only talking quarters here, or is this really what it appears to be?
(Sorry to ask that, that's my investigative reporter style, I just
want to clear things up for any future possible detractors.)
What's your best guess for the theo EV of the games you played?
Do you feel like you played 99.8% or better perfect strategy?
Why the hell did you stick with it so long and not switch to
Blackjack or slots or something? (Partly asked in jest, but you must
have asked yourself this and I'm curious how you answered.)
Were you simultaneously winning at something else that helped offset
the VP losses? Was your bankroll overfunded to begin with? How (in
general, I'm not trying to pry into personal details here) did you
fund the hit to your bankroll?
On the average EV question above, I realize you probably don't know
but please try to give me some feel for this. For example, do you
routinely play negative games, like 9/6 JOB with less than 0.50% CB?
Do you almost always play FPDW at 100.7%? Do you only play progs over
103%?
Based on your $19K loss, 1.1 milling hands, a 40K royal cycle like
non-prog JOB and 1 royal, I can back into an average EV of 100.20%,
assuming no other hands deviated from average. If you're a deuces
player with its 45,000 hand cycle, the back-in number is right at
100.00%. Does that sound in the ballpark? Note that it is not
infrequent for your other results to deviate from average too over a
million hand cycle, like 4OAKs and especially bonus 4OAKS, so if you
usally play 100.9%-after-cashback deuces, then this calc would imply
that you were also a little short on quad deuces or maybe wild
royals/5Ks.
Sorry if I sound enthusiastic about your past woes, it's just such an
impressive statistical oddity and I like such things. I'm also
interested in info about the recovery - if you're almost back to
average now, you must have had some good runs, and those would be
equal anomalies. I'd like to hear that side too. How many hands does
that cover?
Contrary to popular perception, being down does NOT imply that the
odds are in favor of a run of above normal luck. You always face the
expectation of average results. Rather, the prediction that you will
normalize over time implies that in the future you will earn exactly
the EV, and if you play enough, those normal hands will swamp the
weighted-average impact of your abnormal hands. Thus, what should
have happened after you got down 1.1 million hands, is that you would
have had to play another 100 million hands before you became 99%
normalized. Coming back faster than that is equally extraordinary.
blaw57 wrote:
snip
... On
the tiny URLs, one question, is there a time limit on how long they
are good for? I've been reading back through the archives and many
tiny url links are busted - of course, that could be because the
original item has been removed.
As far as I know, the TinyUrls are good for as long as the TinyUrl website remains active. I would suspect that anything that isn't working is due to the original site being moved or discontinued.
Cheers.
Bill Velek
drought odds against x:1
40,000 2
100,000 11
200,000 147
300,000 1,807
400,000 22,028
500,000 268,378
750,000 139,034,738
1,000,000 72,027,404,761(assuming 40K royal cycle, and also assuming that there are no
rounding errors in the calcs behind the longer odds - I'm using MS
Excel so I don't have full control of the numbers myself and that
last one, 72 billion to one, would be extrememly susceptible to
small
rounding errors if any exist - I'd be grateful in anybody knows how
to check that)
probability=(1-1/cycle)^hands
so for 40k hands:
probability=(1-1/40000)^40000=0.367874843
(should be EXP(-1)=0.367879441)
a more accurate formula:
(EXP(-1))^(hands/cycle)
to get odds-to-1 against: (1-prob)/prob=(1/prob)-1
hands prob odds-to-1 against
40000 0.367879441 1.718281828
100000 0.082084999 11.18249396
500000 3.72665E-06 268336.2865
1000000 1.38879E-11 72004899336
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "blaw57" <blaw57@y...> wrote:
a more accurate formula:
(EXP(-1))^(hands/cycle)
this can be reduced to EXP(-hands/cycle) which gives you the
probability of a royal drought versus royal cycles:
royal_cycles drought_probability
1 36.7879441%
2 13.5335283%
3 4.9787068%
4 1.8315639%
5 0.6737947%
6 0.2478752%
7 0.0911882%
8 0.0335463%
9 0.0123410%
10 0.0045400%
table is good for any game for which you know the cycle
(for example you could record high pairs to check to see if a game is
dealing randomly)
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "rockofjello333"
<rockofjello333@y...>
wrote:
> I had a six-month one-royal drought (1,100,000 hands) in
2002/2003
> that cost me $19,000 playing QUARTERS.
Hey, rock, gimme details. I collected some royal drought numbers
off
vpMail back several months ago, when I was going through my piddly
little drought of one royal in 200K hands, and the longest anyone
reported there was zero in 300,000 hands. If you had one royal in
1.1
mil, you've got at least the top spot and probably #1 and #2 in my
personal little collection.
Without answering you point-for-point (I'm a little tired tonight) I
can tell you:
This was ONLY .25 play, and a mixture of about 40% FPDW, 50% FPJW,
and 10% 10/7 DB. Given the actual statistics, I suppose I should
have been glad to be down ONLY 19K for this action.
I keep my dollar play results separately, and my results on $1 DB
and 10/6 DDB are a net win of---hold your breath---$2.00. But this
is NOT including earned comps and cashback. Also, my 19,000 .25 loss
was NOT inclusive of about $10K in earned comps, cashback, and
bounceback. So the actual loss during this period is well under $6K,
which probably explains why I kept plugging away.
Also, when you get the $30 and $40 and $50 spiffs in the mail, you
feel compelled to come down and get them--and once you're there, you
keep on playing...
No matter how you slice it, this was a bizarre run--but you have to
consider that I view it from what I considered its beginning---the
first preceding royal--to its end: the royal that "broke" the
streak. If you consider that I broke out with FIVE royals the week
after, you could say that I got six royals in 1.12 million hands--
still pretty putrid, but well within the realm of plausability. The
point I am making is that any such "streak" sample is somewhat
biased in and of itself. A baseball team that suffered a seven-game
losing streak last month, by definition, went 2 and 7 for the period
that bracketed the streak: bad, but not as dramatic as the "streak".
I suppose the thing that kept me going was that I was getting almost
half of my losses rebated, and that the dollar action was coming out
very close to "expected"--with a modest profit--so I got
discouraged, but not too much so.
P.S. While scraping up bouceback tonight, I hit two royals in eighty
hands---statistically, pretty weird, too. But I like this kind of
weird better, for some reason
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "blaw57" <blaw57@y...> wrote:
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "nightoftheiguana2000"
<nightoftheiguana2000@y...> wrote:
> (assuming 40K royal cycle, and also assuming that there are no
> rounding errors in the calcs behind the longer odds - I'm using
MS
> Excel so I don't have full control of the numbers myself and
that
> last one, 72 billion to one, would be extrememly susceptible to
small
> rounding errors if any exist - I'd be grateful in anybody knows
how
> to check that)
*********************************************************************
The chance of a rare event not occurring in n cycles is 1 in e^n,
where e = 2.71828 is the Natural Number (truncated to 5 decimal
places).
(To prove the above assertion, simply note that for small values of
p, ln(1-p) can be approximated by p, where ln is the natural
logarithm. This approximation is very good when the length of the
cycle is more than 50 hands long and will certainly apply to a 40k
hand long royal cycle.)
Your 72 billion to one figure is correct (I came up with
72,004,899,377 to 1).
Please refer to Message #16573 (if it's still available).
L. Wluiki
You must have been getting the living crapola beaten out of you
during this time, weren't you?
I had a six-month one-royal drought (1,100,000 hands) in 2002/2003
that cost me $19,000 playing QUARTERS. Ecch. The only consolation
is
that when I broke out, it was with five royals in a week, and a
+7,000 month. Still, I've only drawn even as of June 2004,
inclusive
of results of 2002/2003. Sure glad I had that thar advantage
everyone says I had!
I suppose the picture would look a little brighter if I corsidered
earned (and consumed) comps, at a value of at least $300/month.
That's a lot of video poker hands in six months.
How often do you play, and for how long at what hands per hour rate?
Do you play multiple line machines?
Neil
some old geezer came up with this, i believe his name was poisson,
they called him the fish for some reason, i heard he got 86'd from
monte carlo
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "lwluiki" <lwluiki@a...> wrote:
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "nightoftheiguana2000"
<nightoftheiguana2000@y...> wrote:
> > (assuming 40K royal cycle, and also assuming that there are no
> > rounding errors in the calcs behind the longer odds - I'm using
MS
> > Excel so I don't have full control of the numbers myself and
that
> > last one, 72 billion to one, would be extrememly susceptible to
> small
> > rounding errors if any exist - I'd be grateful in anybody knows
how
> > to check that)
*********************************************************************
The chance of a rare event not occurring in n cycles is 1 in e^n,
where e = 2.71828 is the Natural Number (truncated to 5 decimal
places).(To prove the above assertion, simply note that for small values of
p, ln(1-p) can be approximated by p, where ln is the natural
logarithm. This approximation is very good when the length of the
cycle is more than 50 hands long and will certainly apply to a 40k
hand long royal cycle.)Your 72 billion to one figure is correct (I came up with
72,004,899,377 to 1).Please refer to Message #16573 (if it's still available).
L. Wluiki
Must have been something in the air, Tuesday. At the Cannery, after an endless series of "almost" royals on the Multistrikes, I moved over to the bar with the $1 8/5 bonus progressive. Sit down, and start my FIRST HAND as the bartender takes my order. I'm dealt TQKA of diamonds. I get the Jack for $4368. That's a first for me, a royal on my first hand on a machine.
The bartender thinks I'm sort sort of sorcerer. If I had it to do over again, I would have had some extra fun by claiming that this was my first hand of the night, and leaving without playing another hand, explaining that "I only stopped in for a little quick cash". <G>
John
P.S. While scraping up bouceback tonight, I hit two royals in eighty hands---statistically, pretty weird, too. But I like this kind of weird better, for some reason
On urls and pics, it's always helpful to know a good way to do
something around here, so thanks to all for the info and the
experiements you did. I've got a webshots account already set up and
several more like it, so it sounds like if I want to post a picture
it would be best to do it in one of those accounts. Is that right?
I'm not sure what you mean by a "webshots account" but if
you have access to web space, a link to the jpg or a page
that contains the jpg is a good option.
Such as:
http://members.cox.net/vpfree/F/Ski.jpg
<a href="http://members.cox.net/vpfree/F/Ski.jpg">
http://members.cox.net/vpfree/F/Ski.jpg</a>
If you're going to post a photo using vpFREE's Yahoo
resources, the Photo Directory is probably the best choice.
On the tiny URLs, one question, is there a time limit on
how long they are good for?
Tinyurl is supposed to be a long term solution.
And for us on dialup, I believe the
original may be faster?
This is true for ShorterLink which has two distinct
steps, but I don't think there's much difference with
tinyurl.
vpFREE Administrator
Refresh your browser before reading DataBase pages
On 3 Aug 2004 at 23:23, blaw57 wrote:
