Page 17 - June 2003 • Southern California Gaming Guide

Playing in smoky casinos, sitting under air-conditioning vents on uncomfortable stools, and using the same muscles over and over and over again lead to a variety of ailments. Eating free food in a casino night after night has caused many of us to gain far more weight than is desirable. But to play the game you have to survive all of this. Can you?
Is it a problem when people look down on you, because they feel that being a gambler is an unproductive way to lead a life? And if you become real good, can you keep that fact a secret from the casinos so you can continue to play?
If you believe that telling the truth is always the best policy, then you probably don’t have suf cient guile to succeed at this sport. Things are not always black and white here. Sometimes the pressures to push the envelope are enormous. The low road is sometimes more lucrative than the high road, but the risks are enormous if you don’t succeed. Do you look good in stripes?
Can you deal with the repetition? Video poker is a very boring game when you play it 40 hours a week. Playing perfectly at home for 10 minutes at a time is a lot different from playing hour after hour after hour in a casino. Jeffrey Compton, my friend and business partner, has learned Jacks or Better perfectly and can play itwellforanhourortwoatatime.Butifhehastositat a machine for longer than that, he starts to make a large number of errors. So even though he has learned the game perfectly, he’s unlikely ever to become a successful professional player.
Slot clubs provide lots of bene ts to players. The most successful players study these slot clubs two ways from
Tuesday until they know exactly how to extract the most from them. Can you do this?
The game is getting more dif cult. When I started my video poker career in 1994, players told me about the “good old days” ve years earlier when full-pay dollar Deuces Wild could be found all over town. Today, the games are not nearly as lucrative as they were when I started. It’s reasonable to assume that in two years there will be fewer pro table opportunities yet. Can you keep current enough to stay ahead of the game?
You get my point. Mastering the correct way to play the hands just gets you to rst base. This is absolutely necessary for success, but you still have a lot of work to do once you reach that point. Playing the hands is de nitely a worthy subject for a book on video poker; indeed, my publisher would like me to write such a book, but this book isn’t it.
Thousands of people have reached rst base in video poker, but haven’t done so well after getting there. This book brie y describes how I did it, but mostly dwells on how I hit subsequent doubles and triples, then nally my million-dollar home run.
Many of the speci cs I write about here are one-of-a- kind and probably won’t come around again in exactly the same way. But the same types of choices will arise and the tools I used to deal with them in the past will be the same ones I’ll use in the future. Whether these are useful tools for you to use, you’ll have to decide for yourself.
A large part of my success was a winning
fold ’em, as it were. This I can share with you, but my philosophy won’t work for you until you modify it to t your own strengths and weaknesses.
A lot of luck was involved in the million-dollar success that my wife Shirley and I achieved, especially one extremely lucky half-hour period where we earned a half- million in two big jackpots. That may or may not ever happen again for us — or for you. But having the bankroll, skill, and courage to even be in position to recognize the opportunity, and receive that good fortune, required a lot more than luck. It took years of study and play. It took surviving some very long and ugly losing streaks. To stay in the game, you must learn to cope with terrible losses. I’ll tell you about all of that.
And there were bene ts along the way. We stayed in gorgeous hotel suites and ate in the fanciest restaurants in Las Vegas. We could get up to eight free tickets to any event in town. And there are a lot of events in Las Vegas that will satisfy virtually anyone’s taste. I’ll tell you about that too.
It was an extremely stimulating and professionally gratifying, albeit bumpy, ride. I’ll recreate it for you in the pages that follow. So fasten your seat belt and let’s get started.
Excerpted from Million Dollar Video Poker, available from Huntington Press Publishing ($16.95 plus shipping and handling) at www.greatstuff4gamblers.com or by phone at 1-800-244-2224.
attitude — knowing when to hold ’em
and when to
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
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June 2003 Page 17