hi and welcome to our instructional video that is designed to make you
a smarter gambler my name is Steve Bourie and I'm the author of the American
casino guide number one bestselling book in the USA on the subject of casino
gambling and travel and the only book that comes with over $1000 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 Google Play Store and
search for American casino guide. This video is part two 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. Tip number one has to do
with the volatility of video poker games. I've mentioned the fluctuations that
I experience from one year to the next with jacks or better
and believe it or not
Jacks or Better is a very low volatile video poker game compared to other video
poker games. For example if we focus on double double bonus that's a very
popular video poker game it's probably the most popular that video poker players
like to play. That particular game has a much higher volatility than the 9-6 Jacks or
Better. Why? Because with double double bonus a lot of the return is focused
on the low probability hands of four of a kind so the casino funds the four of a
kind hands compared to say jacks or better with more money, more payouts but
what they do is they lowered the payout for the more frequently hit two pair so
when you look at a pay schedule and you see for example two pair only paying one
for one, that generally indicates you have a video poker game that has a high
volatility.
In practical terms, that means if I'm going to play in a casino say a three
hour session and I calculate using one of the video poker software programs how
much money should I bring for this three hour session of 9/6 jacks or better it'll
calculate it, let's say it's $300 and that software is going to tell you that
the chance of you losing $300 is very low. Now let's suppose somebody else is going
to play next to you and he's going to play double double bonus and he wants
the same risk of not losing his money, well $300 isn't going to hack it, he's
gonna need more money and that's the downfall of a lot of average
players they go and they play the high volatility games and they don't bring
enough bankroll so they find themselves tapped out long before they've finished
their playing session. So if you wanna play video poker, get the
maximum playtime and the smallest volatility you want to focus on games that have
this low volatility and you can find out what the volatility is of any game by
looking in a video poker book or you can go to The Wizard of odds dot com video
poker page they list the number for the volatility. Tip number two is how you can
earn more money when you're playing video poker the reality is when you play
video poker more than likely your overall return from playing is going
to be slightly under a hundred percent. For example we mentioned 9/6 Jacks or Better
returns 99.54 percent if you play it accurately what you want to do
is you'd like to get that overall return over a hundred percent where you can see
you're short you're short about point .4, .5% How do you get over a hundred percent? There's two
things you have to master one is you gotta take advantage of cash back and
you want to take advantage of bounce back. Let me focus on cash back first
casinos want to reward their loyal players the first thing you want
to do is
get yourself a players card and always use it when you're playing video poker.
The reason is the casino's computer system is going to track your play and casinos will
reward you for the amount of money that you gamble they call that coin-in and
that's the only thing they're interested in, how much they give you back depends
on your coin-in, not how much you win or lose but they're going to rebate a
certain percent of your coin in. It's like buying a car i buy a car for thirty
thousand the dealer is going to rebate me a couple of thousand dollars, well when you
play in a casino if you join the Players Club the amount of money you gamble they're gonna
rebate a certain percent. What you want to make sure is and that rebate
percentage varies from casino to casino some casinos will rebate point one
percent of your coin in others will rebate point three percent and you should
find out what the base rebate or base return is for playing video poker.
You usually can find that by going to the Players Club and asking them or you can
go to the casino's website where you can go to one of the other websites that I
mentioned earlier like lasvegasadvisor.com. So, first thing is know what the
percent cash back is for that casino
the second thing is let's say it's point one percent which isn't a lot what you
want to do now is scheduled your play time when the casinos offer multiple
points that is extremely important. If I'm getting point one percent times my
coin-in in either cash or free play if I play when the casino is offering 4, 5, or 6
times multiple points meaning instead of getting point one percent they're going
to give me point six and point seven that's going to increase the number of
points you earned during your play session that's going to convert to more
money you're gonna get in cash or more money you're gonna put in the
machine for free play.
SDo you need to discipline yourself to find out when your local casino offers
multiple points and you wanna make sure you schedule your play time I'll give you
another real-world example, I play in a casino that has a base rate 0.13% that's
what they give me based on my coin in. On Mondays they multiply all of my
points by eight
well if you take .13 and you multiply by eight that's 1.04% that they
give back to me and they give it back to me in terms of free play. Well if I add
what I get playing the game and this happens to be a casino that has 9/6
jacks or better progressive my return is 99.6% I add in the 1.04% so I am over
a hundred percent, so that's important. I'm now an advantage video poker player
What else can you do? So first thing is take advantage of multiple points, the
second thing is you want to maximize your mailers. Once you play video poker
in a casino and I suggest you play consistently at the same casino, you want
to make sure that you maximize your mailers. The mailers are what comes in the
mail from the casino they'll send you a mailer every month and it lists all the
activities and promotions that they have for the upcoming month and usually there are
coupons in those mailers we call them bounce back coupons or coupon might say
will give you $50 every week for the next month. You go back to the casino,
you bounce back that's how that got that term you go back to the casino, you
go to the machine, you put in your players card and you can download the
$50 that the casino gives you. You'd like to get $100, you'd like to get $200 every
week. How do you maximize that amount? The key is to make sure that when you
play you get the highest theoretical average for your playing session. Now let me explain
this because this
is extremely important the casinos they want to reward their players and
what they do now a days is they take a look at your coin and obviously the more
you play the higher your coin in and the more you're gonna be rewarded but
they will take that coin in and they multiplied by a percent they call it
theo based on whatever machine you're playing and they multiply those two and
they get what they call a theo that's what sits in their computer so if you go to
a casino tomorrow you play video poker for 3, 4 hours whatever coin in you put in
they'll multiply a percent and the computer will say for this particular day for
this session you had this much theo and what that means for them that's a
theoretical amount that they expect to win from you. Now what most casinos do
is they'll average those session theos over a certain period of time
some casinos use three months the casino that I play on that I mentioned earlier
uses a 21 day session average. It's very difficult to find out this information
they're not free with it but I suggested you ask a casino host that's
one of the perks you can get out of a casino host and some casinos. So how do
you maximize that theo because if you keep the theo high for say 21 trips
you're going to get a very much higher mailer than if somehow that theo goes
down and a lot of players they don't understand that and they trip themselves. For
example, players go to a casino and they decide they're not going to play they're gonna go eat in the
restaurant then they're going to go home. They go sit in the restaurant casino
restaurant they've they go have a nice meal the bill comes and they pay with
their points, the points they earn that's on their players card when they do that
they trip a session the computer knows that they're in the casino and its gonna
say they're there and they're gonna trip you for a session you walk out of the
casino without playing what's going to happen is the computers got you zero theo for
that day well you take a theo of 0 theo when you add it to your other Theos you
can see that the average goes down and your mailer goes down. Another example
casino gives you free play your run to the casino you run through your free
play and then you leave. Again, you're gonna trip yourself and your gonna end
up with a 0 playing session and that's gonna lower your theo. So in order to
maximize your mailers, maximize the bounce back that you get you want to
make sure that when you go to a casino if you're going to use points, if your
gonna download your bounce-back, download your free play that you play during that
session. If you just do those other things without playing you're gonna trip
yourself and you're never going to get a high theo and you're never going to get the
high bounce back and the better mailers so that's really important. The last tip has
to do with how can I keep this money that I earned by playing video poker?
Because you have to understand you have a silent partner when you play video
poker it happens to be uncle sam if you hit a payout that pays $1200 or greater
you're gonna have a casino employee come to your machine, the
machine's gonna lock up and they're going to give you a tax form it's a w-2G
you're gonna get a copy and other copy is sent to Uncle Sam. When you file your
taxes whether it's federal and most states they're going to expect on your
income tax when you file that you're going to report that gambling win as
earnings because the regular IRS regulations say gambling winnings are
taxable so what can you do to make sure that you're not paying too much taxes on
your winnings? What you need to make sure is that you can report your losses
and that's what you want to do, but when your report winnings and losses
on your income tax you gotta make sure you maintain a gambling log so this is
the last bit of information I can tell you maintain a gambling log, in fact the
IRS regs state you should maintain a session gambling log just get yourself a
book and every time you go to the casino you play video poker just put down
the date, the casino what game you played how much you won or lost and then at the
end of the year you add up all your wins your session wins you put that in your
income tax filing and you do the same thing with the losses, if you get audited
then you have no problem you can present your gambling log I've had too
many of my colleagues that didn't take this sdvice and they reported gambling wins
without keeping gambling logs so they went through that horror show known as an
IRS audit. You don't want to have to go through that because if you can't support
your gambling losses and you can report losses up to the amount of your wins, the
IRS is going to charge you a tax for all of that money that hard-earned money
that you won they're going to charge you not only do you have to pay a tax on the
winnings but you're gonna have to pay a penalty for not
filing correctly so the last tip I can leave you is please make sure you maintain
a gambling log you'll never know when you need it if Uncle Sam audits you
but it's really nice to have if you have to go into an audit. 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 has articles on all different
casino games that I've written or you can go to BJ insider dot com and
that site has blackjack Insider newsletter which I edit and there you'll
find information on blackjack. For 3 free issues of the BJ Insider
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 is go to youtube.com / American casino guide