September 11, 2015

The ULTIMATE Irony

September 11, 2015/ Elliot Frome

Just a few months ago, I wrote about how I thought Ultimate Texas Hold'em has the perfect betting structure. This past Saturday night, I had an opportunity to see this in action. My wife and I had the opportunity to see the new variety show at the Wynn called Showstoppers. Good Show. I definitely recommend it, but I would suggest looking for discount tickets! After the show, we stopped to watch an Ultimate Texas Hold'em table game in action. It was a $15 table, which is not for the feint of heart. You have to be ready to wager $75-$100 per hand including the Ante, Blind, Trips and Play wagers.

August 27, 2015

Is Video Poker a Game of Skill?

August 27, 2015/ Elliot Frome

Is Video Poker a game of chance or a game of skill? Before we can make this decision, we need to really define what each one is. What does it mean to say that something is a game of chance? What does it mean to say that something is a game of skill? At first glance, these might seem like easy questions to answer, but I think when you start really analyzing them, the answers get a bit more fuzzy.

August 06, 2015

Wild About Video Poker

August 06, 2015/ Elliot Frome

For those of you who have read my column for years, you know that I'm not a big fan of video poker with Wild Cards. This is not a commentary on how good or bad the game is from a mathematical standpoint. It is merely my own personal opinion regarding how much I enjoy (or don't enjoy) playing these games. I do recognize that they have a rather strong following, however. I can't be certain of the reason for it, but it may have something to do with the fact that there are some version with some very high paybacks.

July 30, 2015

Misconceptions

July 30, 2015/ Elliot Frome

I've been writing for Gaming Today for about 12 years now. I'm not sure of the total number of articles I've written, but it's been about 550 of them. The majority of them have been about video poker. It is almost hard to believe that I have been able to come up with 350 or 400 different topics. Then again, I really haven't. I do repeat topics from time to time. This is for two reasons. The first is that there's a good chance that the people who read a column in 2008 are not necessarily the same readers in 2014. The second is that some topics need to be repeated over and over and over again because it is very obvious that the vast number of Players haven't gotten the message, even when they are regular Players.

July 24, 2015

Don't Get Envious

July 24, 2015/ Elliot Frome

I don't think I've ever covered the concept of tipping (also known as a toke) the Dealer in my column before. For some it's a relatively boring subject. To others, it is topic that evokes much emotion from what I've seen on some on-line postings. Since most of these electronic bulletin boards attract a lot of 'advantage' Players, that is Players who play games that are over 100% payback or very close to it, it is probably no wonder that many of these Players are not big on tipping Dealers very often. If you give the Dealer a nice portion of a big win, this might represent your total net win on an evening.

July 02, 2015

The Non-Intimidation Factor

July 02, 2015/ Elliot Frome

It is virtually impossible to predict which game will be a success in the casino as it is being invented. As I've written in my column numerous times, predicting which game will fail is much easier. Frequently inventors will look at past games and try to replicate what appears to be a formula for success for that game. But I have longed believed that if you look at successful casino games you will see a progression and not just a replication of success. To put it another way, I think that if Three Card Poker were invented today and put up against the other games that are out there, it would not have done nearly as well as it did. In similar fashion, if Ultimate Texas Hold'em had been created in the mid 1990's, I don't think any of us would have ever heard of it.

June 18, 2015

Instant Message Help

June 18, 2015/ Elliot Frome

One night a few months ago, I received a text message from a friend of mine that said "I'm playing video poker. I could sure use a strategy." Kudos to my friend for recognizing the need for a strategy. Of course, it would have been preferable for him to have one before he started playing it. Further, given that learning video poker strategy is not that easy to learn, it would have been best if he spent some time learning it before he headed out.

June 11, 2015

Straight to the Customer

June 11, 2015/ Elliot Frome

Through my years of analyzing games, I've often been asked by friends and family about the type of clients I do work for. When I tell them that most of my work has been done by a company called Shuffle Master. Invariably the response is "who? Never heard of them." I thought it would become easier when Bally Technologies bought Shuffle Master. Everybody has heard of Bally's! Of course, almost all of them are thinking about the casino. A few are thinking about the chain of gyms. Once upon a time, they were all part of the same company, but not for a few decades. It certainly didn't get any better now that Scientific Games bought Bally Technologies. We're back to "who? Never heard of them."

June 04, 2015

March Madness (in June)

June 04, 2015/ Elliot Frome

Welcome to March Madness! I'm a huge sports fan, but I have to admit, I'm not a massive follower of college sports. I generally root for 3 teams. The first is UNLV. I adopted them when my parents retired here and my own alma mater was a Division 3 team (and not a very good one at that). The second is my alma mater, which somewhere along the way became Divsion 1. They aren't a powerhouse, but they are in the big tournament this year. Let's go SUNY Albany! If either the men's or women's team is still in it by the time you read this, the world may be ready to come to an end! The third team is whoever is playing Duke. It's a long story, but let's just say it goes back to the days when UNLV last played Duke in the Championship game.

May 29, 2015

Which Bonus to Play and Why

May 29, 2015/ Elliot Frome

I almost never play jacks or better video poker anymore. It is to video poker what blackjack is to table games. That is to say, relatively boring. Unlike blackjack, whose strategy is more complex than most table games, jacks or better strategy is about average in complexity for video poker. Overall, though, it is the least volatile of the video poker games. This means that your chances for big wins (or big losses) is smaller than with many other versions. There is only one big winning hand in jacks or better and that is the Royal Flush. It hits about every 41,000 hands, it will take a few dozen hours of play to hit one, on average. In between, there's a lot of High Pairs and Two Pairs. And, even when you hit a Four of a Kind, it pays 'only' 25 for 1.

May 21, 2015

Players Can Be Choosers

May 21, 2015/ Elliot Frome

I received a rather strange question this past week from an inventor. He wanted to know if doubling down in blackjack is an advantage for the Player or the Casino. I find it strange because my expectation is that someone trying to invent games would probably understand what creates house advantages and what creates Player advantages. I don't necessarily expect the average Player to fully understand this, but if you're trying to invent a game, you need to understand what levers to pull in order to make the game's math work out correctly.

May 14, 2015

The Essence of Expert Strategy

May 14, 2015/ Elliot Frome

There are many aspects to our lives to which people apply the notion of the importance of having a strategy. Very few of us actually use them for all aspects of our lives. We tend to focus on some important part and then formulate a strategy. Maybe you formulate a strategy for getting out of debt, or for paying for your kids' education. Perhaps you're the type of small businessman who makes sure he has a strategy to make his business a success. We all know there are tons of strategies for how to lose weight.

May 07, 2015

A Beautiful Betting Structure

May 07, 2015/ Elliot Frome

It was about 10 years ago that the Texas Hold'em craze was starting to take over poker rooms everywhere. I used to play a lot of poker in college (won a lot of spending money). I don't think we played a single hand of Texas Hold'em. We played 7-card Stud, Guts, 5-Card Draw and a whole host of other strange games (baseball, nighttime baseball). It's what you get when you play Dealer Choice poker for several hours. But, not one hand of Texas Hold'em. I had no idea what the game was until I saw signs for it in Las Vegas Poker rooms. Even then, I paid it very little attention.

April 30, 2015

Do You Have to Play Perfectly?

April 30, 2015/ Elliot Frome

One 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.

April 23, 2015

Parlez Vous Parlay?

April 23, 2015/ Elliot Frome

This past week, I received a most intriguing request from a reader. He asked me to review 'again' the true odds associated with parlay cards. I found the 'again' quite amusing as to the best of my knowledge this is not a topic I have ever evenly remotely covered. At first, I couldn't even figure what I would write about. Then, after giving it more thought, I realized that there might be some math information that parlay players would like to think about. I apologize that I'm waiting until after the football season to present this information.

April 16, 2015

Training Day

April 16, 2015/ Elliot Frome

I write about a variety of different games in my weekly column. When I first started writing it was almost exclusively about video poker. I followed in my father's footsteps and essentially continued his column from a new vantage point. As my work in the industry took me more into table games, I've devoted a larger percent of my columns to those very same games. It is an interesting mix. I realize, however, that a relatively small number of Players out there have a tendency to cross over with their play. Generally speaking, there are Slot Players, Video Poker players and Table Game Players. Then there are those just starting out who probably haven't decided yet which one they are.

April 09, 2015

Master of Your Strategy

April 09, 2015/ Elliot Frome

Gambling strategies come in all forms. For most table games, it is usually a set of rules in English. For Three Card Poker, it is a single simple sentence - Play with Q-6-4 or better. Four Card Poker strategy is a bit more complex, but can also be simplified to Betting 3x when your hand is of a certain rank, Folding when it is below a certain rank and Betting 1x for everything in between. A game like Ultimate Texas Hold'em has far more complex strategy, but again, it comes down to betting based on the strength of the hand.

April 02, 2015

Introduction to Strategy Tables

April 02, 2015/ Elliot Frome

Recently, I explained a bit about the 32 different ways that a video poker hand can be played. This accounts for all the different ways a Player can discard 0 to 5 cards from a five card deal. Each of these 32 ways is assigned an expected value by looking at every possible draw for that discard combination. Whichever of these 32 ways has the highest expected value is the right way to play the hand.

March 26, 2015

What's Luck Got To Do With It?

March 26, 2015/ Elliot Frome

Recently, a friend of mine posted on Facebook the definition of a "mondegreen." Apparently this is one of those situations where you hear a friend belting out the wrong words to a song because they sound a lot like the ones that were actually sung. We've all done it at one time or another. Today is my turn. Who remembers Tina Turner's classic song What's Luck Got To Do with It. Okay, I know the word was "Love" and not "Luck". But there isn't much room for love in a casino. Some of you may be surprised to hear me admit that there might be some room for luck in one.

March 19, 2015

Not Quite Perfect

March 19, 2015/ Elliot Frome

This week, I received an e-mail from a reader looking for the strategy for Triple Double Bonus Poker. My home grown programs do not handle the 'kicker' situation for games like Double Double or Triple Double Bonus Poker, so I could not provide it to him. If he insists on playing it without the totally correct strategy, his best bet would be to use Double Double Bonus strategy for the most similar paytable as the Triple Double Bonus. Don't get me wrong, I don't recommend just using whatever is the next best paytable. Sometimes, the impact may be slight, but other times it might be far more significant.

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