There was a discussion a couple of weeks ago about recognizing downward trends and stopping before you lose all of your money. I replied that I didn't think it was possible to predict the value of the next hand based on the previous hand.
I was thinking about this and if you could recognize trends, you should become very wealthy playing video poker.
Let's say you put $100 in a single line , quarter NSUD machine, with and EV of 99.73%. There should be plenty of these around. Let's also say that CB is 0.27% and you play perfectly so you have a breakeven game. You play 800 hph so you run $1000 through the machines every hour. If I can recognize 1 downward trend of 400 coins in 10 hours and avoid it, I increase my return by 1%. Pretty good. I think in 10 hours of play, you would see many downtrends of 400 coins. Recognizing just one increases your return by a full 1 percent. At quarters, that's $10/hours. On a $5 NSUD, that's $200/hour.
If these trends are really predictable, it seems like there would be a whole bunch of rich video poker players around.