Page 24 - April 2011 • Southern California Gaming Guide

Bob Dancer: Video Poker
WIt Doesn’t Seem Fair
hile waiting for my takeout food order from a restaurant at the Gold Coast in Las Vegas, I was playing $2 nsu (Not So Ugly) Deuces Wild. I saw a friend of mine, Linda, who was quite upset. I asked her why. She told me she had been at a Palms’ drawing across the
street. She said she had more tickets than the people who actually won. She felt it was unfair.
“You can feel bad if it will make you feel better,” I told her, quoting an old Patty Loveless song,“but that would be the typical result even
if the drawing were 100%
fair, and I have no reason to believe the drawing wasn’t fair.”
“How can that be? I had more tickets. I should have won.” She didn’t really want to be lectured so she took o .
Let’s take a simpli ed look at the drawing. Let’s say there were 20 tickets in the drum and they were going to draw one name. Linda had eight of these tickets, and four people (Abe, Ben, Carl, and David) had two tickets each, and four additional people (Emma, Frances, Grace, and Helen) had one ticket each.
Linda’s chances are good in this example. Eight out of 20 is 40%. She’s still a small underdog to be drawn, but her chances are far better than anyone else’s.
5% chance each. eir total was 60%, which was greater than Linda’s 40%.
Let’s also assume that she
didn’t win this time, but
rather Abe won. While Abe
only had a 10% chance of winning, there were three other players with a 10% chance, along with four players with a
that someone with only one ticket in the barrel won a big drawing, while somebody with thousands of tickets was
“You sometimes hear that someone with only one
ticket in the barrel won a big drawing, while somebody with thousands of tickets was shut out. What you don’t hear is that there are hundreds of people out there each time with only one ticket, and usually none of them wins. It figures that sometimes one of these people win, and when that happens, it’s remarkable enoughthateverybodytalks about it.”
Linda is comparing her eight entries to Abe’s two entries and is feel- ing gypped. at’s not the relevant comparison. She should be looking at her total entries (8) versus the total number of entries (20). is is tough to do, however, because usually the casino doesn’t announce the number of entries in the drum.
Linda’s chances before the drawing were four times as great as Abe’s. But the chances of (Abe
+ Ben + Carl + David + Emma + Frances + Grace + Helen) combined were 50% greater than Helen’s. Looking at Linda versus Abe leads to misleading conclusions. Looking at Linda versus not-Linda leads to the correct
conclusions.
You sometimes hear
shut out. What you don’t hear is that there are hundreds of people out there each time with only one ticket, and usually none of them wins. It gures that sometimes one of these people win, and when that happens, it’s remarkable enough that everybody talks about it. So most people have heard of people with one ticket winning a drawing even though it rarely happens.
If Linda continues to earn more tickets than most other players, she will continue to win much of the time. (And trust me, the players who see her win “all of the time” will get very annoyed.) But even though it looks to others like she wins “too much,” she won’t win all the time, or even most of the time.
And usually when she doesn’t win, whoever does win will have fewer tickets than she does. at doesn’t mean she’s being cheated. at just means that there are lots of people with fewer tickets than she has and when you add up all of their tickets, they have more than Linda does.
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.
PAGE 24
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
April 2011