For the November 16 Gambling with an Edge podcast, Richard and I welcomed David Clary, author of the book Gangsters to Governors: The New Bosses of Gambling in America. That podcast speaks for itself and I’m not covering here what we talked about on the podcast. The last chapter of the book, called “Double or […]
Posts in category Advice for Players
You’re Upsetting Our Players
In 1999, I started communicating with “Richard,” the marketing director of the Laughlin Flamingo hotel. (Today the same property is called the Aquarius, and it may change names again because the parent company is in the process of changing owners.) Richard knew my name because I wrote columns for Strictly Slots and Casino Player, both […]
Understanding a Flow Chart in Super Double Bonu...
Super Double Bonus is a version of Double Bonus where four jacks, queens, and kings earn 600 coins instead of 250 and the straight flush returns 400 instead of 250. The best-paying version, which returns 45 for the full house and 25 for the flush, returns 99.695% when played well. When combined with a decent […]
Year’s end tax questions for gamblers
Russell Fox, our favorite accountant for gamblers will be on the show in a couple weeks. We will be talking about tax things to be thinking about before the end of the year. Send us your questions for Russell. You can post them here, or send them to [email protected].
Be Careful What You Wish For
Say you’re playing 9/6 Jacks or Better and are dealt a hand like A♦ K♣ J♦ T♦ 3♦. The best play, of course, is AJT3. Many players hold the inferior AJT. As I see it, players make the lesser play for one of two reasons: They simply do not know that AJT3 is worth 3.7¢ […]
How Important is Having Fun?
I like my life. And my life includes (currently) maybe 40 hours a month playing video poker. In the good old days, there were long periods where I averaged 200+ hours of video poker each month. That said, while video poker is not unpleasant at all to me, I do not do it because it’s […]
What Should I Say?
There was a news story recently that 11 years ago, a college professor had told Julian Edelman (currently a New England Patriot wide receiver with two Super Bowl rings) that his goal of playing football professional was unrealistic and he should try something else. The teacher recently sent Edelman an apology for doubting his passion […]
I’m Glad I Didn’t Hit It — Revisited
The Undoing Project is a recent book by Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball, Liar’s Poker, and The Blind Side, among others). It follows the careers of two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, as they break new ground and basically invent the field of Behavioral Economics. I’ve written about these guys before and one […]
A Matter of Perspective
If you’re a computer programmer working on a video poker game, the hand A♠ Q♥ T♥ 8♠ 3♥ is equivalent to A♦ Q♣ T♣ 8♦ 3♣, but both of those are different from A♣ Q♥ T♥ 8♠ 3♥. Can you see why? The ranks of the cards are the same and in all three hands […]
Dealing with Anguish
I received the following email recently: “I have been playing a few years and consider myself a pretty good player. I consider myself Bob Dancer-trained and try to play accordingly. I have given up at least six royals going for the high pair. My question is how you overcome the mental anguish of missing the royal. […]