VIDEO POKER

The Necessity of Scouting

Playing intelligent video poker is like a military campaign in many respects. And if anybody is going to be the military commander of your video poker campaign, it probably has to be you! Your need to know the games (including pay schedules) offered by each casino in the area you plan to visit, plus you need to have slot club information --- including cashback and current promotions. After you have such information, only then can you decide whether the games are good enough at the present time to warrant your attention and whether you know how to play the games or not.

Usually the focus of my columns is, "How do you play a certain game better?" This month the focus is, "How do you find out which games are there?" A very different question. In many respects it is like the other blade in a pair of scissors. You can't cut successfully unless both blades are sharp.

The easiest way to scout is on the Internet. There are video poker bulletin boards where people trade off information with each other via emails. Sometimes there is a charge to belong and sometimes not. There are some specific to a gambling venue. And there is a lot of cross-membership among them, so if you post on any of them "are there any good quarter Double Bonus games at such-and-such a casino," you'll often get several useful responses.

I don't have a list of all such bulletin boards, but here are some: Skip Hughes runs one (for an annual fee) at www.vid-poker.com. Signing up gives you a monthly magazine and access to otherwise-restricted information as well. Tom Sims runs a free one at vpfree@yahoogroups.com. Dean Zamzow runs one specializing in questions about Bob Dancer Presents WinPoker at winpoker@yahoogroups.com. There's one for Tunica, www.tunica-ms.com and one for Atlantic City as well that you can ask about joining at acvpp-owner@yahoogroups.com. Each one has its own personality so you may well find you like some more than others. Some of the boards on this list I have never visited, so do not take inclusion on this list as an endorsement. These are all of the lists I know about, but there may well be others I have missed.

There are some publications that run promotional information. Jeffrey Compton and I run such a column in the Neon Section of Friday's Las Vegas Review Journal, which is also posted a few mouseclicks away from here. Strictly Slots is the best magazine giving national coverage, but often there are local papers with good information as well. How to find them? Ask on one of the video poker bulletin boards something like, "Is there any newspaper column that lists casino promotions in the Detroit area?" If there is, you'll find out. If not, you'll find that out too.

Another way of finding this information is to read your mail! Casinos send out information to their "active player database" (defined somewhat differently by every casino), so if a casino you have visited recently is going to be running double points on the Fourth of July, then they'll likely try to tell players about it. The more casinos you actively give at least a modest amount of play to, the more useful (and un-useful) mail you will receive.

There are a number of other publications with promotion information, including ads in local newspapers and in freebie magazines that exist in most casino jurisdictions. Sometimes something is found in these places.

These are excellent sources of information for occasional visitors. You have relatively little time for gambling on a given trip, and you want to find out in advance what you will find so you can prepare for it. A problem with these information sources, however, is that when you find out something, so do many other people Sometimes promotions and machines are lucrative only to the first few people that find them. And to find them, you have to get out there and walk around. Triple points is good, but if there are only three machines of the type you find most lucrative, there's a good chance that other players find them the most lucrative too.

Scouting takes time. Anybody who is going to scout greater Las Vegas thoroughly had better plan on taking a week or more to do it. Taking this much time is out of the question for out-of-towners, but for local players (or very frequent visitors), scouting three or more hours a week is a reasonable investment. An investment that is sure to pay dividends. You'll be amazed at what you'll find!

Also, scouting is something you have to do again and again. The first two or three times you visit a particular casino, it is very easy to keep getting lost. It takes a few visits to learn the layout of the place, and where the machines you like are likely to be found. Once you are very familiar with a casino, changes will pop out at you. If it has been a few months or less since you really looked at a place, you'll notice that this bank of dollar machines used to be for quarters, and they no longer have the Double Bonus machines over by the cashier, etc. Depending on the jurisdiction, casinos change their machines around frequently.

Also, you cannot learn everything there is to know about a slot club unless you play there a lot. It takes a while for the idiosyncrasies to become second nature to you. This is one advantage to having the video poker hobby for a long period of time. There is a big backlog of information that is only built up over time.

And lastly, it's useful to network. Get to know other players who play the same kinds of games that you do. They may know more about what is happening at the Palms, for example, and you may know more about what is happening at the Suncoast. It serves you both well to update each other.