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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.

For a 3,000-word preview of Bob's juicy new novel, "Sex, Lies, and Video Poker", visit www.bobdancer.com.

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Aug 13, 2007

Me and Anthony

Anthony Curtis is a friend of mine. He's the publisher of the "Las Vegas Advisor," a monthly newsletter chock-full of getting the most bang for your buck in Las Vegas, and owner/publisher of Huntington Press. HP is the largest publisher in Las Vegas and specializes in subjects related to intelligent gambling, but also includes titles covering other areas. Several Bob Dancer titles are published by HP.

This article, however, isn't about Anthony's business success. Rather it is about his gambling success compared to mine.

I moved to Las Vegas in 1993 to be a professional blackjack player. My skills became decent, but not great. In about a year, many casinos backed me off from their tables and my blackjack career was over.

Anthony, on the other hand, has enjoyed great success at blackjack, both in regular casino play and in tournaments. He was a member of Stanford Wong's "group of hotshots" that analyzed tournament strategy, eventually leading to Wong's "Casino Tournament Strategy."

I've tried to figure out why he was so much more successful than I was at blackjack. I'm assuming were approximately equally bright. I've come to the conclusion that he had smarter gambling buddies (including Wong and Blair Rodman, recent WSOP bracelet winner) than I did and they figured out things together. Having study partners and computerized learning tools is a smarter way to get good than the lone ranger approach I used. I certainly used this approach in graduate school, but when I was studying blackjack I didn't know others doing the same.

Now let's look at video poker. I've enjoyed much better than average success at this game while Anthony hasn't. He's played quite a bit and remains considerably in the red. How come?

Anthony's done a lot of the right things. He's published books by me and Jean Scott, among others, with all sorts of advice on video poker and related subjects. He's a "hands on" publisher meaning he's a line-by-line editor as well, so you know he's read the books carefully. On occasion he's asked me questions about certain promotions or video poker situations. Although he chose not to publish the Dancer/Daily Winner's Guides because he believed they were too technical for mass sales, he's read from each of them.

He sold tens of thousands of copies of WinPoker, and now even more copies of Video Poker for Winners. He owns and knows how to use this software. So how come he doesn't play better?

I've come to the conclusion that the reason he doesn't play better video poker is that he doesn't have a hunger to succeed in this game. Anthony's life is about being a publisher, being on television regularly, being a father, etc. He's had enviable success at that life. Whether he wins or loses $20,000 a year at video poker is largely irrelevant.

He frequently plays with friends to relax. Alcohol is involved. He knows about good pay schedules, but when he's out with his buddies he'll sometimes settle for whatever's at hand.

When he studied blackjack, however, he was very hungry to succeed. He was living by his wits in Las Vegas, and an extra $100 a week was VERY important back then. When you combine that hunger with intelligence and smart friends, no wonder he was successful. Like I'm doing today, when you're trying to learn something well enough so that you can write authoritatively about it you force yourself to learn it a lot better than if you weren't going to share the knowledge.

For the most part, I've been able to maintain most of my hunger for success at video poker. Not all of it, but most of it.

Enough about me and Anthony. How does this apply to you?

A good formula for success at video poker (or blackjack or most other games of skill) is to master the existing literature, practice on the computer, surround yourself with others attempting to succeed, and discuss those areas where either the authors don't discuss or the authors give conflicting advice.

No author is going to be able to present a roadmap that's exactly right for you. Each author has a different set of skills than you do. The games change over time. Slot clubs are different. But with study and discussion among other "hungry" players, you'll be able to apply many of the lessons from these books to whatever situations exist today. You WILL improve.

There's nothing inherently wrong with Anthony's approach today. He doesn't look to video poker as a source of income. He looks at it as a source of recreation and something to do when he is hanging with his friends. When I showed him this article, he added the following:

"I still attempt to make VP at least a breakeven proposition. I do play bad schedules in bars for low denoms, but I get two important things back. First is the drinks. Drinking is a part of my recreational structure. I do it when I'm not working and it's something that I am willing to pay for. Hence, the free drinks, and not so seldomly, other compensation, have true value for me. The first thing I do when sit down is evaluate which of the bad schedules will cost me the least. The next thing I do is set the speed button to low. As I play, I force myself to take breaks or ponder hands. This can be done by bringing your strategy cards along. All of this keeps me in the realm of positive. The second benefit I get from playing is also not trivial. It keeps me up on the game that I have to write about so often. If I never played anything but positive schedules, I wouldn't play that often and couldn't possibly write about, or edit products on, video poker as I do. So you can see that there's honestly much more to my equation than is obvious. And when I do find a profitable situation, I play it aggressively and close to optimally."