Page 8 - May 2005 • Southern California Gaming Guide

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
What if You’re Not Hitting Today? by Bob Dancer
Someone posed the following situation: I’m playing Jacks or Better and in a half hour of perfect play, I’ve hit no full houses and no ushes. In that case, it doesn’t matter if I’m playing 9/6 Jacks, 8/5 Jacks, or even 6/5 Jacks. After all, the only time the pay schedules
matter is when I connect on a full house or a ush. Isn’t this correct?
e answer to the question is no, but let me get to the reason slowly. ere are a number of
interesting aspects to this problem that bear thinking about.
First of all, this not a very likely situation. Full houses and ushes each come around once
every 90 hands or so, which means that one or the other tend to come about every 45 hands. So assuming 300 hands for a half-hour of play, and a frequency of 1 in 45, I used Microsoft Excel® to run the binomial distribution to gure out how likely this is. e formula in Excel becomes
=BINOMDIST(0,300,0.02222,FALSE), where the “0” refers to the number of either full houses or ushes, 300 refers to the number of hands, 0.02222 represents 1 in 45, and FALSE is the appropriate parameter to add in this case.
e answer comes out to 0.00118, which translates to 1 in 900, approximately. Having this happen once every 900 times you play
5♣ 6♣ 7♣ for example? In 9/6 you should have held the clubs. In 8/5 you should have held the clubs. Or how about A♦ K♥
“Why do you want to know?” e lady posing this situation was using her dry spell as a justi cation to switch around to other pay schedules on a multi- game machine. After all, she reasoned (incorrectly as we’ve seen) that if ushes and full houses aren’t happening, pay schedules can’t matter.
e reason this was enormously incorrect is that she was assuming that because she went through a once-in-900-times rare event that this was useful in predicting what would happen if she kept on the same machine. And this is just plain wrong. Immediately after this dry spell, the odds for getting a full house or a ush on the very next hand are still one in 45. e dry spell has nothing at all to do with what is coming next.
e machine has no mechanism to either continue the dry spell or to “make up” for it. Players who play adjustments either way, again, are not winners.
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, his autobiography Million Dollar Video Poker, and his recent novel, Sex, Lies, and Video Poker. Dancer’s products may be ordered at www.bobdancer.com
300 hands is pretty rare. If you played 300 hands every day it would take about two and a half years to go through such a dry spell. [To give another example of how the Excel function works, if you entered =BINOMDIST(4,300, 0.02222,TRUE), you’d get the probability that you would end up with four or fewer hits in 300 chances, and the answer would be 0.20, which is one chance in ve].
“Immediately after this dry spell, the odds for getting
a full house or a flush on the very next hand are still one in 45. The dry spell has nothing at all to do with what is coming next. The (video poker) machine has no mechanism to either continue the dry spell or to ‘make up’ for it. Players who play
Q♠ J♥ 9♥? Whether you hold should A-K- Q-J or K-J-9 depends on the pay schedule. Or what do you do with A♦ Q♠T♠8♥3♣? at too di ers between the games. And there are a number of other hands like this. Assuming you got none of these hands in the once-in-a-blue- moon example makes it rarer still. Players who use the same strategy on games that return 5 for
1 for the ush as they do for otherwise identical one of these once-in- adjustments either way, again, games that return 6 for
But let’s say you had
a-blue-moon sessions. e pay schedule matters because it
are not winners.”
1 for the ush are not called winners.
determines the strategy. How did you play Q♦ J♦
My last thing to discuss is a recurring theme in my writings, and that is,
Page 8 May 2005
Column: Video Poker with Bob Dancer