H Rumpole wrote:
Bill, I am interested in your answers to Harry
Porter's questions about your strategy cards. If
I missed your answers, just post the link and I
will go back and read them. Thanks.
Although I had every intention of eventually answering these questions
publicly, and actually began drafting my replies, I never did get around
to finishing them, although I did respond to Harry privately. Well, now
that my 'hand is being called', so to speak, I figure I need to provide
some explanation ASAP or folks will think that I'm just ducking these
questions because I lack answers. So I'm posting what I can right now,
despite that these are not really complete answers in the form that I
had intended to give them.
1st question from 12/6/03:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vpFREE/message/23430
Harry Porter wrote:
"Bill, I'm running a bit aside there but there
have been two things on which I'd love it if
you'd briefly share some background on your
approach.
The first is your work to determine an ER for
Multistrike when played optimally.
This is the easy one. I provided a copy of my analysis to Tom Sims back
in September or so, but we had a mysterious problem with extraneous
garbage that kept surfacing on the document, so I think Tom pulled it at
my request. My hard drive later crashed, and I didn't have backup
copies (I've learned), but fortunately a copy was returned to me by
Larry DeMar of LED Gaming. I have now converted it to a .pdf file which
I will post on my personal website as soon as I can; you will need Adobe
Acrobat Reader to view it, and the page will be http://www.velek.com/vp
(my site is currently used for my son's T-Shirt shop in Little Rock). I
did further analysis after that, including my own calculation of
variance for Multi Strike JoB-9/6, but that was never released pending
'cleaning up' of my report and then I lost it when my hard drive crashed.
The second is your initial approach in developing
your own game strategies.
I'm not asking you to share anything that you
consider truly personal property for which you'd
compromise the value if shared to any extent.
Just a peak in the door to get a sense of what
direction you went in each case.
I am going to skip this question until last, because it begins to stray
off-topic a little bit.
2nd question from 1/24/04:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vpFREE/message/25626
"Now, I'm assuming you intended to write "penalty
card" rather than "strategy card". You seem to be
suggesting that your strategies accurately select
the proper hold when they're influenced by the
presence of penalty cards without the need to
make reference to them specifically as such in
your strategies, or for you to identify the
penalties in your play.
I'm having a bit of trouble making sense of that
and I get the feeling that you indeed are
ignoring the affect of penalties altogether
despite the suggestion that your strategies are
100% accurate.
snip
I am in the process of preparing a little more detailed response to
those questions, which isn't finished yet; meanwhile, for purposes of
this thread, here's a condensed version of what that post will
essentially say:
There are a _few_ times that the existence of a penalty card does make a
difference on my chart, but those are listed as exceptions or conditions
in order for the hold to apply; therefore, you automatically distinguish
between penalty and non-penalty situations as you evaluate whether the
different holds within your hand meet all criteria; this will be
explained in detail on my website (link above) which will also have a
sample strategy chart. I'll post a brief notice here when that is done.
To begin with, my approach is to _not_ list the EV for various hands,
such as is done by VPSM and FrugalVP; in my opinion, that just takes up
space on the chart and is unnecessary for general use (facilitating
adjustments for progressives is a different matter, and my cards are not
very useful for that). With MY approach, all I am really concerned
about is which one of the few reasonable holds that are ever seriously
considered in any hand, is the most valuable one; I don't need to know
the _precise_ values, and I don't care. My charts simply logically
arrange types of hands in the order of their _competing_ values
(NON-competing hands will be out of order with other NON-competing
hands, because that doesn't matter) -- and a player selects the highest
one available on the list without regard to any actual EV. If a player
can't match his hand to any on the chart, then it's a 'Junk' hand to be
completely discarded. All decisions are therefore made completely
independently of EVs.
Now, once we eliminate EVs from the chart, we are free to do a lot of
repositioning that isn't possible if your list is otherwise maintained
in strictly numerical order of EVs, and it is also possible to
completely ignore the vast majority of penalty situations which -- while
actually causing a somewhat different EV as compared to similar hands
without penalty cards -- are nevertheless of absolutely _no_ consequence
because the change in EV still doesn't cause a shift from one hold to
another, so that _that_ particular hold is still the correct one despite
the presence of a penalty card. So my approach, which is easier and
more convenient for me, is to address only those instances where the
presence of a penalty card actually _does_ matter, thus holding penalty
card considerations to an absolute minimum of more or less special
situations, and to just include them right in the list of hands as
'criteria' that must be met for that particular hold to ever apply. I'm
sure that at first this might seem even more complicated than other
methods, but I can assure you that this becomes very easy to master
because there are surprisingly few of them. Moreover, if a person is
not interested in playing with that degree of accuracy, they can just
ignore the exceptions or conditions. One consequence of using such a
method -- of condensing the holds in the most effective way -- is that
this is what permitted me to take, as far as I've been able to
determine, 100% accurate strategies for _SIX_ different paytables, and
combine them all onto a single pocket-sized card and yet still keep a
nice, easy-to-read print-size. This was very handy for me in the
casinos, and helped me to learn a lot about the game, but it is a bit
more complicated than most folks would prefer, so I then extracted
simpler single-paytable strategies from it. I don't know how my charts
compare in style or structure to other charts, because I haven't seen
the others except for those generated by VPSM and FrugalVP.
Incidentally, my charts are generated by my own independently devised
method which I have already confidentially shared with Harry Porter via
private email because I consider them to be proprietary; in other words,
I do NOT use VPSM or FrugalVP or any other VP strategy products
whatsoever, but instead use a NON-vp related computer program, adapted
by me for the purpose of generating EVs to a greater decimal precision
than either VPSM or FrugalVP. I then build my strategy charts from my
own generated lists of EVs. I do, however, use WinPoker for some
verification, including penalty card situations. This process is taking
a HUGE amount of time, and I'm still in the process of building my
inventory before releasing any onto the market.
Harry then suggested as follows:
> You might clear things up a bit by indicating how your strategy would
> differentiate the holds in the following two 10/7 double bonus hands:
>
> 1) 6h Qh Kh 8s 5c
> 2) 6h Qh Kh 9s 5c
... to which I replied:
Harry I have a better idea; I'll just post some free-sample charts on my
website. Besides, I don't have my full set of charts done yet,
including that one, but I have no reason to think that I will not be
able to effectively produce the same sort of charts for 10/7 Double
Bonus or any other game.
Please keep in mind that I prepared the combination chart, containing
six paytables, for my own personal use without the faintest idea that I
might someday decide to market anything, and at that particular time I
was still playing short-coin. This 'combination' chart is therefore
MUCH more complicated than a chart designed for a single paytable;
besides, the whole purpose in combining the charts was to help me learn
some of the differences in holds between paytables, so as complicated as
it might seem, it's probably no worse than viewing two or more simple
charts side by side.
The charts that I'm designing are single paytable, so I'm providing my
short-coin JoB-9/6 as a sample on my website. I encourage everyone to
check if for any penalty card situation of which they can conceive, and
compare it against 'perfect play'. I think you will find my chart to be
dead-on. If you think you find an error, please let me know so that I
can check it, too. More than likely it would be a matter of
misinterpreting my "conditions" in my charts, although I've tried to
make them as clear as possible.
I'm going to say that for that particular card, there are only _8_
places on it where penalty cards are decisive, and often they are
specific cards to watch for, such as a '9' or a 'deuce'. This makes it
easy to master in order to play with 100% accuracy, and I think its
simplicity should enable even fast-playing pros to include them without
slowing-down to any significant degree. On the other hand, you can
ignore some or all of extra 'penalty' conditions and still play very
accurately, with a sacrifice in ER that is so small it shouldn't matter.
ยทยทยท
********************
Now I will answer the question that I skipped until last, which was this:
The second is your initial approach in developing
your own game strategies.
I'm not asking you to share anything that you
consider truly personal property for which you'd
compromise the value if shared to any extent.
Just a peak in the door to get a sense of what
direction you went in each case.
First of all, I responded privately to Harry on this one, although I
also began drafting a reply for vpFREE hoping to tactfully express
myself in a way that would not be offensive or taken the wrong way; but
in order to answer you without further delay, this is now the short and
not very diplomatic version. Yes, I consider my methods to be
proprietary and I don't want to _publicly_ share them because of my
intention to commercially market my strategy charts; that might seem
rather ungrateful (hence my desire to be tactful), considering all of
the help that I have received from many folks here, but I assure you
that the development of my strategies is not based upon any information
obtained from this group or any of its members, either publicly or
privately, and my project has now taken _literally_ hundreds of hours.
I think I'd be making a serious mistake to reveal my methods in case I
decide to market my charts. As it is, a very good question was already
raised by R.McKenna --
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vpFREE/message/23435 (another reply I
never finished); in essence, that thread included discussion of the
ethics and legality of posting or copying strategy from licensed
programs that had reserved intellectual property rights, and Richard's
post was:
> Bill and Harry. I agree that sharing strategy charts may be unethical,
> but I wonder about the "illegal" part. After all the charts are derived
> by a straightforward mathematical process, and so are the multiplication
> tables that we all learned from and memorized in the fourth grade. Of
> course the strategy charts are a hell of a lot more complicated, and you
> undoubtedly need a computer to develop them, but any ten computer savvy
> wizards should be expected to independently develop identical charts
> because the math is identical.. Now as a non-attorney and a deplorable
> computer person, I can't help but wonder what the difference is between
> memorizing multiplication tables, and passing the knowledge onto your
> children, and memorizing strategy charts and passing the knowledge on to
> your friends. Thanks for listening. Dick Mck.
Dick basically expressed three ideas that become troublesome regarding
intellectual property rights. First, the idea that if things can be
derived in a straightforward way (presumably meaning that they are very
basic or simple), that they might be less worthy of proprietary rights;
despite that the law has a different view, the _practical_ problem is
that this is a common perception that contributes to people innocently
violating rights, or rationalizing when they knowingly do so. Second,
the idea that other folks have a right to market something if they were
able to independently arrive at the same conclusion (whether they
truthfully did so, or are instead just making a false claim after merely
copying results then remains a question); this is more clearly answered
by patent laws, etc., but infringement is still a problem that
developers in many fields face. Third, the idea that it somehow makes a
difference if you are able to memorize something, as if you are then
free to pass it on to your friends; the next logical step is that they,
of course, would be free to write down what they have learned, and to
then pass it along to the next person, etc. That's why we have
intellectual property laws such as copyrights, patents, and trademarks
-- which generally protect the FIRST one to develop the idea -- and we
also have concepts of unfair competition which broadens that sort of
coverage even more. I won't go any deeper than that, and just let
everyone imagine the ramifications of not having proprietary rights in
the products of research and development. But having rights and
protecting them are two different things; enforcement requires proof,
which becomes even more difficult with something as easy as
multiplication tables versus complex micro-electronic circuitry, ... and
litigation over any violations -- which are now more likely to occur via
the Internet with violators possibly in other countries or without
physical addresses -- becomes even more problematic. I would say that
any legal enforcement by a developer would probably be a rather rare and
extreme last resort (if ever). This is the same problem that software
developers face, and the problem is growing beyond control, therefore
violations involving 'small potatoes', like video poker charts, are
rightfully given less attention than widespread piracy of Microsoft
programs. In view of a market that seems to be somewhat doubtful in
size anyway, and easily diluted by infringements, a developer must
decide whether its really worthwhile to invest a massive amount of time
working on something that some bozo can copy and easily market by just
falsely claiming it to be his own work. This consideration has caused
me to pause more than once. But I think I can create a better strategy,
and I like the challenge of trying, and so I'd probably eventually do
this even if only for my own benefit ... and then once I've finished,
why NOT try to get something out of it if I really do manage to create a
better mousetrap? Anyway, on the chance that I decide to do so, I'd at
least like to be able to _threaten_ violators with legal action; having
them worry about it might be _some_ deterrence, but it will be harder to
do that if they are confident that they can appear able to back up their
claims by showing someone else's detailed math, etc., which any
legitimate developer would have to have. So for that reason, I am not
going to _publicly_ disclose my methods, but I have disclosed them to
Harry Porter, and I also want to disclose them privately, under terms of
confidentiality, to a number of other folks, as I have indicated to
Harry in the following private message that I sent to him (irrelevant
parts snipped), which appears between the lines of asterisks, as follows:
***************Start of Msg to Harry**********************
... your request for information which would give you some insight into
my analysis methods ... not only am I willing ... I actually _welcome_
the opportunity to divulge that information to you and other _key_
people in the VP field. Naturally, though, since I do intend to try to
market some strategy cards, I am protective of my methods and will not
divulge them to anyone unless that person has first sent me an e-mail
indicating that they will hold any information provided by me in
strictest confidence. ... Anyway, I hope you find this to be a
reasonable request. If you do, please just send me a direct e-mail
telling me that you will keep the information I provide to you in
strictest confidence. By the way, part of what I had been mulling over
in my mind was who to include on my list of people to whom I should
offer this information, and any suggestions you have will be appreciated.
To begin with, I don't mind including key math folks who are well
capable of conceiving of the same methods, and some of you probably have
already. ... This includes you and probably Effen Dolts, Howard Stern,
Larry DeMar, and/or Ted Chee. ...
[Note: that was not meant to be a complete list, but merely names that
came to my mind at that time, and I would certainly include other 'math'
folks like Steve Jacobs, Skip Hughes, and Richard Mustain, etc.]
... I figure that you all were well capable of doing this long before I
came on the scene ...
... I also think it is appropriate to assure folks that I am not taking
advantage of their intellectual property, so I intend to include Jean
Scott and Jim Wolf re FrugalVP (despite that I don't know whether Jean's
cards are actually available yet), and Tom Ski re VPSM. I also have no
problem with providing it to _some_ of my strategy-card competitors so
that they, too, can be assured that this is my own independent work
rather than something derived from their properties; while I am not
willing to give it to anyone and everyone who is marketing strategy
(e.g., the fellow who is including 7 strategy charts in his new 'book':
"Loser's ..."), I have no reservations about disclosing it to one or
more of the following: Bob Dancer, Jazbo, the Wizard of Odds, and any
other 'reputable' strategy-authors at their level who you might
recommend. I can't see any benefit in disclosing it to _too_ many
people, but some of these folks might not be at all interested in
knowing my approach. Of course, Tom Sims is also welcome to the info,
but not for posting on the site ...
*********End of Msg to Harry****************
After Harry sent me his e-mail agreeing to confidentiality, I sent him
several pages of detailed information revealing my precise methods of
development which are completely independent of VPSM and FrugalVP, as
well as at least some of my error-checking techniques, although I did
not take the time to discuss each and every little detail with him.
Obviously, for reasons already stated, I am not including them in this
post. I then left the door open for him to ask me any specific
questions, and I assume that he was satisfied because he didn't ask me
anything else after that, as far as I can recall.
I will now get to work on posting info and samples on my website. I
just wanted to get this reply posted ASAP, and figure that anyone who is
interested in more info can check back on this thread.
Thanks.
Bill Velek
To view my Multi Strike analysis or sample VP charts --
http://www.velek.com/vp
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