Page 24 - November 2009 • Southern California Gaming Guide

Bob Dancer: Video Poker
BAecoming a Professional Player
lthough I’ve addressed this subject many times in the past, I still get lots of letters about the subject. Here is a recent one.
Mr. Dancer:
I’m a 53-year-old auto worker and expect to be laid o soon. My wife and I love Las Vegas and have
decided to relocate there. We’ve had some success at video poker and have decided to turn pro. Which of your products do you recommend to ensure success?
Detroit Dan
Dear Dan:
I don’t have any products that guarantee success for everybody. If you have what it takes to succeed at this game, I have a lot of information that will help you. If you don’t have what it takes, my products will help you lose less, but you’re still going to be a net loser.
“Having what it takes,” starts with bankroll and desire. Bankroll, paraphrasing Stanford Wong, is the amount of money you’re willing to lose before you give up gambling—and that’s money above and beyond what you use to live on. If you’re planning on moving to Vegas, I suggest you need at least a year’s worth of living expenses plus money to gamble with. How much money you need to play individual games is complicated.“Video Poker for Winners” is software that allows you to estimate this.
How badly do you want to play video poker? It’s one thing to play a few hours on a vacation and it’s quite another to play thirty or more hours a week, every week.
Once we get past bankroll and desire, we now get into the knowledge to succeed at the game. You claim some success. Does this mean you’ve hit a royal or two? Or perhaps four aces with a kicker?
If so, then so what? Jackpots come to everybody on occasion and everybody loses between jackpots.
at’s the nature of the game. Just because you’ve hit some jackpots doesn’t mean you’re a good player, or a successful one. A successful player is one whose net score (i.e., all wins minus all losses) is positive year after year—or, perhaps, at least three years out of four. Having one or two winning trips “feels good” but is more a sign of luck than skill.
To become a winning player, the key elements you need to learn are which games to play and how to play them. My Video Poker for the Intelligent Beginner lists
virtually all video poker games and explains what pay schedules to look for. It discusses how to use “Video Poker for Winners” to obtain your strategies and then how to use those strategies. is information, however you obtain it, is an absolute must to have. It will take you many hours of practice on the computer to become competent at the strategy for any game—and likely you will need to learn several games.
Even this information is not enough, however. e eld of “players clubs and casino promotions” is ever- changing, extremely important, and frequently an area where you need to go forward with incomplete information. I’ve discussed the subject numerous times in several places, but some of the information is obsolete as soon as its published. How the Gold Coast or Rampart or Station Casinos is guring its mailer this month is anybody’s guess. It’s likely to be similar to what was done before, but some casino every month is surprising at least a part of their customer base.
To get a feel for players club information you need to talk to a lot of others, at least monitor video poker discussion groups like vpFREE, and get a lot of experience under your belt. Sometimes talking to others and reading on the Internet is the“blind leading the deaf,” but every now and then you can gleam a nugget of valuable information.
Becoming competent at video poker isn’t something you can study for a short period of time and then coast for the duration. ings change all of the time. e games that I’m playing this year are not the same as the ones I played last year. ere’s considerable overlap of course, but the opportunities are not the same. I was playing NSU Deuces Wild Multi Strike last year, for example, and this year I’m playing 9/6 Double Double
Bonus Quick Quads. e games have nothing in common with each other. Who knows what will be the best game next year?
Probably 5% to 10% of those people who really, really want to succeed at video poker end up able to support themselves—and more than half of those “succeeding” are making less than $15,000 a year. It’s de nitely cheaper to live in Las Vegas than in many other places, but even so, you have to believe that this is the dream life to be happy on $15,000 a year. To be sure, there are a small number of players regularly earning more than $100,000 a year at this game—so it de nitely is possible. But it’s not easy and percentagewise the number of players who can do this is very small.
You may have gured out that I’m trying to discourage you from trying to become a professional player. If I can do this, you probably don’t have what it takes anyway. It’s not easy to go through the losing streaks (which will come) and even dealing appropriately with the winning streaks.
If you’re still deciding that you want to give this a try, I strongly suggest you have a backup plan. Discuss beforehand what you’re going to do if you blow through half of your bankroll in the rst three months. Finding a good-paying job when you’re in your fties is not easy— especially if your only experience is in an industry where jobs aren’t to be found.
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 his new book, Video Poker for the Intelligent Beginner, 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 or at 1-800-244-2224 Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Paci c Time.
Page 24
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
November 2009
Video Poker with Bob Dancer