Page 23 - July 2005 • Southern California Gaming Guide

Looking For Love in All the Wrong Places by Bob Dancer
There’s an old joke about a drunk on his hands and knees looking for something under a streetlight. e beat cop comes up and asks him what he’s doing.
“I’m looking for my car keys,” the drunk responds.
Take the game Double Double Bonus, for example. is is a“heaven or hell” type of experience. When you hit 4-of-a-kinds, especially those special ones with a kicker, your score goes up very quickly. Between these
4-of-a-kinds, your score plummets precipitously. Regular players of this game know this to be true.
So let’s say your score has been in a free-fall for twenty minutes straight. Is this a sign the machine is “cold” or “bad” or something? Not at all. is is a typical session for this game. Of the next 100 times you play this game, at least 75 of them will have this kind of a free-fall during much of your session. It might be a little bit faster this time, or a little bit slower, but it’s normal nonetheless. Whether you change machines or not, your score will continue to spiral downward until you hit a 4-of-a-kind. (And then it will go down, down, down again until you hit another 4-of-a-kind.) ere is absolutely no reason to believe that the current machine will connect any faster or slower than any other machine with the same pay schedule.
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
“Where’d you lose them?” the cop asks. “About a block down the street.”
“ en why on earth are you looking here?” “Because the light is better here.”
We smile at this idiocy. Looking where the light is makes no sense at all if there’s no reason to believe that the keys are actually there. And yet, video poker players do the equivalent of this all the time.
I’ve taught hundreds of video poker classes through the years, and at well over half of these classes, someone has asked me some variation of,
“How much money should I lose before I change machines?”
is is the equivalent of looking for the keys under the streetlight. It’s easy to know that you’ve just lost $20 (or $200 or $2,000). Since this information is so easy to obtain, players want to be able to use this information to their advantage. Unfortunately, the information is useless.
e secret to which machine to play (i.e., where you really dropped your keys in our extended metaphor) is a mixture of how much the machine returns on
average (i.e., 9/6 Jacks or Better returns 99.54%; 5-of-a-kind Joker Poker returns 97.19%, etc.), how well you play (i.e., do you know the game perfectly or do you make mistakes?), how much the slot club
pays (i.e., how much cash back, or room comps, or airfare reimbursement, etc.), and nally, what promotions are in e ect (i.e., is today double points? Or do you get paid an extra fty coins for a certain 4-of-a-kind?). How the machine has performed over the last half hour is totally irrelevant.
Players often get angry when I tell them this. ey say something like,“How can that be? You can’t win without full houses and I haven’t seen one in twenty minutes. It must be better to move to another machine.”
e fallacy to this logic is that it presumes that whatever the last twenty minutes have been like, the next twenty minutes will be similar. is simply isn’t something you can depend on. e next twenty minutes will very probably be di erent than the last twenty minutes, and this will be true whether you stay on the same machine or move to another.
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
July 2005 Page 23
Column: Video Poker with Bob Dancer