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Bob Dancer writes a video poker column for beginners to experts. He also writes a column with Jeffrey Compton, "Player's Edge", featuring information on promotions at various Las Vegas casinos. Player's Edge is published each Friday in the Neon section of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Click here to send Bob Dancer an e-mail.

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April 10, 2007

When The Best Possible Result Doesn't Make You Happy

If the best possible result for an action that you chose freely makes you miserable, I suggest you're making poor choices with your life.

I was playing $5 NSU Deuces Wild at Palace Station (no longer there, alas, as that casino has eliminated any intelligent reason to play in their high limit room) during their recent point challenge. Two and three spaces to my left, other players were playing the same game for the same stakes. Between us, however, was a lady playing $1 9/5 Double Double Bonus.

Obviously she was clueless about pay schedules because there were 9/6 DDB games in the area. None of the NSU players were going to tell her that because the 9/6 DDB games were on the same machines as the NSU games, and it's hard enough to get time on the NSU machines sometimes without 9/6 DDB players playing the same machine.

This lady, I'll call her Dorothy, sometimes played one coin, sometimes three, and occasionally five. Had I watched her closely I might have been able to figure out her pattern, but I was primarily concentrating on my own game.

All at once, Dorothy let out a string of obscenities that would make a longshoreman blush. I looked over and saw that she'd hit a royal flush --- with three coins bet. I must confess that I'm programmed to think a royal flush LOOKS pretty. Since playing short coin is never an option for me, I tend to forget that some people play that way.

The NSU player to her immediate left commented that $750 was nothing to sneeze at. I suggested that there was no such thing as a bad time to get a royal flush, although some times were better than others. She cursed some more and went back to playing in her normal pattern --- sometimes one coin, sometimes three, and sometimes five.

If she were a student in the mood for a lesson I would have told her that the best number of coins to bet on that machine is zero, and the second-best is one. Betting five coins is next best, and betting two, three, or four is unconscionably bad. It might surprise you that I recommend betting one coin over five on that machine, but keep in mind that it's a 9/5 DDB game --- a game that only returns 97.9% when played perfectly --- which she wasn't close to doing. You will lose far less by playing one coin at a time than you will five coins at a time. And playing slowly is less unprofitable than playing quickly. But I held my tongue. It's one thing to offer advice to someone who asks for it and it's something else altogether to offer unsolicited advice. Plus, the NSU games were being hammered during this promotion and we needed players playing the lesser games in the high limit room so the house average could be maintained.

Most players don't think in terms of losing the least amount. The downside to playing one coin at a time is that when you DO hit the royal flush, you only get paid $250 rather than the $4,000 you'd get if you happened to be betting five coins. If this is psychologically devastating to you, as apparently it was to Dorothy, then you should never do it.

I assume the object of playing variable amounts of coins is that you are hoping that your losses will come on you partial-coin hands and your big wins will come on your max-coin hands. It's a nice thing to hope for, but an impossible one to manage in practice. You never know when that royal flush is coming.

Another problem with betting partial coins is that the strategy is different than playing the same game with max coins. Take the hand Ah Kh Th 5h 3c in the game Dorothy was playing. Although in the 9/6 game you should play 'AKT5', in the 9/5 game with max coins you should play 'AKT'. In the 9/5 game with partial coins, though, you should play 'AKT5'. I wouldn't expect Dorothy to be savvy about these things, but I WOULD expect most readers to be able to understand that going back and forth between max and partial coins without making adjustments to strategy means that you are giving up more than you need to.

You know yourself. Will hitting a partial-coin royal flush drive you crazy? If so, that's just another reason to never bet that way. (A better reason, of course, is to only play good games where betting maximum coins is always the best bet.)