While I don't always agree with Bob Dancer's recommendations one thing
I wholeheartedly concur with is his emphasis on continuous practice to
keep your skills sharp. Even Bob has acknowledged that without
sufficient work his skills can diminish. If that's true for a vp guru
then it must certainly be true for us lesser mortals.
Since MS no longer sees fit to reward my $1 play with reasonable and
fair BB I demoted myself to $.25 play. As I can't stand the tedium of
JOB and 100 play BDLX that leaves only a few other options. I decided
to "dance with the one that brung ya" and revisit the Multi-Strike
grind. It was an interesting educational experience. Even though I had
Multi-Strike Deuces Wild down cold, a few months away from the game
seems to have atrophied my mastery of the game. During play I was
forced to consult the strategy charts several times and I had doubts
about how I played some other hands. Sure enough when I tested myself
on Frugal my error rate was up. They were all minor errors, but errors
I would not have made 3 months ago. I'm left to wonder how much
further my play would have deteriorated if I had gone 6 months without
practicing? Dancer indicates this is not at all an unusual phenomenon
especially amongst players like myself who've studied many different
games. At any rate I've been tuning up and am confident I'm almost
back to normal. The moral of the story is buy Frugal and actually use it!
BTW, if you're interested in Multi-Strike Frugal is a particularly
useful tool because of it's capability to save and resume sessions.
You can create a particular machine type corresponding to each of the
Multi-Strike levels. Of course the top level and free rides utilize
normal FP strategy. I still believe that Multi-Strike NSUD is one of
the better games available (I don't care for the reduced payoff on
straights that you get with DBDW).