So no one wants to give up the strategy to this game, huh? Well, that
just breaks my heart. Little do they know. The combinations and
permutations of a 52 card deck is the long suit of the Mickster. I
guess I'll just have to go back to my hotel room and calculate the
strategy myself. I was writing VP strategy with a pocket calculator
long before the compuiter programs came out. One had too in those
days. There were too many plays not being written about. As a
matter of fact, the computer programs have made me lazy.
All those years I spent bumming around the country were not entirely
wasted. What does a stranger in a strange town do when he is not
working day labor? He hangs out at the library. I read virtually
every gambling book in the library systems of the western United
States. I invested a ton of time on gambling math too. But there
was a problem with that. I was a high school dropout who never even
took Algebra. Try as I might I just could not figure out the code
language of math. It was so confusing. I had no idea what this
meant: C(52,5).
So I come across a poker book by John Scarne called "Scarne's Guide
to Modern Poker." Chapter ten was called the Mathematics of Poker.
In it he wrote this equation: (52X51X50X49X48 divided by
5X4X3X2X1). Bingo! So that's what C(52,5) means. The rest of it is
just logic. If I wanted to know how many possible holdem hands there
were I would just go 52X51 divided by 2X1 which equals 1326. If I
wanted to know the chances of being dealt a pair of Aces in holdem I
would just go 4X3 divided by 2X1 which equals six and then divide
1326 by 6. I went through the whole deck over and over again working
equations. I needed to know all this to play poker. Little did I
know how valuable it would be when I got into VP.
The trick to the strategy is figuring the 4-card royal ER's and 4
card straight flush ER's first. So when you figure the ER to a
particular royal draw like a 3 card royal you add the 4 card royal
ER's to the other ER's. So with a hand like AKQ the paying
combinations are RF, FL, ST, 3K, 2P, HP plus the ER's of the
nonpaying 4 card royals. The same thing with 4 card straight
flushes. This allows you to put the particular royal draw, whether
it be a four card draw, three card draw, two card draw, in it's
proper place in the strategy table. The same with straight flush
cards. I later compared my pocket calculator derived "draw till u
win" strategy to the computer generated strategy of a well known VP
pro who wrote a program to analyze the game. I had 2 minor errors
slicing off .0007% from the payback. Well, 103.1% is not bad
either.
I spent two days in my room perfecting the strategy. Then it was off
to the Vagas Club for some fun. I plopped down in the chair, looked
up and....the game was gone. I scoured Las Vegas for the game, to
no avail, the whole time two little words kept echoing through my
brain: Northern Nevada....Northern Nevada....Northern Nevada....
To be continued....