I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't gamble for longer periods of time to
get those royals. Recently it seems like if I play for 2 hours or so at a
time, no royals come, even when playing 5 play.. But I was just in New
Orleans and actually hit 5 royals (on 5-play NSU) during the trip. The
difference was I played at least 6 hours a day, maybe more, and of course that
plus 5 play meant a lot of hands of play. I stuck on the same machine on
day 1, even coming back after dinner. On day 2 picked a different machine,
but stayed with it throughout the day on and off. Same thing on day 3.
There were a lot of downdrafts too, such as putting in $4700 in machine #1
without hitting a royal OR deuces! Then finally deuces came, and
eventually the royal and more deuces, etc.
The point of what I'm saying is that even on FP machines, you may have to
play a long time and go through a lot of volatility before getting royals
(or even deuces).
At one point I noticed a lack of 3 deuces ever being dealt to me (on the
initial deal). I started recording what 3 of a kinds were dealt, and found
that something like 54 different 3 of a kinds were dealt, before I finally
received 3 deuces! I kept recording this during my session, and eventually
more trip deuces did show up. When I did the final countout, it turned out
that deuces actually had shown up on an average of 1 in 14 times, so not
that much off expectation, but I did have that initial bad run. So this
just goes to show how much volatility you can have, and that the "long run"
that we look for can be 10s of thousands or 100s of thousands of hands.
Thus, for those of you who are not getting royals or losing on many trips,
perhaps the thing to check is - how much bankroll do you have? Are you
being wiped out because you don't bring enough bankroll to sit through the
volatility? And, how much are you playing? - perhaps you need to play
longer.
Of course, sometimes you do sit there for hours and hours and hours and
never hit the royal, but it does seem like I've had better "luck" if I am able
to sit at the same machine for really long periods (unless of course I
really do luck out and hit a royal early on - something which does happen, but
not that often).
I often run into people who say "I've never hit a royal and I play video
poker all the time." But I have a feeling these casual players just aren't
playing for very long at each session. Definitely my experience is the
logical one, the more you play, the more royals you are likely to get.
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