Pocket Hand Win Frequency

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Pocket Hand Win Frequency

            The inspiration for this week's column comes from a reader this week who e-mailed me and had a question regarding a column I recently wrote about Ultimate Texas Hold'em.   In that column I was describing a hand I saw actually played at the Wynn a while back.  The Player was dealt a K-8 offsuit and did NOT wager 4x at that point, instead opting to wait for the Flop.  I had said that this hand was a marginal 4x wager and that the Player could expect to win the hand 54%, while losing it 42+% of the time. 

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Ultimate Texas Hold'em Complexity

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Ultimate Texas Hold'em Complexity

           This past week, I received 2 e-mails regarding Ultimate Texas Hold'em.  That's a good sign that I have found my topic for the week.  The first e-mail was from a reader who saw my column from several weeks ago about the strategy for UTH for the 4x wager.  I have frequently written that Players are too timid when making that 4x wager.  I understand the reasons why.  If you are at a $10 table, you already have $30 on the table (ante, blind and Trips Bonus).  $40 more will make you a $70 Player and that might not be what you bargained for.  But, the strategy dictates that you should make this wager about 45% of the time, which means you can either be prepared for it, or prepared to earn nowhere near the 99+% payback that UTH can offer.

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The ULTIMATE Irony

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The ULTIMATE Irony

            Just a few months ago, I wrote about how I thought Ultimate Texas Hold'em has the perfect betting structure.  This past Saturday night, I had an opportunity to see this in action.  My wife and I had the opportunity to see the new variety show at the Wynn called Showstoppers.  Good Show.  I definitely recommend it, but I would suggest looking for discount tickets!  After the show, we stopped to watch an Ultimate Texas Hold'em table game in action.  It was a $15 table, which is not for the feint of heart.  You have to be ready to wager $75-$100 per hand including the Ante, Blind, Trips and Play wagers.

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The Non-Intimidation Factor

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The Non-Intimidation Factor

           It is virtually impossible to predict which game will be a success in the casino as it is being invented.  As I've written in my column numerous times, predicting which game will fail is much easier.  Frequently inventors will look at past games and try to replicate what appears to be a formula for success for that game.  But I have longed believed that if you look at successful casino games you will see a progression and not just a replication of success.  To put it another way, I think that if Three Card Poker were invented today and put up against the other games that are out there, it would not have done nearly as well as it did.  In similar fashion, if Ultimate Texas Hold'em had been created in the mid 1990's, I don't think any of us would have ever heard of it.

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A Beautiful Betting Structure

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A Beautiful Betting Structure

           It was about 10 years ago that the Texas Hold'em craze was starting to take over poker rooms everywhere.  I used to play a lot of poker in college (won a lot of spending money).  I don't think we played a single hand of Texas Hold'em.  We played 7-card Stud, Guts, 5-Card Draw and a whole host of other strange games (baseball, nighttime baseball).  It's what you get when you play Dealer Choice poker for several hours.  But, not one hand of Texas Hold'em.  I had no idea what the game was until I saw signs for it in Las Vegas Poker rooms.  Even then, I paid it very little attention.

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Do You Have to Play Perfectly?

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Do You Have to Play Perfectly?

         One of the criticisms of almost any gambling strategy is that it requires you to play 'perfectly', and that this is not realistic of a human.  There is some truth to this.  For sure, the theoretical payback can only be achieved if you play the strategy perfectly.  Sometimes, the strategies are present are not 'perfect'.  They have already been altered to give a human a reasonable chance to play the strategy presented perfectly.  For example, in the game of Ultimate Texas Hold'em, the strategy for the 2x Wager consists of about 10 or 12 'rules'.  This can already prove challenging for a human.  If a complete computer perfect strategy were presented, it would likely have hundreds of rules.  No human, short of Rain Man, would be able to play this even close to perfect.

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Master of Your Strategy

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Master of Your Strategy

             Gambling strategies come in all forms.  For most table games, it is usually a set of rules in English.  For Three Card Poker, it is a single simple sentence - Play with Q-6-4 or better.  Four Card Poker strategy is a bit more complex, but can also be simplified to Betting 3x when your hand is of a certain rank, Folding when it is below a certain rank and Betting 1x for everything in between.  A game like Ultimate Texas Hold'em has far more complex strategy, but again, it comes down to betting based on the strength of the hand.

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Graduation Day

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            Last week, I alluded to the notion that Players play Ultimate Texas Hold'em more timidly than they should.  While a portion of this is probably based in the relatively complex strategy of the game, I believe the larger portion is in the decision itself.  It takes nerves of steel to put down 4 times your initial Ante wager.  Give me a High Pair or a suited A-J and I'm willing to risk it.  But what about offsuit A-8 or suited K-10.  How good are these hands?  Even if the strategy says to Play 4x, UTH allows the Player to wait for more information and then either Play 2x or wait longer.  So, why rush my decision?

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Bet Early and Often

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Last week I discussed the importance of net win vs. expected value when looking at wagers of different sizes.  The term expected value was originally used mostly to describe video poker hands.  Since the wager size is the same from hand to hand and the payouts are all essentially odds based - meaning they pay a certain amount for each unit wagered as opposed to a fixed dollar amount, using the expected value works fine.  But, in a game like blackjack where the Player has the option to double down, we need to look at net win (or loss) and not expected value.  We lower our win frequency (which lowers the expected value) when we double down, but we still do so because in the end we win more money, which is the real goal.

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