Ed. Note This article was drawn from my seminar during the Casino Player
Gaming Festival presented at the Tropicana (LV) in June 1996.
Unfortunately, this cry of anguish is heard much too often, not only from Video Poker players, but from players in virtually all games. It is especially dismaying to Video Poker players who are skillful in a game which has practically no house advantage (or even gives the players a slight advantage), to lose much more often than they win.
Writers covering table poker have provided the answer, but there are still too many
gamblers who have not gotten the message:
It's the Nature of the Game
In its simplest terms, any game which includes a payout table of varying odds, such as pushes for a pair of Jacks, ranging to 800-1 on a Royal Flush must necessarily create
many losers to reward the fortunate few who catch the high-paying winners. The overall
long-term payback may indicate that virtually all the money wagered is ultimately returned to the players, but players must recognize that the road to break-even is usually paved with a plurality of losses. The fortunate few who hit the big "jackpot" wins early or more often than the average, see the game in a much happier light, but they are few indeed.
To illustrate this point, we used the Masque Video Poker tutoring software, which has a free-running expert strategy simulator to collect some data. A sample of 96 players, each bankrolled with 400 bet units (the recommended 80-game bankroll), played full-pay 9-6 Jacks or Better. Each player playeed every game at 5-coin limit, for 500 games or bust, whichever came first. Look at the results:
11 out of 96 Busted
65 Lost (Average Loss = 200)
31 Won (Average Win = 200)
No Royals Showed Up
Losing PC.....3%
With about 48,000 hands played (all busts happened close to 500 game limit) the coin-in totalled nearly 240,000 units. Expert play at this game offers a 99.54% payback which would be expected to produce a loss of 1,100 units rather than 7,200 units (3%). The absence of a Royal Flush would account for a shortfall of 4,000 units and the rest of the shortfall would have to come under the heading of "Luck", or Poisson's Revenge.
But let's not overlook the fact that about two-thirds of the players lost...toss in a Royal or two and you still would have about the same percentage of losers.
If you think that is the result of playing at a disadvantage, consider the simulation using
full-pay Deuces Wild as the game...with a 100.6% payback. Here we took 50 players with 400 unit bankrolls, limiting play to 500 games or bust. Not any better, I'm sorry to report.
4 out of 50 Busted
34 Lost (Average Loss = 230)
16 Won (Average Win = 300)
No Royals Showed Up
Losing PC.....2.5%
Again about two-thirds were losers and even if a couple of Royals had shown up, the majority of players were destined to be losers.
We also tried a few "money management" schemes, limiting losses and letting winning run, and they also proved futile in changing the basic character of the win/lose distribution.
Poker writers have stressed that winning a lot of hands is not the expected pattern for the astute player. That truth certainly carries over to Video Poker. Poker writers have stressed that even players who are good enough to have a positive win-rate must be prepared for long strings of losing sessions and cannot be assured of winning until very long-term averages work for them.
Here again, that lesson serves them well when they take their break at the Video Pokers.