Page 15 - May 2003 • Southern California Gaming Guide

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thirties. They have used computers in school and at work and are very familiar with them. Using a computer is second nature to these people — although they haven’t a clue how to use a slide rule.
Many senior citizens have never used a computer, and the thought of obtaining and using one is quite intimidating. I understand this. But I also understand that if they do not nd a way to overcome this intimidation and become at least computer-literate enough to practice video poker, they will probably never become a winning player.
I took a physics class in college and it had open-book tests. This meant you could bring any books or notes to class and consult them during the test. This was a rare thing at the university I attended. There were a number of students who used this as an excuse not to study very hard. They reasoned that they could always look up the answer when they saw the question and so there was no need to kill themselves studying beforehand. There
were other students who studied for this class as much as they would have if the tests were the normal closed- book kind. Interestingly, the students who got the As were the ones who studied. The ones who didn’t study found out there was too much to consider to look everything up on the
day of the test. You could nd a reference to part of the problem on page69, perhaps, but if you didn’t know that another reference to the problem is found on page 114, you had little chance of getting the correct answer.
And the same is true
in video poker. Most people
have to practice beforehand
on the computer in order
to get the right answer in the
casino. Otherwise, when you get
a hand such as A♠ A♥ 3♠ 4♠ 5♠
in Double Double Bonus Poker, you
won’t recognize that the spades are
actually a straight ush draw and are worth
much more than the aces. Players who
don’t practice on a computer usually hold
the aces on the above hand lickety-split and are never aware that they just made a major mistake.
Unless you have a computer to point out when you make a mistake, you’ll never improve. Practicing without a computer will merely enable you to make your mistakes faster.
And you also need to use your computer to learn to use your strategy card effectively. Every strategy- card maker uses slightly different abbreviations and slightly different basic assumptions in creating the
strategy cards. If the rst time you look at your strategycardisinacasinofacingaproblemhand,
you very well will be missing out on much of the value of the card. It doesn’t take a lot of practice to be able to understand a strategy card, but
it does take some.
The last piece of advice at winning at
video poker is to thoroughly learn about the slot club at your favorite casinos
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
and
nd out what promotions are going on. If you like two casinos equally well and this month one is paying double points and the other one isn’t, it’s not hard
to gure out the smarter play. Learning about slot clubs is time consuming—but players who care about winning take thetime.
May 2003 Page 15