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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 7, 2009

How Much Is Your Time Worth?

A beginning player read my "Video Poker for the Intelligent Beginner" book and wanted to learn to play Full Pay Deuces Wild. He would play for nickels, five coins at a time, at the South Point Casino. "Henry" wanted to know if this would be a good use of his time.

Let's assume Henry gets really good and plays 800 hands an hour. That's probably about the maximum anyone can play on these machines, although some players can play faster on other machines. At 25 cents per hand, that's $200 per hour of coin-in.

The game returns 100.76 percent with perfect play and the casino offers a cash slot club of 0.30 percent. (Completely perfect play is essentially impossible. Coming very close to that is a realistic goal if Henry is smarter than average and spends dozens of hours studying and practicing.) On single-point days, this comes out to 101.06 percent, which is $2.12 per hour. On double-point days (on average once or twice a month) you get an extra 60¢ per hour, and on triple-point days (three or four times a year) you earn an additional 60 cents.

If you play 50 hours a month and get $10,000 in coin-in, you'll get four $30 free-play coupons in the mail, which adds $2.40 per hour for your 50 hours, most of which must be played on single-point days. The mailer includes some nice food and show ticket coupons as well.

Playing under the most advantageous conditions, you will earn less than $5 per hour, playing 50 hours a month and earning less than $250, not counting a couple meals. Is this worth your time? Part of this depends on what your alternatives are.

I know of retired people who can live comfortably enough on their Social Security and other income so long as they don't have any big losses. For these people this might be a good alternative, assuming they enjoy gambling in a casino. They're playing a game where they can't get hurt too bad (although $100 daily losses won't be unusual nor will occasional monthly losses of $500 -- if this size of negative swings would be disastrous, Henry should stay out of the casino altogether) and they can continue to play "for the duration."

If Henry isn't sure whether or not he likes to play a lot in a casino, this would be an inexpensive way to find out. Although there will be new faces all the time, he'll run into a lot of the same players every day. Does he like these people or not? If he decides that these people are interesting, then that adds some non-monetary pleasure and shifts the odds towards playing there. If he thinks that most of them are jerks, then likely this won't be a life he enjoys.

Henry will also be able to determine whether or not he can be successful as a player. It's one thing for me to calculate that with perfect play and including the monthly mailers you'll earn $4 or more an hour and it's another thing altogether to get good enough and consistent enough to actually do this. Although the strong player has a significant advantage percentage-wise on this machine, many players are net losers. A large number of players don't go through the effort of learning the strategy well and always following that strategy.

How do you know whether you can become good enough to win? You can't know for sure unless you actually go and try it. And you need to run this experiment for hundreds of hours over several months or more to be sure. All of us go through lucky spells and unlucky spells and you won't know for quite some time whether your results are more due to luck or skill.

There is not magic number of hours when the "short term" automatically turns into the "long term." As a personal rule of thumb, I'd suggest that if you play 500 or more hours a year, your results will usually be pretty much what you deserve. (There are a couple of qualifiers in that sentence. I just can't make it any more precise.) And even then, Henry's total results won't be apparent unless he keeps good records. I suspect that most nickel players do not keep good gambling records.

Your situation and game of choice will be different from Henry's. However the way to go about figuring these things out stays the same. Thoughtful players take the time to go through this process.