Page 24 - April 2010 • Southern California Gaming Guide

Bob Dancer: Video Poker
SCtandardization of Bet Sizes
ontinually nding new subjects to write about is a constant challenge for me. After all, I’ve been writing video poker columns for years and I no longer have a reservoir of untapped ideas. So partly looking for inspiration for an article or three, I was recently rereading
Mason Malmouth’s Gambling eory and Other Topics (Two Plus Two Publishing, 1999).
One of Malmouth’s recurrent themes is that the bets of winning gamblers are not always the same size. In blackjack, backgammon, sports betting, and live poker (the games Malmouth examines most closely), one secret of winning is to identify the situations where the player has a
bigger-than-average advantage and to bet more in that circumstance.
When I read this, I immediately concluded that this isn’t true for video poker. For any given machine, our bet is a constant
ere are at least two video poker games, namely
above makes you look like a superstitious idiot, but really has essentially no cost (other than time lost) because all 5-coin-per-line bets have the same per- centage return, it might be strategically bene cial at times. Especially if you add some ridiculous explanation like, “When these machines give me an even number of full houses on a given play, I always cut back because I know from experience that the machine punishes me after that. But for some reason, after an odd number of full houses, it’s okay to increase my bet. Fortunately for me, the machines haven’t caught on to my secret yet.” If you can manage the above quote with a straight face, you deserve to keep winning.
Without the o -the-wall exception listed above, standardization of bet size is a trait of winning video poker but virtually no other gambling game. Does this make video poker a better game? Maybe not. But it does make video poker an easier game. I’ve played both backgammon and blackjack at a professional level, and, for me anyway, video poker is much easier.
And I don’t attempt sports betting or live poker because I believe they are much too di cult.
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 the software “Video Poker for Winners,” 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. Pacific Time.
“max credits.” I found this interesting. is might be the major di erence between gambling at video poker and gam- bling at other beatable games.
is article isn’t about chastising Malmouth for making a mistake. He wasn’t considering video poker when he made the argument, and in general, I nd his conclusion correct. And interesting.
In video poker, the
big choice is whether to
play a speci c game at all.
But once we make that
decision, we bet the max.
In most cases the only
way to increase your
bet is to increase your
stakes—say from quar-
ters to dollars. Another
way is to go from a single line machine to a Triple Play machine. In a few casinos the best games may be found in more than one denomination, but, in general, this is not the case.
where you have a large choice of bet sizes. On these machines, you may bet 5 coins, 10 coins, 15 coins all the way up to max coins and still get the full value for the royal. ere may be bankroll considerations that lead you to make one sized bet over another, but it’s hard to come up with an intelligent reason for betting 10 coins this hand, 35 next time, 125 the next, 65 after that, etc.
reason for changing your bet on this type of machine, and that’s for camou age purposes when you’re being watched by casino executives. Many casi-
nos are now at least occasionally excluding advantage video poker players, so if you can convince them you are really a superstitious gambler, your playing days might last a little longer. Since betting like described
“In video poker, the big
choice is whether to play
a specific game at all.
But once we make that
decision, we bet the max.
In most cases the only way
to increase your bet is to
increase your stakes—say
Fifty Play and Hundred Play,
from quarters to dollars. Actually, there is at least one strategic
Another way is to go from
a single line machine to a Triple Play machine.”
Page 24
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
April 2010
Video Poker with Bob Dancer