Page 17 - October 2003 • Southern California Gaming Guide

One Coin or Five? Tby Bob Dancer
here have been a lot of articles written about whether to play one coin or ve coins at video poker. The advice of each author I’ve read is very similar. In my opinion, the advice of each of these authors is wrong!
promotions, with your skill level factored in) bet ve coins. For games where the house has the advantage, bet one coin. And play slowly.
Video poker is a form of gambling, and there are those of you who get a thrill out of playing $1.25, but are bored if you only play for 25¢. This article ignores such factors. I am only discussing how you can win more, or lose less money.
When we drop to nickels, most casinos have nickel games that are quite a bit tighter than the quarter games in the same casino. Most ve-coin nickel players would lose less money if they switched to being a one-coin nickel player. But for many players, betting 5¢ at a time doesn’t have enough “bite” to be interesting. For these players, betting one quarter at a time is usually a better bet than betting ve nickels— simply because at most casinos the quarter games are considerably looser than the quarter games. (For the same pay schedule, betting ve nickels is better than betting one quarter— because of the bonus provided for a ve-coin 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 Winner’s Guides, 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
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
The consensus advice is to play ve coins in order to get full value out of your royal ushes when they come. For a 9-6 Jacks or Better machine, you are playing at about 99.5% with ve coins, and only about 98.1% when you play one coin. It’s obvious that 99.5% is better than 98.1%, so that proves it. Anybody can understand that.
I hope you don’t understand that, because it’s faulty reasoning. You don’t get paid in percentages. You get paid in dollars and cents. Let’s look at the above numbers. Let’s assume you are playing for quarters.
99.5% payback x $1.25 per hand = 0.625¢ loss per hand 98.1% payback x $0.25 per hand = 0.435¢ loss per hand So at 600 hands an hour, you will lose about $1.14
less per hour if you play one coin, instead of ve. Of course playing zero coins will save you another $2.61 an hour, but you would then have to give up the privilege of feeding the machine.
Player’s club bene ts change this somewhat. With a player’s club return of .15% cash, your hourly expected loss is the same at 9-6 Jacks or Better, whether you play one coin or ve. With a player’s
club return above .50% (rare, but ndable, especially on double point days) you have a slightly positive expectation with ve coins, and a slight expected loss with one coin.
Even with a player’s club, less-than-perfect strategy can dip the scale into the range of 1 coin. Very few players play perfectly or really very close. Even players who have bought strategy cards or books (and most haven’t) rarely play as well as the authors suggest.
Promotions can change this, too. Let’s say a casino offered to pay double for four 8’s, but only if you had ve coins bet. That is a gain of .44% x $1.25 = 0.55¢. This easily more than makes up for the 0.15¢ per- hand de cit from playing 5 coins.
It is almost always bad strategy to play more than one but less than the maximum. The second, third and fourth coins are all money losers. Playing three coins just triples your expected loss compared to playing one coin.
My rule (admittedly simpli ed) is as follows: For games where you have the advantage (including the return on the game, plus the player’s club, plus
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October 2003 Page 17
Column: Video Poker With Bob Dancer