John, you always put things so clearly!
<<What you are really doing is shifting some of the return from lesser hands to the RF. Sure, you will hit more royals but you will still win less money. In 10/7 DB, 1.67% of your return is from the royal. In this game, 2.22% of the return is from the royal.>>
I knew the concepts in your first sentences - basically the "results" of using a strategy modification to get more royals. But I had never thought about the fact that the royal is a far bigger percentage of your return if you modify strategy.This impacts the short term!!!!!
I knew that people would lose more in the long term, but this is why people who want to "protect their bankroll" by using a modified RF strategy are doing just the opposite. This is the crucial reason why you will also lose more in the short term. Everyone knows that you don't get a royal in every session you play. Most of your sessions you won't. So you aren't stretching your bankroll by doing this - you are going to lose more in most of your sessions.
I guess in most cases where people chose a lower EV game that has more jackpots or modify basic strategy in a higher EV game, they would rather be "unhappy" with many many bigger losing sessions and/or fewer winning ones so they can be "really happy" in the one royal session ever blue moon (that's MY math for this time period).
I could not do this if my life depended on it - and please no Marie Antoinette stories. It's just an expression that means I use proper strategy routinely because I want to be happier in the short term AND the long term.
It is not bad if someone chooses to go against the math. Hey, I see people waste their money all the time outside the casino. They are unorganized so pay a lot of late fees. They don't comparison shop. They wouldn't think of browsing in a thrift store to hunt bargains. They buy things the minute they want them instead of when they can afford them. They carry large balances month to month on their credit cards their whole life and pay exorbitant interest rates. They don't bother to use coupons at the grocery store.
If you make tons of money, you can do all the above things and still have a nice easy life financially as you get older. Brad and I never made tons of money - so we regularly did things to get more value out of the money we had. When we started coming to the casinos almost 20 years ago, it only took ONE visit to convince me that there was a way to gamble that was more economical and it depended on the math, including playing the best game we could find and using proper strategy.
For all those 20 years (each year a short term?) we had fun every minute we were in a casino, even when we were having a losing session or in a long losing streak. When we lost, we were very certain that we were only loaning our money to the casino and a casino would pay it back sometimes in the future. We worked hard so we could have more fun time in the casino. This plan worked very well in the short term. We had only one year that we came out in the red and it was a very small figure that was dwarfed by the profits of the other years.
Now we live a fairy tale life. We have absolutely everything we want and more money invested for a secure future that I ever dreamed we could have, more than most people have who have earned many times more than we did over their working years. We can provide the extras for our children and grandchildren, things they could not afford. We have reached our goal to have enough that we can share when we see someone having a hard time in life.
I don't say any of this to brag - we've been blessed because we were born with a frugal bent - and I certainly don't want anyone to feel that "their way" is less worthy than ours. But during this whole discussion about short term and long term, I have worried that some people here will be influenced to stray from the math and feel it doesn't matter.
It DOES matter - and using a good strategy in life AND in VP will reap more rewards than you could ever dream about. For those of you who have this dream - you CAN reach that dream!
···
____________________
Jean $cott - "The Frugal Gambler"
MORE FRUGAL GAMBLING can now
be ordered, autographed, at
http://www.FrugalGambler.biz
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]