vpFREE2 Forums

Questions on Charting

#1

From time to time, I see people charting video poker machines. Usually , they secretly mark a notepad when they get a good hand, or a near miss on straights or higher. Considering this activity does generate heat from management ( they dont like people playing VP with pen and pencil in hand ) I'd like somebody to speak up on why this is still a worthwhile activity. Possible benefits are:
a. check if machine is random
b. try to find a machine A hotter than machine B
c. try to determine if machine A generates more slot points than machine B
d. try to justify's one's total EV ( ie. I'm 10% down for the year because I did not get my fair share of ducks )

what am I missing by not charting ?

thanks in advance....Tom

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#2

trying to catch mistakes made in the casino environment but not made at home on winpoker, for example missing some flush draws due to distracting spot lights

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--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "tomflush" <tomflush@...> wrote:

what am I missing by not charting ?

#3

Tom, I don't think you are missing anything. The reason I 'chart' is that at some point during the session, I will think something 'unusual' has happened. Like why am I down $200 after 2 hours of single line quarter NSUD? I'll take a look at the chart and see that I have played 2000 hands, have put $2500 through the machine and have had no deuces or royals. This accounts for about $150 of the loss.

I have tracked about 60,000 hands of single NSUD. I keep track of all hands SF or higher. It's interesting to see the totals for each of these hands pretty close to the expected value. You can see your results are dominated by the deuces and royals. In fact, I graphed each session and you can tell where the deuces and royals were hit for the most part. Most of my sessions are an hour or two.

Sometimes I'll count quads or full house draws in DB. I like numbers and it is reassuring to see the theory actually matches the reality.

I think it would be educational for every person to do this at least once for a royal cycle or 2. Especially the people who have missed their last 27 flush draws. Tracking shows how inaccurate our memories are in the casino environment.

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--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "tomflush" <tomflush@...> wrote:

From time to time, I see people charting video poker machines. .....
what am I missing by not charting ?
thanks in advance....Tom