CasinoGaming.com


	Sundays: Inside Gaming Tuesdays: Video Poker Wednesdays: Off the Shelf Fridays: Richard Eng, Player's Edge Saturdays: Pocket Aces

VIDEO POKER

Columns

• Back to Bob's index

• Back to columnist index

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 more details and a schedule of Bob's free classes, visit www.bobdancer.com.

Feb. 03, 2009

What is Your Time Horizon?

A lot of players feel stress over gambling results. Certainly losing is more stressful than winning, but it's a lot more than that. A large part of the stress we feel is the time horizon at which we look at our scores.

To show you what I mean, let's look at the year-end results of a very strong and successful, albeit hypothetical, video poker player:

2001	+133,000
2002	+82,000
2003	+222,000
2004	+340,000
2005	+27,000
2006	+150,000
2007	+94,000

These are excellent results. Probably less than one player in 500 has scores that average $150,000 a year, which is what these do. If most players were told they could get that kind of results, they'd take it in a heartbeat. A hundred and fifty grand a year is a pretty stress-free life, wouldn't you say? Especially when you consider that meals, hotel rooms, cruises, and various other goodies that big players get aren't included in these figures.

Now let's look more closely at 2006, which at $150,000 is an "average year." $150,000 a year means $12,500 a month, but the monthly scores aren't constant at all.

January		-$15,200
February		$52,100
March		$15,200
April		$12,500
May		-$15,300
June		$30,200
July		$40,200
August		-$16,800
September		-23,300
October		$62,500
November		-$43,300
December		$51,200

Five of the twelve months are negative. Not quite so stress-free when you look at monthly data. It turned out that December was a big month. Had the biggest three months been even or negative, the player would have been down for the year.

The average of these monthly scores is $12,500. Since the April score turns out to be average in value, let's look at the daily scores for April:

1-Apr	-$2,300	16-Apr	$14,400
2-Apr	-$6,700	17-Apr	$2,300
3-Apr	$8,700	18-Apr	-$14,300
4-Apr	$0	19-Apr	-$12,700
5-Apr	$400	20-Apr	$3,100
6-Apr	$1,300	21-Apr	$17,300
7-Apr	-$8,200	22-Apr	-$800
8-Apr	-$8,300	23-Apr	$18,200
9-Apr	$0	24-Apr	-$300
10-Apr	$19,300	25-Apr	-$2,900
11-Apr	-$10,400	26-Apr	$0
12-Apr	-$22,400	27-Apr	$0
13-Apr	$6,500	28-Apr	$4,300
14-Apr	$0	29-Apr	-$2,600
15-Apr	-$8,700	30-Apr	$17,300

Although the monthly score turned out to be "average", eight of the 30 days had scores bigger than the monthly total --- sometimes positive and sometimes negative. Halfway through the month the score was $30,800 in the hole. The biggest score during the month was negative. Numbers like these on a daily basis look far more stressful than the "$150,000 per year average" they turn out to be.

I'm not going to, but we could take it down to lower levels as well. The minus $300 score on April 24 seems to be "almost nothing" on this score sheet, but the daily total could easily mask trips to two different casinos. One ended up plus $5,400 and the other ended up minus $5,700.

The numbers in this example are hypothetical. The April scores are approximately autobiographical for one of my months in 2003. I found one month in one year in my records that added up to $12,500 and these were the daily scores for that month. Although these numbers may be bigger than you're used to, and your numbers may have more minus signs than this successful player has, every full-time player has a similar pattern of scores.

I'm a player that has a pretty long time horizon. I know my annual scores will be pretty healthy if I keep nose-to-the-grindstone (which I do). They don't have to be positive every year, but so far they have. I don't sweat the daily scores. I tell people that "today's score doesn't matter." That's an exaggeration, of course, but a daily result is really just a small blip of data on the annual score sheet.

Shirley, on the other hand, cares a lot more than I do about the daily scores. With negative scores, she dies a little bit. With positive scores she rejoices.

For both of us, negative scores are about twice as bad as positive scores. That is, however bad we feel after losing $1,000, it takes a win of $2,000 to make up for it psychologically. The difference between us is that she looks at the daily scores so she feels bad a lot. I look at the annual scores almost always so I never feel bad about them.

What Shirley and I go through psychologically is likely true for others as well. If your time horizon is short, you feel a lot more stress in your life than if your time horizon is long.

How do you change your time horizon? I'm not sure. I suspect, however, that realizing how your time horizon affects your level of stress is a good first step in dealing with that stress. When the cause of stress is psychological, it follows that the cure for that stress will be psychological as well.