When playing jacks or better video poker, all it takes is to have ONE High Card and you can eliminate the choice of throwing all five cards. My father, Lenny Frome, called this a Razgu hand. Shortly before my mother died, I actually found out that the term was created (or at least popularized) by a friend of theirs. A Razgu is just a hand in which you wish you could start all over again. It is to poker what a mulligan is to golf.
Read MoreThere are many aspects to our lives to which people apply the notion of the importance of having a strategy. Very few of us actually use them for all aspects of our lives. We tend to focus on some important part and then formulate a strategy. Maybe you formulate a strategy for getting out of debt, or for paying for your kids' education. Perhaps you're the type of small businessman who makes sure he has a strategy to make his business a success. We all know there are tons of strategies for how to lose weight.
Read MoreA few months ago, Nik Walenda walked across a tightrope between two Chicago skyscrapers blindfolded. I'm not all that impressed. I think he should try analyzing casino games for a living. Most days it seems a lot like walking a tightrope blindfolded too. Only, if I mess up, I don't just hurt myself. I might cause a casino to lose a lot of money if I allow a game to hit the floor with a Player advantage. After more than 10 years in the industry, I've never done it, but I have heard cases where it did happen due to a math mistake.
Read MoreFacebook is usually a great place for me to get ideas for columns. Within any given week, the odds are someone has posted something absurd enough for me to use as a segue into a topic. This week, I had at least two of them. As they were loosely related, I'll use them as my lead in. One was about a study done about homeopathic medicines. Supposedly 68 different 'common' ones were studied and they did nothing significant to help the condition. The other was about the anti-vaccine movement that links vaccines to autism. This is not a political column, so I'm making no statement about either of these two issues (although I am willing to go on record as saying both of my kids had their vaccines). What I noticed in common for these topics was the number of people who simply dismissed the science behind the facts. Someone had a bad experience with a prescription but a good one with some homeopathic remedy so this becomes 'proof'.
Read MoreWhen my father passed away in 1998, he was just about ready to place an order for the 2nd printing of the 2nd edition of his book Winning Strategies for Video Poker. It was with a little bit of trepidation that we went ahead and ordered the full 2000 copies. I'm not sure how many copies were sold in total before he passed away, but based on what records I can find plus the fact that the full 2000 sold out and I have had it reprinted yet again, I'd say it is fair to say that somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 copies were sold, which is absolutely remarkable for a self-published book from what I'm told.
Read MoreJust how important is it for Players to play the correct strategy in the casino? Most of my columns look at this aspect from only the Player's perspective. I put it in terms of a loss rate per hour to the Player. I turn this into an overall impact to the Player's bankroll over a weeklong trip to Vegas. Today, I want to look at strategy at a very different level. I'm going to look at how it has changed the landscape of gambling in the world.
Read MoreOne of the key principles of Expert Strategy is to know which games to play. For the most part, this means play the games with the highest paybacks possible. If this is all that mattered, there would be a very long line waiting to play whatever game has the highest payback. So, I say 'for the most part', because I recognize that if I'm going to argue that casino gaming is a form of entertainment, then the game you choose to play has to be fun for you. This is a subjective decision. You may hate playing video poker, or you may hate sitting around a table playing blackjack having people analyze all of your plays.
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