Page 8 - January 2003 • Southern California Gaming Guide

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
Sony, Country/Western Music, and Video Poker by Bob Dancer
Column: Video Poker with Bob Dancer
Ihave been a Country/Western music fan for many years. In the early 1990s I supported myself as a C/W dance instructor and so collected a lot of CDs. Since then I have bought another hundred or so CDs and so have a fairly large collection.
A few years ago for Christmas, Shirley bought me a musical home entertainment system from Sony. She then put my 250+ CDs into the thing and hit the “random” button. I now got a new song from LeeAnn Womack followed by an old song from Alabama followed in a topsy-turvy order by music from Garth Brooks, Reba McIntyre, George Strait and all of the other artists in my collection. For a C/W music lover, it is quite pleasant. Some of these songs I haven’t heard for 10 years (and I can skip the ones I really don’t like), and it is a nice mix.
I’m getting to video poker very soon now. But I still need to give you a little more background.
I have a friend who would say, “All Country/ Western music sounds the same. Bad!” But those of us who like the genre know that some songs are fast,
some are slow, some are happy, and some are sad. C/W dancers know that some of the songs have the beat of a two-step, or a waltz, or a cha-cha, a polka or maybe a swing.
Now when I hit the “random” button, the songs come out in every which order. I don’t expect Sony’s randomizer would meet the
Random Number Generator
standards by various state gaming control boards, but on a super cial level, it is similar.
Songs in a waltz tempo
make up about one song in
fty in my collection. But
one night there were three
waltzes in a row. There is
no way that the Sony randomizer knew that they were waltzes. It just happened that disc 14, track 3 followed by disc 232 track 1 followed by disc 3 track
9 were all waltzes. It would be easy to conclude that “my music machine is in a waltz mood tonight.”
About one in four C/W songs could be character- ized as “sad.” Once I listened to six sad songs in a row. Again, the Sony randomizer didn’t know the songs were sad. It is just that I thought they were sad
after listening to them. We wouldn’t expect people to say things like “I should have been able to tell that the machine was in a ‘sad cycle.’ I should have bailed out after two of them!” Nobody says that when it comes to the music randomizer, but you hear things like that all of the time when it comes to video poker!
Once “Friends in Low Places” by Garth Brooks was followed immediately by “Friends in Low Places” by Mark Chesnutt. Same song, but different interpretations of it. That happened one other time
As a music listener, I know that the entire collec- tion will be played eventually. I might hear the same song three times before I hear one particular one, but eventually it will all average out more or less. If Brooks and Dunn make up 3% of my collection, I expect that 3% of the songs I hear will be by them. These are rational decisions made regardless of what just played in the past half hour.
And the same thing with video poker. Winning players make decisions based upon reasonable expectations for the future. Losing players (who do not know how to use pay schedules to evaluate what is going to happen in the future) make decisions based on what has happened in the immediate past. Learn to make decisions based on the future rather than the past, and your results will improve.
That’s it for this time. Until next time, go out and hit a royal ush.
Bob Dancer is America’s best-known video poker writer and teacher. He has a variety of “how to play better video poker” products, including reports, strategy cards, videos, and the award-winning computer software, Bob Dancer Presents WinPoker, and a brand-new book Million Dollar Video Poker. Dancer’s products may be ordered at www.bobdancer.com.
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Page 8
January 2003
“The pattern only becomes obvious after it is over. After 4 sad songs in a row (or losing 100 credits in 5 minutes), there is no way to predict what the next song (or score in the next 5 minutes) will be.”
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with the same song by an artist and then, after a one- song interlude, the same song on a CD which was a collection of several hits by various artists. I guess you could call it the “Same Song Anomaly.”
Although I am not in the position of betting on the Sony randomizer, my guess
is that this just happened by chance. As humans, we notice patterns that were totally unintentional beforehand. In gambling, after the fact, often we feel we should have noticed that pattern earlier.
In truth, it isn’t possible. The pattern only becomes obvious after it is over. After 4 sad songs in a row (or losing 100 credits in 5 minutes), there is no way to predict what the next song (or score in the next 5 minutes) will be.