New Strategy in 2012

[Tedlark]

billyjoe I can help your 2012 allready, wanna sell your hat? It may even be worth more to me if webman autographs it!

[Frank Kneeland]

 Thanks, Frank. You actually nailed my thought process exactly. I recognize that some of my wins last year were extremely rare, and to expect to duplicate that year after year is a fool's errand. I enjoy playing VP, but I would be VERY unhappy in the poor house. Now, if I can just keep from falling off the bandwagon. It won't be easy, especially considering chance could swing the other way even if you improve the games you play. The trick is priding one's self on the decisions one makes and not letting how one does effect one's judgment. You can't second guess yourself due to results.Since you already had success playing on what most consider to be BAD machines it's going to be very hard to stay on the bandwagon and out of the traffic.If you succeed, at the very least you'll impress the hell out of me. If it's going to work though, you need to be the one it impresses, not me.You have to take extreme pride in good decision making or else it loses it's ability to motivate. Good luck, and I don't mean on the machines. Good luck with your choices my friend.~FK

[backsider]

Frank, Im not understanding why you say in various posts that results dont mean a thing, but decisions do. When I play the only thing I care about is my results, and everyone else does too including you (if you were risking your own money at least). My decisions can be interesting but they dont buy bread.  Ive read where the Wizard of Odz says something similar about how its not if you win but how good your bet was. Thats really stupid dont you think? That guys on the radio? A typical going out for me is a decision on where to play, what to play, how long to play, and how much to drink.....I mean, play. Ok so I had some fun an killed some time, but the ONLY thing that matters is if I won or lost. Yesterday btw I was dealt a royal at the Cannery on dollar fiveplay. The paytable was not what you call positive, Im sure it could be labeled a bad decision by you and the Wizard, but Im STILL counting the money! Good decision to play it, dont you think?

[Frank Kneeland]

Frank, Im not understanding why you say in various posts that results dont mean a thing, but decisions do. When I play the only thing I care about is my results, and everyone else does too including you (if you were risking your own money at least). My decisions can be interesting but they dont buy bread.  Ive read where the Wizard of Odz says something similar about how its not if you win but how good your bet was. Thats really stupid dont you think? That guys on the radio? A typical going out for me is a decision on where to play, what to play, how long to play, and how much to drink.....I mean, play. Ok so I had some fun an killed some time, but the ONLY thing that matters is if I won or lost. Yesterday btw I was dealt a royal at the Cannery on dollar fiveplay. The paytable was not what you call positive, I'm sure it could be labeled a bad decision by you and the Wizard, but Im STILL counting the money! Good decision to play it, don't you think?You misunderstand. I never said results don't mean a thing. That's not the point at all and if that's what you are taking away from the advice then you are taking it exactly the opposite of how it is meant.There are no guarantees where randomness is involved.   You aren't guaranteed to lose if you make bad choices and you aren't guaranteed to win if you make good choices. You are however more likely to do well with good choices and to do poorly with bad ones. But more likely is still not absolute. There are no absolutes in gambling.What I'm saying, and what I've always been saying, is you can't JUDGE a choice as good OR bad by the outcome. If you start thinking you were right because of a positive result and wrong because of a negative result then in the fullness of time you will be lead astray. It's certainly possible to have a positive day playing even the worst of machines, good luck having a winning year. By the same token one can lose playing even the strongest edge, but in time if one plays with a strong enough edge they should come out ahead.If you tell me, "hay I won $1,000 dollars at casino X" there is no way from that information that I can know if you were doing something good and were expected to win, or if chance alone was responsible for your results.Results do matter, they are simply separate from and irrespective of results and tell us little about the choices made before and during play.You cannot control your results, but you can control your decisions.The goal is to get people to put more thought into the controllable aspects of gambling and stop worrying about things outside their control.And the wizard's advice is perfectly sound. Imagine I offered you $2,000 on a single coin flip in the event it comes up heads. To take the challenge I request $100 in advance win or lose. Would it be a good idea to take the bet?And more importantly, would it have been a good idea to take the bet even if the coin happens to come up tails?Whether or not I flip the coin heads or tails is totally irrelevant. A 50/50 shot at $2,000 for the merger cost of $100 is a terrific bet, even if you lose.Now do you get it??? ~FK

[BillyJoe]

billyjoe I can help your 2012 allready, wanna sell your hat? It may even be worth more to me if webman autographs it!
Ask me again in December, Ted, after I have seen how my year goes with a different VP strategy, but a similar wardrobe.

[backsider]

[QUOTE=backsider]

Frank, Im not understanding why you say in various posts that results dont mean a thing, but decisions do. When I play the only thing I care about is my results, and everyone else does too including you (if you were risking your own money at least). My decisions can be interesting but they dont buy bread.  Ive read where the Wizard of Odz says something similar about how its not if you win but how good your bet was. Thats really stupid dont you think? That guys on the radio? A typical going out for me is a decision on where to play, what to play, how long to play, and how much to drink.....I mean, play. Ok so I had some fun an killed some time, but the ONLY thing that matters is if I won or lost. Yesterday btw I was dealt a royal at the Cannery on dollar fiveplay. The paytable was not what you call positive, I'm sure it could be labeled a bad decision by you and the Wizard, but Im STILL counting the money! Good decision to play it, don't you think?You misunderstand. I never said results don't mean a thing. That's not the point at all and if that's what you are taking away from the advice then you are taking it exactly the opposite of how it is meant.There are no guarantees where randomness is involved.   You aren't guaranteed to lose if you make bad choices and you aren't guaranteed to win if you make good choices. You are however more likely to do well with good choices and to do poorly with bad ones. But more likely is still not absolute. There are no absolutes in gambling.What I'm saying, and what I've always been saying, is you can't JUDGE a choice as good OR bad by the outcome. If you start thinking you were right because of a positive result and wrong because of a negative result then in the fullness of time you will be lead astray. It's certainly possible to have a positive day playing even the worst of machines, good luck having a winning year. By the same token one can lose playing even the strongest edge, but in time if one plays with a strong enough edge they should come out ahead.If you tell me, "hay I won $1,000 dollars at casino X" there is no way from that information that I can know if you were doing something good and were expected to win, or if chance alone was responsible for your results.Results do matter, they are simply separate from and irrespective of results and tell us little about the choices made before and during play.You cannot control your results, but you can control your decisions.The goal is to get people to put more thought into the controllable aspects of gambling and stop worrying about things outside their control.And the wizard's advice is perfectly sound. Imagine I offered you $2,000 on a single coin flip in the event it comes up heads. To take the challenge I request $100 in advance win or lose. Would it be a good idea to take the bet?And more importantly, would it have been a good idea to take the bet even if the coin happens to come up tails?Whether or not I flip the coin heads or tails is totally irrelevant. A 50/50 shot at $2,000 for the merger cost of $100 is a terrific bet, even if you lose.Now do you get it??? ~FK[/QUOTE]
 Thank you Frank. I get most of it. The only thing I dont agree with is that you cant say a decision was a good or bad one based on the outcome. My decision to play that fiveplay machine the other night was as good a decision as I could have made. But if I had lost, Id be cursing my decision to play it. It all seems pretty simple to me. The part about the Wizard: That coin flip is definitely a good bet no matter what. But from reading what he has to say as it relates to videopoker, he really ties his statement to whether Im playing a 99% game or a 101%er. He says the first is not a good bet and the second is. Hes also reaching out to his customer base which are mostly once in a while players. For me, as often as I play which is once every 3 weeks about, either one of those scenarios is a good bet as he calls it. In his lingo, really neither one is a bad bet. How could either one be for the little time Im playing it? Im sure he would have called my choice to play a 7/5 bonuspoker fiveplay machine a bad bet and not worth it. Wrong he was though, and wrong he is for many people each day. A wizard he is not. He should retire fast!

[Frank Kneeland]

Thank you Frank. I get
most of it.

Unfortunately, this is one of those
types of things where getting “most of it”, isn't much better
than getting none of it. It's the type of thing where you either get
it or you don't. I have a couple of simple analogies that might help.
See below... I'll be using it for an article in the future, the
current working title is: Journey
to the Undiscovered Country.The
only thing I don't agree with is that you cant say a decision was a
good or bad one based on the outcome. My decision to play that
five-play machine the other night was as good a decision as I could
have made. But if I had lost, Id be cursing my decision to play it.


Journey to the Undiscovered Country

I returned, and saw under the sun,
that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,
neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of
understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance
happeneth to them all. ~Ecclesiastes 9:11

In oder for
anything I'm about to say to make sense we have to agree on one very
important point: The future is unknown and unknowable. It's fine to
think that your actions today will effect what happens tomorrow,
indeed that is the whole point of the endeavor. But you have to judge
decisions on only the information available at the time the decision
was made. Though we'll be getting to gambling examples, let's start
out with some real life examples. I'll tell how the decisions panned
out later. Please judge in your mind whether or not the following are
good or bad decisions.

A child
decides to run across a busy street without looking both ways.
A man decides
to marry a women he met yesterday at a strip club.
A hiker
carrying several bottles of drinking water decides to drink out of a
stagnant pool, just to be closer to nature.
A young boy
with all the right stuff decides he wants to be an astronaut.


Alright, have you
got your answers? If you are like most people you've probably
answered BAD to 1-3 and GOOD to #4. These were not hypothetical
situations, I was in fact talking about real people. Here's the
outcomes:

The child was
me. The busy street was Park Avenue in New York, and thanks to
chance I'm still here to write this, though after a scolding from my
Mother I never ran into a street again without looking both ways.
The man's name
was Tom, the gal he married was one of my high-school sweethearts, a
girl named Lisa. To my knowledge they have been happy for 12 years
now and have two children.
The hiker was
my old roommate Michael and as far as I know he suffered no ill
effects from drinking out of the pool. His life took a turn for the
worse soon thereafter in a car accident that cost him his job and
good health. It occurred on a dark empty country road at night, due
to a tire blowout. Nothing he could have done.
The
young boy became astronaut Gus Grissom. He was the first man to fly
into space more than once, though the second time was his last. He
died in that fateful Apollo I mission along with Ed White and Roger
Chaffee.


Now, after knowing the outcomes to
these real life non-fictional events would you change your answers
and:

Recommend to your child that they
run across roads without looking both ways.
Marry exotic dancers you've just
met yesterday.
Believe that is always safe to
drink out of standing water found along a mountain path.
Believe that no one should ever
become an astronaut, because it's a death sentence.


We can only hope these aren't your
conclusions and that knowing the outcomes of those situations
wouldn't change your thinking in any way. It's just not a good idea
to run across busy streets without looking, and no amount of
survivors will ever make it so, or make up for the ones that ended up
as roadkill. This is the fundamental premise behind results and
outcomes not justifying bad decisions. In gambling it's just a little
harder to see.

Gambling Example
Imagine it's seven o'clock. You've just
walked into your favorite casino. After looking around for thirty
minutes to find the highest return game, you make your choice on what
you'll play that day. However, you come over all peckish and decide
on a nosh first. While in the coffee shop a friend of yours walks in
and says, “hay what cha doin”. You tell him that you are here to
play and what game you'll be on after dinner. He then asks, “Is
that a good idea?”

How do you answer? (You
have not played yet, you have only made your choice as to what you
will play later).


Now here's your job: I want you to
judge the choice you've made without knowing the outcome. Why?
because this is exactly how we HAVE to make decisions everyday in all
aspects of life. We never know the outcome prior to making a
decision.

If you cannot answer the question, “Is
that a good idea?”, without
knowing how the decision pans out, then you could
have mild to moderate cognitive distortion. It means you aren't
judging your decisions prior to making them. You are crossing the
road first and then deciding whether or not you should have looked
both ways. You have to be able to answer, “Is that a good idea?”
before you sit down. And here's the part that's so hard to
understand, if it was a good idea, a bad outcome doesn't change
anything. When you made the decision, you didn't know what the
outcome would be. You made the best choice you could, given the
information you had at the time. That is all we can ever do.

Judging decisions based on outcome is
related to Outcome and Hindsight Bias and these are considered very
serious risk factors for developing problem gambling. They also give rise to something called illusory control, by which people overestimate the effect their actions play in outcome. (also effected by locus of control) [things you may wish to google in bold italics]


It all seems pretty simple to
me.

And this is the most worrisome thing
you've said. It's an incredibly hard to understand and difficult
topic that has taken scientists more than 50 years to unravel with
cross discipline studies into genetics, psychology, neuro-chemistry.
Sociology, etc... If it seems simple, something is terribly wrong.Scientists believe that more than 90% of the world's population has outcome and hindsight bias to varying degrees, and that many of the world's ills are the result. It's hard to spot in daily life, but in casinos it's fairly easy.~FK

[BillyJoe]

Frank, I will extend your analogy to golf, which I still play a lot, but not at the competitive level I once did. If you are trying to make a putt, you analyze the circumstances, then execute a stroke. Once executed, you have lost control of the outcome (unless you choose to break the rules, and run after the rolling ball to guide it in the hole ). So reading the break and speed of a putt (the pay table) and making a perfect stroke (using perfect play) do not guarantee success. Even when a competitive golfer believes that their analysis prior to the stroke was correct, and that they made a pure stroke, they still miss some putts (lose money). But every so often, they make a bad stroke on a putt that they barely looked at, and the darn thing goes in the hole (an RF on a re-deal on a 6/5 DDB machine). Like  golf , VP can be a humbling game.    

[BillyJoe]

OK, back on point. I'm not done with you guys yet . Since this strategy will be new to me, I have a question right off the bat. If I am lucky enough to find, and have narrowed my playing choices down to two machines: a 9/7 Double Bonus (99.11%) or a 9/7 TDB (99.58%). I figure the comps and tier credits on my play are worth 1% to me, so both these machines are theoretically positive. Does the volatility of the TDB make it less desirable, even with a slightly higher ER? Remember, I am a casual player, four hour sessions per day, on a five day trip.  

[Tedlark]

  But billyjoe your logic is flawed too. Nowhere in your post did you mention where your wife chases you out of the house and takes a swing (or 5) with a sand wedge at your $75,000.00 suv as your drunkedly pulling out of the driveway?