Cardfather@Aol.com wrote:
Mr. Velek........As a favor to those of us that automatically delete posts
with too much math, could you please
translate into English what all this means to the average player that just
wants to win a few bucks playing some
VP?
Enlightenment?!
Seriously, ... anyone can post anything on the Internet, and it might be gold (accurate and useful) or complete garbage. Eventually folks get to know who they can rely upon for accurate info, but even the experts are only human (i.e., can still _possibly_ make mistakes), so I like to understand the mathematical basis for strategy decisions (and from my emails, many others do, too). I also like to learn new things so that I can further experiment myself.
In this particular thread, Steve Jacobs has revealed something that I think _most_ VP players would be keenly interested in, whether or not they decide to utilize the strategy. They can follow the math if they choose, or they can just accept or reject it off hand and delete/ignore the thread.
How is knowing all this going to help make 'Joe' a winner?
See number 3 in your list ...
There are
only 4 steps I know of to playing VP.
1)Put you $ in the machine.
2)Press Deal.
3)Choose the cards you will keep.
4)Pray for luck.
CF
... It helps players make informed decisions about the strategy they will use, and then enables them to practice that strategy. Let's take this specific thread, for example. For as long as I've been playing VP, just about the only things that I ever heard were to select the proper machine (still valid), play full-coin (I'm finally doing that), and use perfect or optimum strategy (generally meaning maximum-EV, with 'optimum' merely ignoring very minor penalty situations). And in fact, this is essentially how WinPoker and FrugalVP are set-up by default; they are based on playing for maximum EV of a hand, and consider other choices to be 'errors'. And so "max-EV" has been, by and large, the only strategy given serious consideration, as far as I can recall.
Now Steve Jacobs has revealed an intriguing approach, and I think there is room on this board for some detailed discussion about it, even if that does mean that a large number of folks (maybe even the majority) will just ignore it because of the math. I find myself deleting lots and lots of posts, too, because I'm not interested in them ... but I have never complained about it or questioned a member's prerogative to discuss such things. The mathematics of VP strategy is most _certainly_ 'on-topic', and if people can share 'trip reports' and talk about offers in casinos that I will probably never visit, then we can talk about VP math.
As for how this will help make 'Joe' a winner, that depends upon who 'Joe' is. A professional gambler would probably have absolutely no interest in any strategy other than max-EV; this is because they are typically playing frequently and long enough to accumulate play that begins to approach long-term expectations, and they are probably more concerned with wringing out every fraction of a percent ... long-term ... that they can get, and they probably have the bankroll to help them do it. A recreational player, on the other hand, might consider it more desirable to sacrifice a very small piece of long-term ER in exchange for a lower Risk of Ruin and/or lower bankroll requirements during a short vacation when the player just wants to enjoy play as long as possible with the stake that they have available at that time. Steve Jacobs has provided a method to do that, and we can now practice that modified strategy by inserting new values (derived via math) into the paytables for WinPoker or FrugalVP. How else would you practice a modified strategy?
Now, until someone comes along and lists each and every change that needs to be made for each hand on each paytable for each game, and also for each strategy (in this instance, sorokin optimized), those of us who are interested are just going to have to do a little bit of math. But even those who can't understand or are not interested in the math still derive benefit from these math exchanges, because it is through the exchange of such knowledge that innovation occurs ... and the masses eventually benefit from improvements and new discoveries, whether they understand the underlying concepts or not.
Cheers.
Bill Velek