Hi and welcome to our instructional video that is designed to make
you are smarter gambler my name is Steve Bourie
and I'm the author of the American casino guide, the number one bestselling book in the
US on the subject of casino gambling and travel
and the only book that comes with over one thousand dollars in casino coupons.
if you want to know more about our book be sure to visit our website at
americancasinoguide.com
and if you have a smartphone or tablet
be sure to download our free app just go to the App Store
or the Google Play Store and search for American casino guide.
This video is part one of a two-part series where Henry Tamburin
who is the author of six books on casino gambling
discusses six tips to become a smarter video poker player.
first tip is you gotta discipline yourself
to play only full pay video poker games.
You have to understand that if you take say a specific video poker game
like Jacks or Better you go into a casino and you might find different
pay tables for a Jacks or Better video poker machine
and it's up to you, it's your responsibility to go up to that video
poker machine and try and select the one
that pays the highest return for that jacks or better game.
And video poker players
use this nomenclature like 9/6 Jacks or Better
which signifies that that is the highest paying
Jacks or Better game. The 9/6 refers
to the per-coin payoff for a full house or a flush
so when you walk up to a video poker machine
you can simply look at the pay schedule and look down the first column at one coin
just for reference, you're not gonna play one coin but your gonna look
down at first column
and look to see what the payoff is for a full house and a flush
and you wanna see nine and a six
that is a full pay video poker
jacks or better game. That game is going to return
99.5 percent theoretical return
You can go to a casino in find Jacks or Better that pay
8/5 or 7/5 and heaven forbid 6/5
every time that pay schedule goes down
for the flush and the full house you're gonna drop your theoretical return
so it makes no sense to go to a casino and play
a short pay, say 7/5 or 8/5
Jacks or Better when that casino could have
a 9/6 full pay game. Now how do you locate, how do you know whether your local casino
has a full pay video poker game? My suggestion is
go to this website and I'll give you the name
it's VPfree2, you gotta type the number two
dot com, so that's VPfree number two
dot com. This site has a database maintained by
video poker pros and expert players
of all of the full pay video poker games that you'll find
in casinos throughout the US. You can for example look up
which casinos in a certain area where you live or where you're going to visit
a specific casino what
casinos in that area have 9/6 Jacks or Better
so you can find that information very readily
if you're coming to Las Vegas you can also look on the site
lasvegasadvisor.com and they also have a video poker page
that lists all the full pay games that are available in each casino
in the las vegas-area. Tip number two to be a smarter video poker player
is you've got to learn the playing strategies
and you've got to play max coins. I mention for example 9/6 jacks or better
has a theoretical return of 99.54 percent
but you can only achieve that return
if you play every hand perfectly and if you play max coins and usually max
coins is five coins.
The reason you have
to play max coin is that if you look at the payouts
the payout screen for a 9/6 jacks or better
every payout increases proportionally
when you increase your betting from one coin to five
except for the Royal Flush when you bet up to five coins you get a bonus
payout
and that bonus payout will help you achieve the 99.54
percent return, the bottom line is if you only play one or two or three
coins
you're not going to get 99.5 percent you're going to get less
You gotta play max coins when you're playing video poker
to get that high return. The second thing is
you have to learn the playing strategy for that particular game
If you're playing jacks or better you gotta learn the playing strategy for jacks or
better, if you wanna play double bonus
you gotta learn the strategy for that game and so on. The easiest way to learn
the strategy
and there are several ways you can you can get the strategy in the book
on video poker you can get in on different internet sites
for example wizardofodds.com
has video poker strategies or
what I suggest is you get yourself a video poker
training software. These training software
you purchase them they're not expensive, they're generally about fifty dollars
pop 'em into your computer at home
and you play video poker you can play any video poker game
while you're playing, the computer
is going to alert you when you make a playing mistake and it's also going to show
you what the correct play is
and it's going to keep your playing accuracy so you can have fun playing
video poker at home
at the same time learning the correct playing strategies
and you want to continue to practice until you get your playing
strategy
at least ninety-nine percent you might think that's impossible
trust me it's feasible if you practice at home
because if you make mistakes at home you're going to make mistakes in the
casino and its gonna cost you money
so practice
makes perfect. Tip number three
deals with bankroll, you know how to find a full pay game
you've practiced your playing strategies the third important thing is
you've gotta have a sufficient
bankroll to play video poker. Why?
Because by the nature of the game
of video poker it is a volatile game,
meaning your bankroll is gonna go up
and down from while you play and from session to session
You're never gonna win every time you play and certainly you can experience
losing streaks
but the whole point is that a Royal Flush occurs once every forty thousand
hands on average
but you never know when you're gonna hit that royal flush, it could come tomorrow
it could come the next day you might hit two in one session
or it might take your year, that's the volatility involved in video poker.
So you have to have sufficient bankroll to take you through those losing streaks
and I'm gonna give you a prime example of
what happened to me to show you an example of the volatility
In 2013 playing
9/6 jacks or better full pay I only hit three royal flushes
the entire year and I averaged about 250,000 hands of video poker
and if you look at statistically if i'm suppose to get one every 40,000 on
average I should have gotten at least six royal flushes during the year
Now remember that's an average, sometimes I'll get less sometimes I'll get more
Well you see in 2013
I got less than what probability
predicts, so I needed the extra bankroll to get me through the year.
In 2014, recently I had 11
royal flushes in 18 consecutive playing
sessions, that's a prime example
of the fluctuations and the volatility of video poker.
One year I hit three the entire year
the second year I hit 11 in two months
and for the year
2014 I ended up with a 18 so one year I hit three,
one year I hit 18, I played the same
number of hands on the same game but you can see from that example
the volatility of video poker which is why it's important that you need to
have a bankroll.
How much bankroll do you need? It really depends on the game
and if you get the video poker software I mentioned earlier
the software has a bankroll function
where you can put in whatever game you're gonna play whatever denomination
you can afford
and it will calculate how much bankroll you need
so that you won't go broke. I mean that's the worst case scenario and that's what
you wanna prevent
when you play video poker is to go broke so
a rough rule of thumb is you really need about three to four times the amount of
the Royal
So if it's a thousand coin royal flush
you really should have about a three or four thousand dollar bankroll
Take this money and put it in a money market
open up a money market at your bank or your mutual fund
put that money in it call it a 401 G
this is the money you use to play video poker. When you go to the casinos
take out some of this money, play video poker
whatever is left you put it back in. That money that's in your account
is gonna go up, it's gonna go down it's going to fluctuate
but over time if you continue to play skillfully
with the tips I'm sharing with you you'll see that it'll grow,
it'll grow over time. If you want to learn more about me and some of the
information that I have on my website
you can either go to smart gaming
dot com which I was articles on all different
casino games that I've written or you can go
to BJinsider.com
and that site has the blackjack
Insider newsletter which I edit and there you'll find information on
blackjack.
For three free issues of the
BJ insider to simply go
to this URL it's
BJinsider.com/freetrial
Don't forget that you can see more of our educational gaming videos on our
YouTube channel
Just go to YouTube.com/Americancasinoguide