Bob Dancer's LVA - 27 MAY 2014
Money Management Rules Are Largely Worthless
http://www.lasvegasadvisor.com/bob_dancer/2014/0527.cfm
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Bob wrote: “For video poker the dynamics are different. Generally speaking we lose, lose, lose until we hit a royal flush (or perhaps four aces or deuces). The “all at once a big score” feature doesn’t lend itself to incremental
stopping points. Whether we are up or down $500 (or any other figure) tells us nothing about whether we will hit a royal flush later in the day.”
At a typical casino, hitting more than one royal flush in a trip will get you reduced-mailed or no-mailed or worse, so for video poker, if you hit a royal, you should probably leave. It doesn’t really matter what game you are playing, casinos these days are results oriented and the royal is the result they don’t like to see. Also the card readers are unreliable so you may show a loss even with the royal but the casino has no idea if it’s a real loss or a synthetic loss. The sharp players also change their strategy so they get less royals (on average) and more mailers. In these days of tighter and tighter machines, most of the money is in the mailers anyway.
Adjusting strategy to catch fewer royals? Now there’s an approach that’s never occurred to me. The mailer money vs. machine return ratio must be astronomical.
As for the “quit with a profit” plan Dancer discusses, I’m guessing the rec players who do it are driven by psychology, not math. Rejecting Dancer’s completely rational advice to ignore the results of daily sessions, many recreational players find it annoying and/or depressing to end up down at the end of the day after being significantly ahead earlier.
Could you elaborate in what you mean by “The sharp players also change their strategy so they get less royals (on average) and more mailers.”?
Thanks.
wha724@comcast.net wrote:
Adjusting strategy to catch fewer royals? Now there's an approach that's never occurred to me. The mailer money vs. machine return ratio must be astronomical.
The mailer can be worth more than the overall value. There are
occasions with progressives with little competition and a lot of meter
movement when optimal strategy (the strategy that maximizes the value
of the play, not the value per hand) is more conservative than if it
weren't progressive. A 9/6 Jacks or Better machine with a 1% meter
which isn't linked to any other machine is an example.
Do you mean the hand-paying royals or are you referring to 25c royals that pay out 1000 and don’t require a W2G as well?
If it’s a handpay, the casino wants to know the exact person who’s getting it. If it’s not a handpay, the casino only cares about the total return of the machine, in other words the aggregate hold from all players combined.
For example, take the wizard’s strategy generator:
Video Poker Strategy Calculator - Wizard of Odds
Video Poker Strategy Calculator - Wizard of Odds
Calculate the return and strategy for nearly any video poker game.
Preview by Yahoo
Select Jacks or Better and set the Royal to 0 and you get something like:
2 Pair or better
4 SF but not Ace high
High Pair
4 Flush
KQJT offsuit
Pair
4 Straight no gaps
3 SF no gaps or 2 high cards or more
AKQJ offsuit
3 Flush 1 high card or more
KQs, KJs ,QJs
4 Straight Ace high
3 SF with 1 high card
AKs, AQs, AJs
KQJ9 offsuit
3 SF one gap
KQJ offsuit
2 High Cards
1 High Card
3 SF two gaps
draw 5
Wizard shows an EV of 0.979491 and a Variance of 3.72 .
Now, you actually do get royals even with this strategy, so you have to add that back in:
For EV (return/cycle):
800/77,594.06=0.01
For Variance ((return-mean)^2/cycle):
(799)^2/77,594.06=8.23
So, the actual EV is 0.989491 and Variance is 11.95 .
You’re only giving up about a half of a percent to maxEV strategy which you will easily make up when you consider longevity, mailers, tax benefits, down time for handpays, better “luck” at drawings, etc. The reduced variance and increased net edge also means a reduced bankroll requirment.
noti wrote: If it’s a handpay, the casino wants to know the exact person who’s getting it. If it’s not a handpay, the casino only cares about the total return of the machine, in other words the aggregate hold from all players combined.
Possibly you’re thinking of single-line “regular” games.
I play $1 Ten Play Quick Quads and $1 Ten Play UX and sometimes $1 Ten Play something-else-I-don’t-wish-to-identify-further. Royals may or may not be the highest paying jackpots. Multiple quads — especially with some kind of multiplier — can easily exceed $4,000 on these games.
For those of us who play these games hours at a time, royal flushes are every-10-hours experiences, assuming you play about 400 base hands per hour. If you typically play five hours at a time, getting a royal is an every-other-session-on-average occurrence. On UX, I might get 20 or more W2Gs over that 5-hour period. A casino may well react to the total of the W2Gs, but I doubt whether they pay particular attention to the number of royals.
I still maintain that getting a royal flush is usually not a particularly relevant reason to stop playing a session. Although NOTI is one of the contributors on this site whose opinion I respect the most, in this thread I think he is off base.
Bob
Bob wrote: “Possibly you’re thinking of single-line “regular” games.”
Yes, I’m addressing quarter, 50 cent, dollar, two dollar single-line games, the bread and butter of the casino industry. A quarter royal is generally not a taxable, but it can be a handpay at some casinos.
Bob wrote: “I play $1 Ten Play Quick Quads and $1 Ten Play UX and sometimes $1 Ten Play something-else-I-don’t-wish-to-identify-further.”
Yeah, I play that too, but there aren’t many casinos left that will tolerate that kind of action.
Bob wrote: “A casino may well react to the total of the W2Gs, but I doubt whether they pay particular attention to the number of royals.”
Agreed, on the big multiplays the casino is looking at your total W2G’s, they probably don’t understand exactly how you got those hands and they don’t really care, but they do care about the session total. There is some total amount that will be a problem, it’s the player’s job to figure out what that amount is and to avoid it, just like on table games. Sometimes the casino lets you know when they’re getting uncomfortable with your action, other times you find out from the marketing department when your mailer amount suddenly drops or is absent.
NOTI: There is some total amount that will be a problem, it’s the player’s job to figure out what that amount is and to avoid it, just like on table games. Sometimes the casino lets you know when they’re getting uncomfortable with your action, other times you find out from the marketing department when your mailer amount suddenly drops or is absent.
This is true. But even if you know what that number, it’s easy to surpass it “all at once.” Video Poker is not a game where you increase, increase, increase your score gradually so you can get very close to the limit and then stop. You generally lose, lose, lose and then hit a big jackpot out of the blue (or maybe you leave before that big jackpot comes today).
AFTER you hit the jackpot, it’s easy to say, “Yup. That was too much. I should have quit before this happened.” But BEFORE the jackpot, it’s 40,000-to-1 against hitting it on the next hand. You never know when it’s coming.
There are always those who say after-the-fact that they KNEW the royal was coming today. The fact is, they didn’t know. If they DID know, how come they didn’t switch to a $100 machine just before the royal was due to hit? I’m certainly not suggesting NOTI makes comments like these — but I am suggesting that not even the experts know when those jackpots are coming.
And it’s hard to avoid something that comes out of the blue.
Bob
Bob wrote: “But even if you know what that number, it’s easy to surpass it “all at once.””
If you play the regular games, single line video poker, then the big jackpot is the royal flush (maybe sometimes Aces with a kicker or royal deuces) and most casinos will tolerate one royal per trip, so the solution is to walk if you hit a royal. On the multiplays and multiplier games the big hit is a dealt hand or big multiplier hand and probably exceeds the casino’s tolerance level anyway, so on those games you’re pretty much playing until you get kicked out. It seems a lot of times the casino is unaware of what the maximum payout is on some of the newer games and they are not very happy about it when they find out. Casinos really hate making the big payouts, on the slots many or even all of the big jackpots are paid by the vendors not the casino. The casino is afraid to book the big action, they don’t look far enough ahead, so if something big hits it ruins the week or the month and people get fired. Vendors aren’t afraid to book the big action, the IGT megakeno and megabucks and megajackpots hit all the time.