More on single coin play for 2015

[olds442jetaway]

The Mrs and I had a nice overnight trip Sunday night. Also I got to see in the lounge the Seahawks catch that sent the game into ovetime. Wow! I think pass interferende could have been called as well.
     Getting back to vp. The first half of the trip I strayed from strictly single coin play and it didn't work. Wound up down about 300 with only about an hour or so to play this morning before heading home.
     This morning, I forced myself to return to strictly single coin play hoping for some scraps to take home and maybe cover a breakfast or two later in the week at one of my favorite local diners.
     I decided to play Spin poker Deluxe, but only with 9 lines and only 5 cents bet for a total of 45 cents on each play. A little cold at first playing Joker Kings, but then bam.......5 of a kind on 4 lines, a dealt straight flush a couple of minutes later, some good quads on multiple lines, another dealt straight flush 5 minutes later and finally Royals on 3 lines. Ended up only down a hundred for the trip and would have been up 200 or more if I had not strayed the night before. I think this is the 6th trip now, where strictly single coin play has proven its worth. More to follow I hope. I am really questioning how random things really are when it comes to big bets vs tiny ones. PS...This was a crappy paytable game too with only 15 for quads and 400 for the Royal with one unit bet.

[FloridaPhil]

The Cheap Strategy does not keep you from losing.  What it does is give you more chances to win with the same bankroll. If you had been playing dollars, I'll bet you would have bailed and not had a chance to be there when you got your good hands.  It does seem like single coin play pays better, but I think it's because you can play longer.    If you play 3-4 times more hands, you have 3-4 times more chances to hit a max coin jackpot. 

[chattycattty]

I guess there is more than one way to do anything. Not that I get many royals but I would surely be pissed if I hit on a royal with only one coin in the machine. If you are a quarter player why not just go down to nickels. Many machines let you go back and forth between nickels, quarters, and other denominations. If I was going to employ this strategy I think I would go back and forth between nickels and quarters.

[FloridaPhil]

I do not advocate playing single coin all the time.  The cheap strategy is about playing single coin 80% of the time and the rest at max coins.   It's all on the website.  It is common the find the odds at single coin quarters to be better than nickel play even with the royal bonus removed. 

[olds442jetaway]

That is why I call my play for now strictly single coin play. It just happens to be working for me right now ( for six straight sessions ). I like the Phil method, I just had no luck last year with it. I am keeping track mentally on how I would have done so far with it for 2015, but so far, it wouldn't have worked this year either. I just seem to get very few back to back good hits. I do get them fairly close together sometimes, but not close enough to have the Phil method work for me. At least so far. Maybe I can come up with some sort of a comprimise between strictly single coin play and the Phil method like maybe trying a higher bet level or denomination for 5 minutes or so. Something like that. That could of course cost more if it doesn't work.
     The reason I played so small on yesterday morning is because I had busted my budget allowance the night before by straying from strictly single coin play. I would have still had some play money left for Monday morning also even if I had used Phil's method Sunday night and it didn't work. That said, the only thing I was willing to risk on Monday morning was the 20- free play I had. Would I have had hits like that with a higher denomination or max bet per line, who knows. So far I have to stick with what I am doing or something similar so I don't chance a repeat of what happened last year. At least pretty much I have the will power to do it.
     As a final note, I saw one massive hit for many thousands of dollars Monday morning at Mohegan Sun. A foreign guy who spoke no English hit the Multi Strike machine. He was playing dollars, but I don't know which game or the details. There were attendants and suits hovering all around, so I couldn't get a good look. I think they had to bring in an interpreter too. I hope the guy had valid ID or he wouldn't get paid. This was around the time we had to go home, so I didn't see the final payoff etc.

[roveer]

I too have seen this in action. Often times when I'm dwindling down on my multihand games I will drop down to single coin just to prolong my demise. Seemingly out of nowhere the quads start popping up all over the place. Of course that leads me more anger saying why wasn't I playing multi-coin but I am a believer that I would not have gotten the same hand had I been playing more coins. I do believe I have seen this happen on multiple occasions. I still don't think we really know what is going on inside these machines. I wouldn't be surprised if there are all kinds of hitches and craftfully done to "follow the rules" in the broader sense. At the end of the day it is my believe that as a player we need to evolve to a point where we know when to stop when either winning or losing. That seems to be my only untrainable shortcoming at this point.

Roveer

[notes1]

better watch out roveer, those comments might get the ' VP/true believer/nothing is ever goofy going on ' to call you a conspiracy nut. or, they will question why you play, if you are not convinced nothing is amiss. 

[FloridaPhil]

Actually, that's how I came up with the Cheap Strategy in the first place.  Like most players, I never played single coin until I was almost out of money.  As soon as I switched, sure enough jackpots all over the place.   So I decided to start with single coin and work up instead of the other way around.  Playing single coin quarters all the time limits your losses, but the wins were too small to be fun.  After I worked out the 4 coin win switch timing, I added the jump to dollar play at $25.  I hit a $4,000 royal and a $1,000 quad deuce with the new strategy within the first 90 days and I was hooked.   It was also a pleasant surprise to find that I could play all day with a $250 bankroll and that most of the time I came home with some money left.   I had enjoyed playing video poker for years, but the loses took their toll on me.  The Cheap Strategy changed playing video poker from a depressing exercise to a fun and enjoyable pastime. I've said this before but it bears repeating "Playing Video Poker should be fun not painful". 

[olds442jetaway]

And I had lots of fun with those little hits yesterday even though had I hit them the night before when I was playing as much as five bucks a hand, I probably would have hit over ten grand. It seems like only players who play millions of hands see this kind of pattern over and over. I also believe that most of the hits would not have come with max bets in. Now the trick is to come up with something that is fun all the time. I am working on it and I refuse to let them suck me in like last year. One final thing along the same line for the millions of hands played folks. Almost every trip when I am down to the last coin I am willing to risk on a particular machine and the credits are near zero, a good hit comes out of the blue. Call me crazy, but somehow the program knows this and hopes you will put more money in based on the few hits they just gave you at or near the end of your play. I would say this is nonsense except I see this over and over again almost every session. If I ever decide to keep track of this on a pad and paper for a hundred or so events, I'm 100 percent sure the results would bear this out. That wouldn't be much fun though so for now, I'm just going to try and enjoy playing vp with a very limited budget.

[FAA]

I saw a guy enter his $4 free play at Caesars. Not ten hands in he gets a quad and is elated. I'm thinking that he just blew massive earning potential. $31.25 vs his $6.25 party. If betting a quarter on every single hand, my frustration would be off the charts. I swing between two and five quarters and hope to quad and house on the max bet. I do have a good time, but it sure would be nice not to take this additional gamble.