VIDEO POKER

It's not the Base Percentage that is Most Important

For quarter players in Las Vegas, Full Pay Deuces Wild (returning 15 for 5-of-a-kind and 5 for 4-of-a-kind) remains the best everyday play that is still found at several casinos. Perhaps half as many of these 100.76% games exist today as a year ago, but it remains a decent play.

The second-best Deuces Wild pay schedule commonly available is called NSU (returning 16 for 5-of-a-kind and 10 for a straight flush). This 99.73% returns a full percentage point less than FPDW, but can be a better play.

Let's look at how it works at the Eastside Cannery. The highest denomination you can play FPDW there is 25¢. The slot club is locked in at 0.083%, even if less-than-100% machines get awarded 2x or 3x points. The machines have a speed governor on them. I assume that you can play about $800 per hour through the machines (which comes out to 640 hands per hour). I haven't actually measured the speed, but I assume that's fairly close. Adding this together, the total return is 100.84% and the expected earnings on a dollars-per-hour basis is $6.72.

If you can afford to play $2 NSU, the math comes out very different. Playing on 3x point days (0.50%, which usually come about more than once a week although not this month), the game is worth 100.23%. You can play $10,000 per hour through the machine, which makes your expected return $23 per hour --- which is quite a bit more than the $6.72 you can make playing FPDW.

The mailers there appear to be based on both theoretical return and the numbers of dollars played. I assume they add less than 0.1% for FPDW players (adding 80¢ per hour) and slightly more than 0.2% for NSU players (adding $20 per hour).

The critical difference deals with the necessary bankroll to play 25¢ FPDW with a 0.18% slot club (adding the slot club to the mailers) and playing NSU with a 0.70% slot club.

Video Poker for Winners allows you to calculate either short run or long run bankroll. Today I want to look at the long run bankroll, which is called "Risk of Ruin" in the software.

Long term bankroll requirements mean you are going to be playing forever and ever amen. Nobody is going to play that long, of course, but it gives you an outside limit on how much a game can cost. You need to determine how much risk you are willing to fade. To start with, I'm going with you being willing to risk a 10% risk of ruin.

For quarter FPDW with a 0.18% slot club, the long-term bankroll required is $3,474. For $2 NSU with a 0.70% slot club, you need a long-term bankroll of $65,371, which is almost 19 times as much.

This is not a trivial difference. Even though the long-term bankroll calculations are inflated because you're not nearly going to be playing forever, you ignore these numbers at your peril. Players do go bankrupt. There aren't any do-overs if you go broke.

There are a lot of players who currently do not have anywhere near a $65K bankroll and see no chance in the world of obtaining one. I encourage these players to reconsider. A major part of increasing your bankroll is to cut back on your expenses and to find extra ways to bring in money. Playing $7-per-hour video poker is NOT a way to increase your bankroll. Even playing full time, that will only bring in $15K a year, and most of us have expenses that exceed that. It's not difficult to find extra sources of income if you really set your mind to it. There are a number of "self-help" business books that can help you obtain the mindset which is needed to increase your bankroll. (I've recommended Robert T. Kiyosaki as a financial author before, but there are other good sources as well.)

Quarter FPDW games may well soon be a thing of the past. When this happens, if today's FPDW players wish to continue to have the advantage playing video poker, they MUST obtain a bigger bankroll in order to play other games successfully.

I've heard many quarter players become spitting mad when they see FPDW games disappear or slowed down or have their slot club benefits decreased. Becoming angry is an option open to all of us. If it serves as a wake-up call, then getting really ticked off is useful. If these players do not improve their skill and/or their bankroll, however, they will soon find they won't be able to compete.

In three year's time I expect virtually all FPDW games to be gone in Las Vegas. At that time, there will be thousands of players without the bankroll to play larger games where they will have the advantage. But any player who dedicates himself today to significantly increasing his bankroll has a good shot at being able to compete then.