I was asked this past week about the process of analyzing a game. I was caught a little off guard when I was asked in front of a room full of people. My answer was probably a little jumbled. But now, with some time to think about it some more, I think I can explain it better. The real trick is not coming up with the payback of win frequencies. What I'm really in search of is the proper strategy for the Player to play.
Read MoreI don't get jealous of a lot of things or people. I think I'm quite fortunate in my personal and business life. If there is one thing that gets me a bit 'green', it's when I come across a gambling related article that gets front page exposure on Yahoo that doesn't really say anything special. Now, this doesn't mean the article is useless. I'm just wondering how come that article gets on Yahoo and my articles don't?
Read MoreLast week I reviewed some relatively common positive paytables. Positive meaning paytables with a payback of over 100% meaning the Player should win in the long run. In that column I spoke of a Deuces Wild paytable that meets this qualification. There are actually more Deuces Wild paytables over 100% than any other variant of video poker. No one knows the reason for this for sure, but I can only guess it goes back to the early days of video poker before a complete mathematical analysis was run on the game. I have always surmised that when these original paytables were created that they developers took their 'best guess' as to how Players would play hands instead of fully recognizing that there is only one proper way to play the hand.
Read MoreThis past week, I received a letter from a reader who found some 'errors' in my Expert Video Poker for Las Vegas book. I'm a bit skeptical when someone tells me these things as the numbers have been out there for so many years and looked at by so many people. As it turns out, they were more like typos, which I guess technically is an error, but I put it into a different category. Fortunately, neither of the typos would lead a Player to go very far astray. One of the typos listed the number of Four of a Kinds from the Draw on a Three of a Kind. Right below the typo is the correct number which was used in the actual calculation of the Expected Value. So, it might have been a bit confusing, but most readers would probably realize it was just a typo. Also, I don't think too many people are confused about how to play a Three of a Kind. It is one of the more self-explanatory hands.
Read MoreOne of the criticisms of almost any gambling strategy is that it requires you to play 'perfectly', and that this is not realistic of a human. There is some truth to this. For sure, the theoretical payback can only be achieved if you play the strategy perfectly. Sometimes, the strategies are present are not 'perfect'. They have already been altered to give a human a reasonable chance to play the strategy presented perfectly. For example, in the game of Ultimate Texas Hold'em, the strategy for the 2x Wager consists of about 10 or 12 'rules'. This can already prove challenging for a human. If a complete computer perfect strategy were presented, it would likely have hundreds of rules. No human, short of Rain Man, would be able to play this even close to perfect.
Read MoreTwenty years ago, if you walked into a casino, you had four choice of what to play that covered about 95% of the casino floor - Blackjack, Craps, Roulette and Slot Machines. Flash forward to 2013 and the casino floor is quite a different place. If I had to take an educated guess, I'd say that Blackjack and Slots have given up the most square footage. Slot machines yield space to video poker and Blackjack yielded space to the myriad of new table games that have been invented and successfully invaded the casino. For most of the time, only one blackjack variant managed to make any inroads. This was Spanish 21. While its popularity has diminished a bit, it is still quite a powerhouse in the industry.
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