Ok, so that’s what we’ve come up with. It’s certainly not an exhaustive list, to the contrary! We’d like to know what you think? What other ways do you make your $100 for gambling last a bit longer when you’re in the casino? This is a situation where there are a full 7 players at a blackjack table or 14 people at a craps table. The benefit to playing at a full table is that is really slows down the number of decisions per hour. The fewer decisions per our, the less you’ll lose in said hour. The dealer will have re-shuffle at Blackjack, the dealers have to pay out all the crazy bets on a craps table or figure out how much to pay to which players at a crowded roulette table. Point is, the more players at a table game, the longer it will take between money losing opportunities. –Play the minimum bet on a slot slowly –Slot play VP for free drinks This may seem like a strange comment to make, but really, it makes sense, doesn’t it? The more frequently you’re away from the table (or video poker machince) the less time you’re making decisions which can deplete your $100. If you were to take a break at what appears to be the half way marker during a six deck Blackjack game, you’re buying time away from the action. When you come back, you’ve potentially sat out 1/3 – 1/4 of the shoe. Don’t (I repeat: Don’t) wait until the shuffle up of the shoe to wait to use the restroom. If you do, you’re playing hands you could otherwise being sitting out. One positive upside to setting away from the tables/VP machines is that you’re getting rated on your players card for time that you’re not actually gambling. Knowing that casinos are looking for a minimum of 4-hours/day, each bathroom break is worth about 10 minutes to you. Do this once every hour during your 4-hour “gaming session” and you’ve knocked 40 minutes off your potential money loss time! Pettersson said the machines with 99.8 percent payouts still award three points for every dollar spent. WMS designers created the new games based on feedback from players, with features they requested, company officials said. Station Casinos is updating its video poker offerings with new machines that let players customize backgrounds and the way cards are dealt. "The company will continue to offer more 100 percent payback machines than any of our competitors online gambling in canada eastbound," she said. "We remain committed to providing our guests the best gaming value and video poker products available." Gamblers with loyalty cards used to receive three points for every dollar they spent on most video poker machines, including full-pay ones. But Station recently changed the formula on its 100 percent games. Now, players earn one point for every $4 they gamble. Manufacturers soon began offering players choices on slots and other electronic games to draw them, and their money, in even further. When players first sit down at a My Poker game, it asks for a one-time log in, which allows gamblers to customize the experience. Data is integrated with the player’s loyalty card, so the machine remembers the person's choices. Players also can customize games online. Unlike slot machines, there aren’t as many random number combinations in video poker, which uses a 52-card deck. Serious players quickly figured out they could identify the video poker machines with the best payback percentages and increase their winnings . The My Poker machines allow players to design their own look and feel for each game and customize how fast the cards are dealt, how they're sorted on the screen, the color of the background and style of cards. But at the same time, the casino company is removing many of its highest-paying video poker games. The games are exclusively at Station Casinos. "Even with that adjustment, we still remain the leader in the market for offering the most machines with a 100 percent payback structure," Pettersson said. Some of the options are solely for looks, such as background color and card art. But some can help optimize play. Yes, it is a wild ride – but because we have always made the best choices, based on sound mathematical data, in what and how we play in a casino, although we must suffer through the many expected losses in the short term, our reward is being winners in the long term. However, there was one early sign that might have foreshadowed my later activities. I loved to play games, from “Chutes and Ladders” with my 2 little sisters, to Monopoly as we grew older. We were a very competitive family – and even today when we get together we play Scrabble for blood! However, at the end of our three-day visit we had lost our whole $3000 vacation bankroll. We were not sad; it had been so much fun. But on our flight home, we agreed that we had enjoyed this kind of vacation so much that we needed to find a way not to lose so much money so we could do it more often. We realized we had temporarily lost our normal good financial sense in the heady casino atmosphere. Perhaps we could find a frugal way to have more casino vacations. Maybe it wasn’t just all luck whether you won or lost in a casino! There is not one key to successful gambling, but attention to many details, including: Through the years Brad and I have always been looking for “good games,” but we have also been looking for “good opportunities.” These are the numerous extra benefits casinos provide their customers: players club points good for cash or free play, bonus and multiple-points promotions. drawings, tournaments, mailed bounce-back offers, and coupons. In reality, there is no one big secret – not a magic bullet I can describe in 25 words or less. It is hundreds – no, thousands – of little details that make a gambler successful and most of them are not secret at all. You can find them in many printed resources, like the four books in my Frugal Gambler series online slots real money canada medicine, and all over the Internet, including the site where you are reading this article and where I will be sharing more helpful suggestions in the coming months. When we got home, Brad put me in charge of research, and I became a dedicated student of gambling. I went to the library and brought back piles of books on the subject. I subscribed to gaming magazines and we went to seminars that taught game strategies. I studied every bit of information I could find. At first I didn’t have a computer, but when I finally jumped on the information highway in cyberspace, I found even more help. And one of the most important non-secret reasons for Brad’s and my successful gambling run of 30+ years is that I have continued this study up to this very present day. And one of the biggest of these extra benefits is comps, those freebie meals, hotel rooms, show tickets machine a sous jeux gratuit, cruises, parties, or gifts that a player can earn as rewards for their casino action. We have learned to navigate this complex comp system and thus been able to enjoy tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of perks over the last 30+ years, resulting in Dan Rather nicknaming me the Queen of Comps on “48 Hours.” We used to consider these extras as “gravy,” just something to add to the value of our play on good games. However, the casino world has changed since the economic slowdown in the late 2000’s, and many casinos are removing or downgrading those good games in order to improve their suffering bottom lines. So now the search for the “extras” has become one of our most important tasks since their value is needed to make up for the lost value in the games themselves. My husband Brad and I have been gambling in casinos for the last 30+ years, with such good financial success that the tax people have demanded documentation! Seems they think no one can beat the casino odds year after year. But we have done so, and many want to know our secret. Below I will give you some general precepts and some specific examples from our own experiences. "In the year-and-a-half that Ginnie and I played blackjack in Vegas we made about $12,000 from blackjack (including promotions directly related to blackjack) and $21,000 from coupons and other promotions," says Bob. "It was a subsistence success and when the blackjack promotions disappeared we had to switch to quarter video poker." Surprisingly, Bob found some more machines awarding points at the inflated rate and he restricted his play to those games until, within a few months, they were all fixed by management. By November, things had turned around and Bob was now up $70,000 for the year - a turnaround of $170,000. At this point he got a little bolder and decided to try his luck on a $100 9/6 machine slots for fun quizzes, deciding to risk up to $40,000. It took him just three hours to lose the entire forty grand. In 1991 Bob met Ginnie, an attractive Asian girl, 10 years his junior blackjack online office, on the dance floor. Bob is an accomplished dancer and actually chose his pen name, Bob Dancer, based on his fondness for dancing. The couple began dating on a steady basis and Bob began teaching her about blackjack. They spent many weekends in Las Vegas taking advantage of casino promotional programs designed for out-of-state players. These programs were prevalent at many casinos in the early 90's and required a player to buy-in for a fixed amount (usually around $1,000) and they were then given extra chips (usually 10%), plus a free room and some credit for food. The chips were all nonnegotiable and couldn't be cashed in, they had to be played, but if you played a break-even game of blackjack, it was fairly easy to come out ahead on average, although as in all gambling, some trips were positive and others were negative. The trend the past few years has been for many Las Vegas-area casinos to cut their cashback/comps on their better paying video poker machines, but Bob doesn't see that being much of a problem for good players. "There are still plenty of games out there, but adjustments need to be made," he says. Although Bob makes it sound easy, he does warn players that "video poker, played well, is a grind-it-out game" and players must have a sufficient bankroll in order to finance their play. "If one royal flush is going to make a big difference in your bankroll then you're playing for stakes that are way too high. Royal flushes come every 40,000 hands on average. There are times when it will be a couple hundred thousand hands between royals and there are times when it will be two or three in the same day." During the course of time, however, it became more difficult for Bob and Ginnie to use their advantage-play methods. Many of the casinos discontinued their bonus chip programs and those that kept it barred the couple from playing because they felt they were “abusing” the program. It also became harder to use coupons because many casino employees were now familiar with their faces and wouldn't let them use the coupons more than once. Once a player knows the proper strategy, what's next? "Actually, learning the game is the easy part," says Bob. "Once that's mastered, players need to learn the slot club inside and out. Talk to other players to find out what promotions are in place. Every casino has its own idiosyncrasies that aren't written down anywhere, but you can find out about them by networking with other players. Video poker players make more off promotions than they do off the games. That was true in the past and it's still true today. The best players learn how to calculate when they have the edge by analyzing how much the game pays, how much the slot club pays and how much the promotions are worth." When it was all over, Bob and Shirley had won slightly more than one million dollars (including cashback from the player's club), plus several cars, two computers, a home entertainment center and more than four million frequent flyer miles. Part of the reason for the couple's success was that the casino was too generous with its player's club benefits, plus it had mistakenly programmed some video poker machines to award player's club points at a higher than normal rate. Since Bob was able to take advantage of these facts, did he feel badly about it? That evening, Bob played his $25 machine, while Shirley tried her luck on the $100 version under Bob's watchful eyes. Within 15 minutes, Bob hit a royal for $100,000 and within the next half-hour Shirley hit a royal for $400,000. The half-a-million dollar payoff was certainly the highlight of Bob's video poker career, but it also prompted the casino executives to take a closer look at his play and it marked the beginning of the end for Bob and Shirley's welcome at the MGM Grand. And which game is the best to play? According to Bob, "It depends on where you're going to be playing. If you go on the Internet to Yahoo's discussion group VP Free (http://members.cox.net/vpfree/), it lists the best video poker games at most casinos in the country. No matter where you live, you can find the most lucrative game available in the casinos near you. Whatever it is, that's the game you want to learn." When asked what is the single most important thing the average video poker player should learn, Bob gives a surprisingly candid answer. "The average person is not going to be successful at video poker," he says. "Video poker is applied mathematics and the average person with a casual interest in the game won't get a long-term advantage over the casino because he isn't willing to study hard enough to get an edge." Dancer plays at a number of casinos, including in no particular order, both Fiestas, Palms, Golden Nugget, Ellis Island, Gold Coast, Orleans, Sam's Town, among others. "In 2004 the Orleans and Gold Coast were probably two of my top four casinos for playing," he says. His game of choice is Not So Ugly Deuces (NSUD): a Deuces Wild game which, when played perfectly, returns 99.73%. "But nobody plays it perfectly," he adds. "There's a whole bunch of penalty card situations and nobody has them all down pat." Besides writing "Million Dollar Video Poker," plus a steamy novel titled "Sex Lies and Video Poker," Bob also writes about video poker for numerous gaming magazines and teaches weekly video poker classes at Silverton casino in Las Vegas, plus occasionally at other casinos across the country. He also markets a line of strategy cards and a series of Winner's Guides for players wanting to improve their skills. Additionally, Bob and his business partner, Jeffrey Compton offer their marketing services to casinos through their company, Compton Dancer Consulting. "A lot of players get annoyed by this. They have studied to the point that they've finally gotten good at the game and then the casino changes things. There are many players who believe that they have the right to get better and that the casino should stay a sitting duck by not changing. Well, the guy running the casino doesn't see it that way. So if you're going to play in this game you have to be willing to get better or be left behind." The two Coast casinos give double points on holidays, so that's when you'll find Bob playing there. "It's a .30% cashback club and the double points make it a worthwhile play," he says with a smile. Games vary the size of the four-of-a-kind jackpots by paying less coins on the more frequent winning hands like straights and two pair. However, that's how players determine their favorite games. Do I want to play longer on a game like Jacks or Better or take a shot at a bigger jackpot as in the industry's most popular game, Double Double Bonus Poker? Most people who work at making money on video poker avoid volatile games like this one and prefer Jacks or Better. Others prefer Double Double for the gambling side of the game - it is a fun and wild ride. Unlike bar owners, who are liable for the actions of their intoxicated patrons, casinos don’t have such liability. And unlike alcohol and drug addictions, which are devastating in their own ways, gambling addictions don’t leave visible physical traces. Merely financial ruin. O’Connor was a “whale.” Given these odds, how does O’Connor’s performance stack up? In a nutshell: you make a bet, the machine deals a five-card hand, you choose which cards to hold and which to discard, the machine deals replacement cards, and then you pay or get paid according to your final hand. “As a high-powered person, video poker would be a lot more enticing … than a slot machine. You can change the outcome based on the cards you select. You think you’ve got an element of control. … That’s why people get addicted.” After it was revealed that San Diego’s former mayor Maureen O’Connor took $2 million from her dead husband’s foundation to support her gambling addiction, wagered more than $1 billion at casinos around the country and ended up with $13 million in net losses, one question was why. An Oregon study in 2003 found that almost three quarters of gamblers in addiction treatment programs enrolled because of video poker, which some have dubbed “video crack.” Slot machines were second, with 10 percent. A book published in 2005 about the link between Indian gaming and personal bankruptcy rates argues that machine games are designed to be both addictive and effective at generating revenue. And a casino’s willingness to extend credit to customers makes it more enticing. Casinos say they attempt to stamp out irresponsible behavior, but they also court the kinds of customers who are almost guaranteed to be profitable for them. A clear picture of O’Connor’s gambling habits has not yet emerged, but these calculations, however rudimentary, back up what several experts said: that amount is astounding real money slots online zoo, but not unfathomable. Wendy Reeve, executive director of Casino Operations with Sycuan Casino online casino slots canada balsam, said video poker gives players an illusion of control. For that reason, she surmised that it’s popular with people in positions of power who like slot-style games. O’Connor’s high-betting volumes and huge losses make her a jaw dropping statistic in gambling history. Her story unfolded against a backdrop that apparently made it easy for a person of means to breeze through a fortune by gambling in her own backyard as well as from coast to coast. In Nevada, the state’s requires that casinos help problem gamblers. Casinos must post gambling addiction hotline numbers in visible places, they must offer patrons the option to fill out self-exclusion forms, which prevent casinos from letting the patrons back for a set period of time. Their staff are trained to look for problems, said A.G. Burnett, chairman of the Nevada Gaming Control Board. All video poker tables resemble this one to a greater or less degree. In Jacks or Better, which is the plain vanilla version of video poker that all other games are based on, the casinos and manufacturers focus on changing just two payouts in order to tweak their payback percentage for the games in one direction or the other—the full house and the flush. Video poker looks like a slot machine and indeed has a lot of similarities with the slots. The biggest difference between the two games is the payback percentage. The amount of money that a gambling machine is programmed to pay back per $100 is considered its payback percentage. Once you’ve decided how much you want to bet per hand, you can press the deal button. When you do, your account on the machine is debited by your bet amount, and you get 5 cards dealt to you. You have the option of keeping any combination of cards and of discarding any combination of cards. Our online video poker section includes detailed information about how signup bonuses work for video poker players, and we offer recommendations for which online casinos are safe places to play—as opposed to some online casinos which are NOT safe places to play. In video poker, instead of getting paid off by some arbitrary combination like 3 cherries, you get paid off based on the poker hand ranking of your final result. A royal flush is the top paying hand, a straight flush is usually the 2nd highest paying hand, and so on. Another way to look at this number is as the house edge. That’s just the payback percentage subtracted from 100%. This is the way we look at the casino’s advantage for most table games. Once you’ve inserted your money, you decide how many coins you want to wager on each hand. You should always wager max coins, which on most video poker machines is 5 coins. The most common denominations for video poker machines are quarter and dollar machines. So if you insert $100 into a dollar machine, you’ll have 100 credits. Insert that same $100 into a quarter machine, and you’ll have 400 credits. But with a royal flush slots canada 900, you get a payout of 250 to 1 on every bet except for the 5 coin bet. On that one online craps for real money real world, you get an 800 to 1 payout (or 4000 coins). The pay table is what determines how much you win based on the strength of a given hand. You’ll find pay tables on slot machines, too, but they’re relatively meaningless—again, you don’t have any way of knowing what the probability of getting a particular result is on a slot machine game. That probability is controlled by the slot machine’s random number generator, which has settings that are determined by the manufacturer in order to meet a certain expected payback percentage. By manipulating the probabilities of getting certain results, then comparing that with the payout amount of these combinations, a slot machine manufacturer can predict within a few tenths of a percentage point how much that machine is going to pay out in winnings over time. You’ll notice something else about this set-up, if you’re paying attention. Since the probabilities of getting certain hands is a known factor, you can make intelligent decisions about how to play each hand in order to get the best possible expected outcome every time. In fact, if you’re uncomfortable playing for 5 coins roulette real money 911, you should lower your stakes. It’s cool if you don’t want to play for $5 per hand. Just scale it down to a quarter machine and play for $1.25 per hand. But don’t cheat yourself out of that bonus payout for the highest possible hand by betting only $1 per hand on a dollar video poker machine. The house edge for the full pay machine is 0.46%, so that’s the amount you expect to lose per hour—0.46% times $3000. That’s $13.80 per hour. In that respect, video poker is much like blackjack. Since we’re dealing with known probabilities based on a 52 card deck, we can determine with a great amount of accuracy what the correct play is on every single hand. When you make the correct play on every hand, you’re engaged in optimal strategy. Getting a cherry on any given reel after a spin might programmed to happen 1 in every 10 spins, or it might be 1 in every 20 spins, or it might be 1 in every 100 spins free online casino canada inc, or any other number. There’s a reason for this recommendation. This makes it easy for humble gambling writers like us to write about online video poker, though. With over 3000 online casinos out there, it would be a Herculean task to write about all of them if they each had unique games available. On the other hand, suppose you have 4 cards to a royal flush, and you also have a pair. The odds of making your royal if you break the flush are about 1/47, but the payoff if you success is 800 coins. That’s far better than an expected value of $1, so you should break the pair and go for the royal flush. Even though the odds of hitting the hand are around 2%, the payoff is more than worth it. The payback percentage is a long-term, expected result based on probability. The more bets you make, the more likely it is that you’ll see results which mirror the expected return. Casinos count on this in order to make a profit. We have an entire section of this site devoted to explaining the differences between video poker games. What many gamblers who are new to the online casino scene don’t realize is that there are only maybe 3 dozen kinds of online casino software out there. Most Internet casinos lease their software from a software provider, and if you play at one casino using that software, the games are the same as at any other casino using that software. Here’s an example: You’ll find further information on everything discussed above within our free video poker section. We’ll give you all the advice you need if you’re interested in practicing your strategies before playing for real money. That’s an expected return in that example. Your actual results will vary because of standard deviation. You might finish your short slots session by winning $8, or $16, or even $24. Or you might lose a greater amount. And if you want to know how much of a difference that makes to your bankroll and how fast, take a look at the section of this page (above) in which we compare the difference between 9/6 Jacks or Better and 8/5 Jacks or Better. Instead of symbols on spinning reels, the action in video poker takes place over 5 “stops”, and the result in each one of those is from a deck of standard playing cards. In most video poker games, a virtual 52 card deck is used, although some games use a 53 card deck with a joker thrown in as a wild card. Knowing the correct strategy versus not knowing the correct strategy can be the difference between losing $13.80 per hour and losing $81 per hour. The correct video poker strategy varies from game to game based on the game’s rules and the payouts for the various hands. The strategy for Deuces Wild is dramatically different from the strategy for Jacks or Better, as you might expect it to be. Since this site is written in English, a large percentage of our visitors come from the United States. And video poker is more popular in the United States than anywhere else in the world. So it made sense for us to create a section about the game as it’s played in the USA . This section includes a rundown of what states offer casinos with real money video poker and which states don’t. We also look at what the various states have to say about the legalities of playing online for real money. Normal video poker machines are called “single play” because they invite you to play one game at a time. But these certainly aren’t the only types of video poker games. You’ll also encounter games that enable you to play three, five, 10, 50 and even 100 games at a time. For example, if you normally play single-play Jacks or Better at the $1 level, it may seem logical that you could play 100-play Jacks or Better at the 1¢ level. After all, you wager one dollar on each hand in either game. But, by looking at the increased variance for 100-play (10 times that of single-play), it’s easy to see that the same bankroll won’t be sufficient. As stated above, variance for single-play Jacks or Better is 19.5. A 3-play Jacks or Better game has a variance of 23.4—a 20 percent increase. In the 5-play version of Jacks or Better, the variance now becomes 27.3—40 percent greater than single-play. 50-play Jacks or Better has a variance of 115.8, and the 100-play version has a variance of 214. That’s 997 percent greater than the single-play version of the game! We’re talking about a huge variance for a game that initially has a relatively low variance. Those are some pretty big numbers. But what do they mean to the average video poker player?
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