Vegas casinos hate America

i thought we were making this country great again. Thanks Trump!

Free drinks could soon be much harder to come by in #LasVegas

 

Ha, good! If they don't give me drinks I stand a much better chance of winning.

 

Video poker was just like video games in the arcade in the 1980s — you just played it to waste time once you got good at it.

 

Don't how true it is anymore, but there used to be a pretty good number of people who were skilled at finding so-called "full-pay" Deuces Wild games, which have a house edge of -0.76%. You read that right ... played properly they offered the player a positive expected return. Casino comps like cash-back, room, food and beverage comps, etc., were gravy on top.

Thing is, you have to bet the max every hand (which might be $5 or more) AND you gotta be prepared to play a long time (because the bonus for the royal flush is where the positive value kicks in). Oh, and you gotta play every hand damn near perfectly ... so you gotta lay off the booze.

 

My dad is pretty expert at video poker and plays for hours. Double Double Bonus has the slimmest house edge. With comps, etc. he says he nets a few bucks an hour on average playing nickels or quarters.

 

Yep. Word gets out mighty quick.

 

Mount Airy gambler drinks 27 rum and cokes, falls off stool

 

I think that's what the hardest part about gambling is, is having patience. Everybody wants to win big, and have the big cash out. In reality, you might win a couple hundred dollars once every 100 trips. The real skill comes from having the patience and the discipline to call it a day when you're up $50 after an hour or two, and not chase the big money.*
You can consistently win, but you have to be content to grind it out, be disciplined enough to know when to walk away, and seasoned enough to know when you've probably topped out for the session.

*That's all to scale, of course. If you're a big swinging dick who can afford to play $25 per hand blackjack for more than a few bad hands without blowing a month's salary, then maybe you can win $300 or $400 per session. If you're like most of us schlubs pouncing on the $5 and $10 tables, then $50 might be the best you can do.

 

#Hero
#Blessed

 

Unless you're playing a positive-expectation game (say, the rare-as-hens-teeth 100+% video poker machine, or blackjack when you're counting cards), no amount of discipline can put you ahead long-run. It's true that the vast majority of gamblers lose more than they should, but that's because they play bad games (say a 6:5 blackjack game) ... and some of those, they play badly.

Now if you do everything right -- say, blackjack with perfect basic strategy, or a damn-near-100% video poker game played perfectly -- you can keep your losses very, very small (on average) and, perhaps, move slightly into the plus column with comps.

Even then, you have to be willing to put a lot of money at risk to ride out the fluctuations. Avoiding gambler's ruin -- when you run out of money while waiting for a bad run of luck to run its course -- requires a pretty big bankroll. Let's say you're willing to run a 5% risk of gambler's ruin, and the casino doesn't give you any cash-back comps. You'd need a bankroll of around $4,600 if you were playing full-pay deuces wild and you were playing it perfectly. Had you walked into there with only $1,000, you'd have run about a 50% chance of walking out broke.