Page 25 - November 2011 • Southern California Gaming Guide

Bob Dancer: Video Poker
ASLiterary Example
hirley and I recently went on an extended trip. We ew into Omaha, Nebraska, rented a car, and ew home twelve days later from Jackson, Mississippi. During the process of that trip, we stayed in four di erent hotels for three nights apiece. As I usually do on trips, I visited the
local library before I left, and checked out several books. I read them on the plane trip, and maybe a half-hour each day.
One of the books was a sort of whodunit. It was rather complicated, with several of the characters having interesting relationships with other characters, and I was really enjoying it. Every day I picked it up for a half hour or so, which meant I had to refocus on what the relationships were.
One of the nights, I dropped Shirley o at one of her cousins and continued on 150 miles, where I had an appointment early the next morning. I checked into the hotel room late, and the room we reserved (king bed no smoking) wasn’t available, but they had a single. is was ne for one night (because Shirley was sleeping elsewhere), and they told me they’d have the room we wanted the next night.
e next day I quickly repacked my suitcase and moved down the hall. Shirley would arrive by bus by dinner time, and I had a full day scheduled. at night, I looked for my library book and couldn’t nd it. I gured I left it in the room I slept in the night before and could pick it up the next day.
e next day, the hotel sta searched my former room and couldn’t nd the book. Where could it be? It was possible that the person who slept in the room the night after I did took it with them, but that was unlikely. Money or jewelry had a good chance of disappearing unreported. But a library book? Not the sort of thing people steal. But it wasn’t there, and I know it didn’t evaporate.
So, I bit the bullet and started on another book. e hotel promised to send the book if found, and I renewed the book at the library “just in case,” but I didn’t have high hopes. I gured I’d owe $25 or so to the library to replace it. Two weeks later, when teaching video poker at the
South Point, I found the book in my computer case. I’d had it all along. I was just looking in the wrong place. No problem. I was looking forward to continuing it, because I remembered enjoying it from before.
But when I went back to it, I found I didn’t remember all the relationships. e book I’d read in the meantime, and the other things I’d been thinking about in the meantime had obscured my recollection of the details. I hadn’t forgotten everything, of course, but I had to spend several hours semi-skimming the earlier pages to get up to speed again.
Okay. Enough about the book. What does this have to do with video poker? I’m glad you asked.
Some of the relationships in video poker are much more complicated than those in the book I was reading. If you were studying Double Bonus Poker a few months ago, and have been playing Deuces Wild in the meantime, you are probably not nearly as good at Double Bonus as you were before. To get back up to speed again, you need to study some more.
It’s not as di cult to re-learn Double Bonus as it was to learn it in the rst place, but you have to go through the exercise if you want to succeed. At this point in my career, I can go back and forth between about nine games and play each of them at the professional level. But that’s only after hundreds of hours of study and review over the years. And there are a few games I only play every other month or so, which I need to review before I start investing again.
One of the techniques I regularly used when I was switching games to one I used to know but hadn’t played in a while was to use Video Poker for Winners, and turn
on “AutoPlay” (in the options section), and “Advanced” and “Show” (in the training styles section), and just sit back, press the deal button, and watch. is would deal hands and show me the correct answers. is would serve to refresh my memory rather nicely.
All the hands dealt while doing this were the trickier ones. It never dealt me 4-of-a-kinds to play. I have that play mastered. But it would give me a lot of combinations with 3-card straight ushes in the same hand as a couple of high cards—sometimes suited, sometimes not. It would deal me 4-card inside straights with a variety of other possible holds in the same hand. In other words, it would deal me the hands that are played di erently in Double Bonus compared to Deuces Wild — or whatever other game I was playing recently.
Do you have to study this hard? at’s really up to you. How important is winning to you? Everybody has a di erent philosophy about how important winning is compared to how hard it is to get there. (Most people have concluded that life is too short to get expert at Double Bonus, for example.) My philosophy has worked very well for me, but you’ll have to choose your own path.
Listen to Bob’s radio show Gambling With An Edge, on Thursday evenings 7 to 8 p.m. Pacific Time on radio station 1230 AM in Las Vegas online at klav1230am.com. Dancer’s products may be ordered at bobdancer.com or at 1-800-244-2224 Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific Time.
NOVEMBER 2011
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
PAGE 25