Bob Dancer wrote:
If you wanted the return on a game, you had to order another product (VP
EXACT --- I think), and it would take 4 or 5 hours to come up with a
99.544% figure for 9/6 Jacks --- with no other statistics provided.
My first VPEXACT run ran for 107 hours. You must have been on an 80486 to
get an answer in only 5 hours; mine was an 8 MHz 80286. Oh, and no Windows
in those days; the whole computer was not usable for anything else until the
run was done or aborted.
I was working for Wong at the time doing monthly surveys for his
Current Blackjack News, we became friends, and he visited sometimes with
me on his trips to Vegas. When I finally obtained VP Tutor and showed it
to him (including all of the features I liked that Wong's vp was
missing), he spent about three minutes looking at it and came to the
correct conclusion: "This product is far superior to mine." I think he
later sold VPT on his website.
VPTutor wouldn't handle sequential royals; Wong's VP did, and I kept it
around just for them until WinPoker v 5 came out.
His software seems woefully out-of-date now, but it was the
first one.
First commercial one, yes. I had analysis routines written in IBM 360
assembler language on a mainframe; an acquaintance wrote his in TRS-80 Basic
and still has them on their cassette tapes, though he doesn't have any way
to read those :-). And Tomski had programs when I met him that seemed
several years old at that time, so he probably also had working programs in
those days (the Atlantic City equivalent of 8-5 progressives was 6-5
progressives, a horrible flavor, but with wonderful meter advance. Caesars
AC had a 5% meter for the first three cycles when they put in their
progressive VP bank.) The first AC team used strategies developed by hand,
with a TI-92 calculator and index cards.
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--
Randy Hudson