Page 12 - April 2006 • Southern California Gaming Guide

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
Successful Gambling and Other Investments by Bob Dancer
If I told you somebody was a successful investor, what image would come to your mind? You may well think of somebody who buys and sells stocks or other nancial instruments or possibly real estate. You probably didn’t think of somebody who bought
and sold ne art or baseball cards, but there are successful investors in those areas, too. As there are in video poker and a few other casino games as well.
Each of these investment opportunities has its own idiosyncrasies. But there are some general principles that apply to most (maybe even all) forms of investing. Let’s look at some of those general principles, with special emphasis on how they apply to video poker.
1. Identify a profitable opportunity. In the stock market this might involve price earnings ratios. In video poker it involves pay schedules and slot club returns. For some players it involves progressives. For others it involves sweet-talking hosts to receive extra bene ts. To others it involves nding ways to get more drawing tickets in the barrel than anybody else.
2. Develop or obtain a technique that allows you to capitalize on that opportunity. Knowing that a game returns 102% does you no good unless you also know how to play it well enough to capture most of that return. I know a lot of people that have heard that playing single deck blackjack is a better bet than playing a 6-deck shoe but don’t have any real knowledge of why or how to exploit that information.
3. Study and/or practice until you can execute that technique very well. In video poker, this would include how to play each hand in the game itself, the peculiarities of the slot club, how the comp system works at this particular place, when you get double points, and what kind of hand quali es you to get a drawing ticket for the new car. Players who attempt to learn the “minimum acceptable amount” generally aren’t very successful and don’t adapt well to changing circumstances.
4. Personalize the techniques so that they work well for you. In most investment areas, what worked well three years ago doesn’t work so well today. I was a decent backgammon player in the late 1980s, and it took me 15 years to obtain that knowledge. If I played a low-level professional backgammon player today, I’d likely get my clock cleaned. e game has changed signi cantly and I’ve made no attempt to keep up.
In video poker, I’ve been more successful than most, and I attempt to honestly communicate what I know. But my techniques are designed
to take advantage of my strengths, playing the speci c games I nd in greater Las Vegas.
And as the games
change, my techniques change. In any one article I might explain one or two stratagems out of the hundred or more I use. Your strengths are di erent from mine, and you may well play elsewhere with a slot club that is di erent in some strategically important way. Standing on my shoulders, guratively speaking, may well be a good place to start. But at best, you’ll be trying to master some fraction of what I did several months ago.
5. Moneymanagement(usedheretomeantechniquesdesignedsothatyou never lose everything) is important over a lifetime. e older you get, the more important it is to not go broke. If you tap out when you’re twenty- ve, you can recover. If you lose everything when you’re sixty- ve, your best earning years are behind you so there are far fewer good recovery opportunities.
Even though most successful stock market investors will tell you that diversi cation is important, there are plungers in that market that have done very well. But every plunger is one bad decision away from bankruptcy. Making every decision correct over a lifetime is highly unlikely. In video poker, each individual bet should be a very small proportion of your total wealth.
6. Evaluate how good you are compared to the competition. Most people tend to overestimate their own abilities and underestimate how hard it is to succeed and the importance of whatever mistakes they make. Video poker players will tell you of the weekend in 1999 when they got four royal ushes, as though that proves they’re a winning player. I’m not very impressed with one winning weekend any more than I am with somebody who continually wants to tell me about that one stock they own that is now worth six times what they paid for it, while “forgetting” to tell me about the stocks in their portfolio that are worth nowhere near what they paid for them. But if you tell me that your annual score for 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005 was positive for at least three out of the four years, then I’ll agree you know what you’re doing and I like your chances for being a winner in 2006.
7. Don’t assume that just because you’re good at one game you’ll be good at another. Will somebody who has been a successful investor buying and holding stocks be able to be successful investing in stock options? or commodities? Maybe. Maybe not. Each of these di erent areas has its own strategies. Likewise, good blackjack players have the potential to be good video poker players, but there’s a signi cant learning curve they have to go through rst.
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 novel, Sex, Lies, and Video Poker. Dancer’s products may be ordered at www.bobdancer.com.
Page 12 April 2006
Video Poker with Bob Dancer