VIDEO POKER

So How Come Four Credits?

The goal, when the cover picture was shot, was to duplicate what actually happened when Shirley connected on a $400,000 royal flush. The actual event was documented by a Polaroid snapshot, duplicated in the book, that wasn't of high enough resolution for the cover. When Mike Fields of IGT heard about this, he graciously volunteered to use IGT's labs to reproduce any hand we wanted to be used for photography purposes. Just tell him what the hand was.

It was a generous offer. Gonna be a great picture of a once-in-a-lifetime (probably) $400,000 royal flush. And they duplicated the HAND perfectly. Just not the machine. It was a slightly different generation machine and in the real picture showed a very pretty "HANDPAY REQUIRED $400,000.00" notation in the center.

The fact the machine showed 4 credits, though, was accurate. And that's a very strange number. For players who always play maximum coins (which includes Shirley and me), the number of credits is always a multiple of five --- at least for people who use the bill acceptor. But on this machine, most players don't use the bill acceptor.

This was a $100 machine, where a pair of jacks or better gives you your money back, two pair gives you 10 credits ($1,000), and 3-of-a-kind or better ($1,500 or more) becomes a hand pay. Inserting five $100 bills for one hand takes quite a while. Inserting five $100 tokens is much quicker. So the casino pays you in tokens (20 of them for a straight, 30 for a flush, 45 for a full house, 125 for an all-too-infrequent 4-of-a-kind.) There was a large, secure place between the machines to hold however many tokens we accumulated.

Another problem was that the machine didn't store more than eleven credits. In this game, the only hand-type that increases your credit balance is two pair. If you obtained the two pair when you had either zero or one credit --- meaning you started the hand when you had either five or six credits --- the credits would add up. If you obtained the two pair when you had two through six credits --- meaning you started the hand when you had between seven and 11 credits --- the ten coins would spill into the tray. This was a VERY tedious machine to play, and the only reason we put up with it was that at that time the MGM Grand was giving away the store slot-club-and-promotion-wise, I had a $25 machine to play while waiting for the frequent hand pays (I would supervise Shirley's play of every hand when her machine was playable), and there were virtually no other customers in the High Limit Slot area that night so the attendants could give us quick service.

So when Shirley needed to load the machine, she'd grab a handful of $100 tokens and slip them on in. If she slipped in six or seven instead of exactly five, it was no problem. The credits would rack up --- with prescribed limits. Apparently she'd added extra coins a few times in a row and had nine credits before the deal, and that meant four credits left when the video poker gods smiled on us. An unusual credit total to be sure, but maybe not so unusual when you know the circumstances.

This one night is discussed in four pages in the book. The other 250+ pages discuss mainly how I went from being somebody with a $6,000 bankroll knowing nothing about video poker in 1994 to being knowledgeable enough, successful enough, and brave enough to recognize and take advantage of a too-good-to-be-true opportunity seven years later. I hope you enjoy the book and can apply many of the lessons in it to your own situation.