Draw Timing Change, is it possible?

[FloridaPhil]

I think there are two interesting points here.  One, is playing slower on negative expectation games reduces your losses (understood).  The second is something I have been thinking about for a long time.  It seems like the good days show up right away.  Except for Royals, it seems like I can tell if I'm going to have a good day in the first 30 minutes of play.   Rarely do I ever have a good day if the first 30 minutes went badly.  It seems like the whole day is bad no matter what I do.  It's very hard to do, but I think you should walk away and come back another day if you don't get a 4OK or straight flush within a short period of time.  Of course this applies to recreational players only.  Pros have to take the good and the bad but they only play positive games so everything should work out in the long run.

[New2vp]

Certainly, other things equal, your daily total should be better on days when you have a good start than when you have a worse start.

[shadowman]

Just a note on the "good day" conjecture. My last trip I was down $800 in the first 20 minutes. I was still down until my last 10 minutes of play when I hit a $1000 jackpot to end up $800 for the trip.
 
I was actually down to the last 5 credits I was going to play (I'd hit the 6 hour mark for my normal session) and won my money back 4 times before hitting a 75 credit win. About 10 hands later I hit the $1000. Of course, this was unusual but demonstrates that anything can happen.

[royal flush]

nice save some players will ask if you changed to thelucky machine

[Frank Kneeland]

This is a long reply but it might be one of the most important posts I've done on this forum. Please try to read the whole thing slowly.@FloridaPhill: You seem to be hearing the information,
but the conclusions it's leading you to are no closer to the truth
than how you were looking at things in the first place. Your last
sentence sums up very nicely where you appear to have a disconnect.
Oh, and don't feel too bad, from what I've read 90% of the population
thinks similarly. The human mind is predisposed, due to evolution,
not to comprehend or recognize randomness. There's no shame in
this.You said, " Pros have to take the good and the bad"
implying that non-pros don't. Nothing could be further from the
truth. Pros and non-pros alike have to weather up swings and down
swings, the only difference is in their perceptions of them, and how
they react.Pros typically play for set periods of time, or to
reach point goals, which causes their ups and downs to be included
within a period of time that has nothing to due with
results.Non-Pros stay or leave based on how they are doing,
which creates an artifice of truncated or extended results that
differentiate themselves only in how they are recorded, and over what
time span they occur.


Here's an example:

For ease of discussion we are going to
set some parameters, merely for convenience, though actual results
would not be so consistent, the basic principles would be identical.
First, we are going to assume that win/loss rate is $50 and hour.
Second, we are going to subdivide everything into hours. So for
purposes of argument in this example, if the person has a winning
hour they will have won $50, and if they lose they would lose a like
amount. I'm removing breaking even in a given hour, since it would
not add anything to the example or alter the results.

Destiny has decreed that in the next
twenty hours of play a person will have the following results: (The top row is the hour the bottom row is the result.)

























1


2


3


4


5


6


7


8


9


10


11


12


13


14










-50


50


-50


-50


50


50


-50


-50


-50


50


50


50


-50


50










Continuation of table














16


17


18


19


20




50


-50


-50


50


-50





Now imagine that three different
people, each with different goals go to play. They will all
experience the same results as mentioned above, the only difference
will be in how they record it and over what time span it occurs.

Person 1: For this person all
they car about is getting in 10 hours of play each day. They go to
the casino and win lose or draw play their 10 hours and leave. Their
results look as follows:







Day


Result


Total




1


-100








2


0


-100




Person 2: For this individual
they are most concerned about losing, so they take only $50 with them
into the casino, and they always leave if they go thru this loss
limit. If they are winning they stay. On the last day they leave
because they have to be somewhere.







Day


Result


Total




1


-50








2


-50








3


-50








4


50


-100




Person 3: For this individual
they could care less about losses, what they like is to go home a
winner, or at least break-even. So they keep playing if they are
down, and leave if they win $50, or if they get back to even from a
loss they leave as well. Win $50 or break-even is their goal. Again,
we'll assume they leave after the 20 hours to keep things simple.







Day


Result


Total




1


0








2


0








3


0








4


50








5


-150


-100




The first thing that should be obvious
to you is regardless of their goals the end result remained the same,
-$100. What their goals did change is how much time it took them to
get thru the twenty hours and how they ended up recording their
results. Here's a breakdown:








Person


Days to Complete


Wins/Break-Even


Losses




1


2


1


1




2


4


1


3




3


5


4


1




If you were looking for positive spin
you need look no further than subject 3 who scored 4 wins to only 1
loss. Subject 2 clearly has the worst of it losing 3 times as often
as he wins, but at least he never goes thru that all important loss
limit, and he keeps his gambling under control. Subject 1 seems to lose about as often as he wins, might as well flip a coin...he's
boring. Of course all these people had identical results, so why do
they look so different???


Perception, perception,
perception...nothing more, nothing less.

The bottom line remains unchanged. It
would however feel different. Perhaps for some this would be a good
thing. I hate this idea, because by changing the feeling, we white
wash the reality. Bad things should feel bad, and good things should
feel good. If you want to change something change your reality, our
society in general has enough white washing to last us all ten
lifetimes, no need to add to it.

Setting loss limits, or win goals, or
even time goals only changes over what time span your results will
occur, and how they get recorded on paper; because of our silly
tendency to divide up independent random events by days, like they
were related to each other because they happened in a row.It is worth noting that any myriad of
goal sets are possible and all of them WILL alter how you perceive
your results and over what time spans they occur. None of them effect
net result. With our oversimplified examples above it should also be
obvious to you that person 2 could end up playing a really long shift
if he was unlucky enough to hover just between down $50 and even for
a while, person 3 could go thru his entire bankroll if he got stuck
and never made it back to +$50. Of course person 1 is immune to these
sorts of random swings he has no control over and simply has to deal
with playing about 4 hours too much in a day and all the health risks
that entails.

I like to set 4 hours as a reasonable
time limit these days. For everyone what their bodies can take is
different. Set your own goals, but know they are only changing your
perceptions and your health.~FK

[Eduardo]

Frank...  Very good explanation. You're the best. I do wish you could have more fun though.

[Frank Kneeland]

Frank...  Very good explanation. You're the best. I do wish you could have more fun though.
You me me both brother. You and me both!

[FloridaPhil]

Excellent tutorial on this subject!  My head is spinning just thinking about it.  You are absolutely right about the types of players.  I often hit a decent payout and keep playing until I give it back.  It makes me think about why I'm playing anyway.  Am I playing to stay for as long as possible, limit my losses or to go home ahead?  I've come to the conclusion that for me I want to play for as long as possible with the least loss.  I don't have any problem keeping to my loss limit because I only take what I can afford to lose into the casino with me and I leave my credit cards in the car.  I've switched to low variance games at lower denominations and so far I seem to be OK with it.  I tried playing one coin and liked it, but the 250 coin Royals made me crazy...

[Frank Kneeland]

I liked this thread so much I added an intro to my earlier post and I'm turning it into an article. Here's the missing intro:





The Very Special (not)Theory of
Relativity
We are surrounded by a universe where
the ticks of a clock seem as constant as death & taxes, and for
us time appears immortal, immutable and inviolate. With our own eyes
we see objects speed up and slow down, traveling the full range
between full stop (at rest) and god speed (really really fast).
Surely time must be a constant and speed a variable? Well no, not
really. Our eyes, mind and other senses deceive us. Time had a
beginning, it will end, and in-between it slows down and speeds up
proportionate to the relative velocity of objects moving thru it and
gravitational fields. Within the event horizon of a black hole time
even dies.

When Einstein looked at things in
a really different light he discovered; that, for light, things are
really different.

As it turns out the speed of light is a
constant, and time the variable. For us time and speed are variable,
and our only constant is our perception of how fast light travels.
Yea it's weird...it's hard to understand...and it's been confirmed by
every scientific test done in the last hundred years. Even more
important to understand is that no amount of observation with our
five senses would ever have lead to this understanding. Look and ye
shall find (everything but the truth!). Too bad old Albert didn't
extend his Theory of Relativity, and his Theory of Special Relativity
to include gambling systems. If he had, he would have found some
amazing correlations.

In gambling even as our results remain
a constant, we can alter our perception of them and the time it takes
us to achieve them. Again time is the variable. Einstein claims to
have had his epiphany about relativity while conducting a thought
experiment on a train. He imagined the train traveling at the speed
of light and tried to visualize how the world would look to an
observer. I believe we can reach similar understandings about
gambling with a slightly different thought experiment.

Imagine for a moment that your fate was
sealed by Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld personally (Norse Goddesses of
Fate). In your next four hours of play on a video poker machine the
hands you would be dealt were cast in stone. You could however choose
to play them anywhere at any time. In the absence of rules you would
simply walk into the casino of your choice, pick a machine, and play
for four hours and be done with it. On the other hand, you could set
daily loss limits, win goals, move machines if one was paying poorly,
and split up your play in any manner you wished. If we set an hour to
be the smallest increment of reckoning you could play four hours in
one day. Two hours on two days. One day of three hours, and one day
of one hour. Or lastly, you could play one hour a day for four days.


Try imagine how different your results
would look based on the rules you set and how in retrospect identical
results would appear completely altered. Now let's take an example of
three different gamblers with very different play rules playing with
identical results and see how it changes things.~FK

[Tony Felder]

Wow, great job Frank! Thank you for that, it does seem that most players fall into those 3 categories. Maybe the time and bankroll is different for each player but your right. Trying to find the combination of  those that works is the key. I just cant seem to string together positive days, its always win, lose, lose, lose, win, lose, win, lose, lose, frustrating!