Page 14 - September 2007 • Southern California Gaming Guide

Bob Dancer: Video Poker
WIhen the Best Possible Result Doesn’t Make You Happy
f the best possible result of an action that you chose freely makes you miserable, I suggest you’re making poor choices with your life.
I was playing $5 Not So Ugly (nsu) Deuces Wild at Palace Station (no longer there, alas, as that casino hammered during this promotion and we needed
has eliminated any intelligent reason to play in their high-limit room) during their point challenge. Two and three spaces to my left, other players were playing the same game for the same stakes. Between us, however, was a lady playing $1 9/5 Double Double Bonus (ddb).
players playing the lesser games in the high limit room so the house average could be maintained.
Most players don’t think in terms of losing the least amount. e downside to playing one coin at a time is that when you do hit the royal ush, you only get paid $250 rather than the $4,000 you’d get if you happened to be betting ve coins. If this is psychologically devastating to you, as apparently it was to Dorothy, then you should never do it.
I assume the object of playing variable amounts of coins is that you are hoping that your losses will come on your partial-coin hands and your big wins will come on your max-coin hands. It’s a nice thing to hope for, but an impossible one to manage in practice. You never know when that royal ush is coming.
Another problem with betting partial coins is that the strategy is di erent than playing the same game with max coins. Take the hand A♥ K♥ T♥ 5♥ 3♣ in the game Dorothy was playing. Although in the 9/6 game you should play “AKT5,” in the 9/5 game with max coins you should play “AKT.” In the 9/5 game with partial coins, though, you should play “AKT5.” I wouldn’t expect Dorothy to be savvy about these things, but I would expect most readers to be able to understand that going back and forth between max and partial coins without making adjustments to strategy means that you are giving up more than you need to.
You know yourself. Will hitting a partial-coin royal ush drive you crazy? If so, that’s just another reason to never bet that way. (A better reason, of course, is to only play good games where betting maximum coins is always the best bet.)
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, his autobiography Million Dollar Video Poker, and his two novels, including Sex, Lies, and Video Poker. Dancer’s products may be ordered at www.bobdancer.com.
Obviously she was clueless about pay schedules because there were 9/6 ddb games in the area. None of the nsu players
were going to tell her
e nsu player to her immediate left commented that $750 was nothing to sneeze at. I suggested that there was no such thing as a bad time to get a royal ush, although some times were better than others. She cursed some more and went back to playing in her normal pattern—sometimes one coin, sometimes three, and
tongue. It’s one thing to o er advice to someone who asks for it and it’s something else altogether to o er unsolicited advice. Plus, the nsu games were being
that because the 9/6 ddb games were on the same machines as the nsu games, and it’s hard enough to get time on the nsu machines sometimes without 9/6 ddb players playing the same machine.
is lady, I’ll call her Dorothy, sometimes played one coin, sometimes three, and occasionally ve. Had I watched her closely, I might have been able to gure out her pattern, but I was primarily concentrating on my own game.
“If she were a student in the mood for a lesson I would have told her that the best number of coins to bet on that machine is
All at once, Dorothy
let out a string of
obscenities that would
make a longshoreman
blush. I looked over and
saw that she’d hit a royal
flush—with three coins
bet. I must confess that
I’m programmed to think
a royal flush looks pretty.
Since playing short coin
is never an option for me, I tend to forget that some people play that way.
zero, and the second-best is one. Betting five coins is next best, and betting two, three, or four
is unconscionably bad. It might surprise you that I recommend betting one coin over five on that machine, but keep in mind that it’s a 9/5 ddb game—a game that only returns 97.9% when played perfectly—which she wasn’t close
sometimes ve.
If she were a student in
the mood for a lesson I would have told her that the best number of coins to bet on that machine is zero, and the second-best is one. Betting ve coins is next best, and betting two, three, or four is unconscionably bad. It might surprise you that I recommend betting one coin over ve on that machine, but keep in mind that it’s a 9/5
to doing. You will lose far less by ddb game—a game that
playing one coin at a time than you will five coins at a time.”
only returns 97.9% when played perfectly—which she wasn’t close to doing. You will lose far less by playing one coin at a time
than you will ve coins at a time. And playing slowly is less unpro table than playing quickly. But I held my
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Page 14
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
September 2007
Video Poker with Bob Dancer