Someone wrote:
Bill, I agree with your explanation on playing short coin on a negative
machine. ...
snip
... My wife hits a $62 royal.
snip
I'm now trying to convince myself that the decision was still sound. I have to
look at it as if instead of losing $10 or $15 dollars like I expected, I got a
nice unexpected 'bonus'.My only problem is, we had gone about 100,000 hands since our last royal. Then
because we were getting killed on quarters during our trip to Vegas last month,
we switched to nickels. Got a royal on those, then the $62 royal at the Gold
Strike, so I'm feeling I've really been short changed.
snip
I can imagine how you feel; there is no denying the fact that if she had been playing full-coin _when_the_Royal_hit_, you'd be celebrating the jackpot. This is not to say, though, that the hand would have come out the same way if you had been betting full-coin, and that she would have still gotten the Royal; for example, her strategic holds for that and preceding hands might well have been different, along with other things like timing. I'm not going to get into a discussion of the RNG now, but it would be like going back in time where we would likely realize that even the slightest changes would be compounded as time progressed back to the present, where we would then discover that things are now dramatically different. You might, therefore, find some solace in the logical thought that if she _had_ been playing full-coin, she probably would not have hit the Royal to begin with ... at least not at that time. You could, therefore, think of it positively: "Boy, am I glad she was playing short-coin and won $62.50, because if she had been playing full-coin instead, the statistical probability is that she would not have hit a Royal and would have lost money during that session instead (since this was, after all, a negative machine).
But it's pretty natural to feel like you've 'missed your opportunity' and will now need to wait a long time for the next Royal (and statistically you probably will) ... as if a counter somewhere has been reset. I wonder sometimes if some folks don't actually regret hitting the Royal during short-coin play, or perhaps even hope before hand that they will NOT hit the Royal while short-coining. But the fact is that a Royal, even short-coin, is a super hand to hit, and you've profited from it. And since each new hand is completely independent of past events (i.e., there _IS_NO_COUNTER_ which has been reset), hitting that Royal short-coin has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with prospects for hitting it again when you are playing full-coin (or still playing short-coin). You just need to take your profit, be grateful for it, and move on; you can't change the past anyway, and beating yourself up over 'what might have been' isn't going to help either. Of course, I realize that this is no doubt easier said than done.
I think I'll change my short play plan, to play with full coin, but play
slowly, which is no problem at a bar with sports on the TV.
My problem is that I'll have a tendency to play so much VP at a certain rate while there; for example, I might play 2 or 3 hands during the huddles of a football game (2-3 games ... watch TV ... 2-3 games ... watch TV). So I'm already slowing down anyway at the bar for reasons already explained in my original post. While the BEST thing to do when faced with a truly negative machine is to just not play it at all, ... slowing down is an effective way to limit losses, and so is short-coin, but short of quitting completely, the best approach would be to do both. And you can only slow down so much; if the bartender is frowning at you and wants to start charging you $3.00/drink because you're not gambling, then you've got to play or leave.
Now, as far as whether you've learned a lesson from this and will never play short-coin again, wait until you can look at this unemotionally and then consider whether, for the purposes and considerations at hand, it was a logical and right decision? If it was, then it should be again in the future under similar circumstances, and the fact that you happened to feel 'cheated' doesn't alter anything except one very big and overriding fact: if you can't logically come to terms with this, and continue to have regrets about what had happened, then there is no point in risking that happening again; this is supposed to be fun ... certainly it isn't for profit if you're playing a negative game ... and if the fun is gone because of this, make sure it doesn't happen again.
Cheers.
Bill Velek