EDITORIALS:

First, let me start off by saying People will ALWAYS think they know better than you (Ahem!! Yes, ourselves included). I'm here to warn you of those advices that could TOTALLY ruin a good play (or a few...)


I once went to a casino specifically to play $1 deuces (it was a double-point day for the slot club). There was only one vacant machine, and a change girl told me that someone had hit a $4,000 royal on it earlier that day. Most people probably wouldn’t sit down at that machine, since it had already given up a royal. I knew, however, that mathematically the first royal didn’t make any difference. I sat down without giving it a second thought. I started playing at 5 in the evening. At 9:45 I hit a $4,000 royal. After being paid, I stayed right where I was and kept playing. Now, you might think that I was pressing my luck, that I should have left that machine then. I only had about $600 in it, and I’d taken $4,000 out of it. And, the machine had now paid out two royals in one day. But I said, “No. It’s still double-point day and I want to keep playing.”


At about 11:15 I hit another $4,000 royal. Now the machine had paid out $12,000 in royals (that I knew of) that day. By no stretch of the imagination had $12,000 been won back by the machine. I’d played it half the day and lost back less than $1,000. So there I was, $7,000 ahead and waiting to collect my second $4,000 when a man started talking to me. He patted me on my shoulder and said, “Honey, lemme give you a little advice here. You’ve got to quit right now and take that money home; because you stay here you’ll lose it all and more.”


I patted him on the shoulder and said, “Well sir, I don’t know what you play, but I’ll tell you something that I don’t tell just anybody. I’m playing a positive expectation game that pays back over 100%; the longer I play, the more likely it is that I’m going to win more.”


Though most people have a very difficult time understanding or believing it, there is no such as a machine being “played out.” In other words, even though someone hit a royal on a particular machine earlier in the day (or week or month), it doesn’t mean that the machine won’t give up another royal for some predetermined amount of time. By the same token, there’s also no such thing as a “due factor.” If a machine hasn’t paid a royal for weeks, it becomes no more likely to hit than at any other time.


I left at the stroke of midnight. Had there been more time left to accumulate double points, I’d have continued to play.


“HOW MUCH MONEY WILL I NEED?”


This is another common question we’re asked, though a lot of people just assume we can do what we do in the casinos because we have all the money in the world. Everyone wants to know how much money is necessary to allow the percentages to bear out. My answer, “Not too much,” might surprise you. Let’s not forget that we’re talking about a low-roller couple playing quarter video poker and making $1.25 wagers here. In his book, Online Poker—Precision Play, Dan Paymar has a chart that’s very useful. It’s labeled “Bankroll Necessary to Hit a Jackpot.” The chart indicates that if you’re playing quarter deuces wild, you should have a bankroll of at least $2,850 to be 99% sure of hitting the royal flush—and thereby achieving the 100.5% expected overall payback— before going broke. Bob Dancer, a successful video poker pro and knowledgeable writer, has a similar rule: you should have a bankroll equal to three royals ($3,000 for 25c. machines, $12,000 for $1 machines, and $60,000 for $5 machines.) There’s no guarantee that you’ll hit the jackpot before exhausting a $3,000 stake, but 99% is good enough for us.


Our own experiences confirm this. We’ve been playing video poker for more than six years, three to eight hours a day, at least 100 days a year, and we’ve never needed a “bankroll” (the amount of actual money we have to gamble with) greater than $3,000. In other words, our longest losing streak playing 25 machines never resulted in total losses greater than $3,000.


The one time that we came close to accumulating losses of $3,000 was the most inopportune time of all for Lady Luck to leave us. It was the week the “48 Hours” video crew was following us around. We were bragging to them about how well we did in Vegas playing video poker, and here we were losing consistently, nearly reaching the $3,000 loss point. (At the end of the week, we won a car, which catapulted us back into the black.)


If you have a partner and the two of you are playing on one bankroll, you don’t need twice as much. You need the same $3,000 for quarter machines as if only one of you is playing. Think of it this way: would you need more money if you were playing eight hours a day by yourself than if two of you each played four hours a day? No. In fact, partnership play smoothes out the ups and downs a little.


If you want to have a little more than the minimum bankroll, just in case, you might feel better with a $4,000 or $5,000 bankroll for one or two people playing quarter video poker. If we approach that $3,000 in losses, we don’t get as nervous if we have a $1,000- $2,009 “reserve.”