Distressing CET VP Stories

[DaBurglar]

I gotta put this in a solitary entry:     Why has everyone all of a suddent forgotten that these "return percentages"  are indicative over the long haul, over TIME, lots and lots of time!!!!!    I mean c'mon guys......when we say a machine returns 99% and it is truly set to do so, that game may very well give player A  a 102% return for his session,  player B gets a 98.5% return for her session, and player C gets a 80% return for his session......that is how these games work and how time and randomness and all that factor in and factor out over the course of things. Ergo, a 8/5 Bonus Poker machine set to return 91% (or 88% or 95% or whatever) when the paytable  implies 99.37%, may in fact give Player A a return of 102% for his session, PLayer B this time gets 70% and player C gets 91% for her session!    However as time goes by, all players will see more lower, or increasingly BAD returns on the 8/5 BP machine set to deal more crap hands........ Remember, it took me four plus years to arrive at this conclusion, and it did not come easy.    After 2 plus years when I first suspected something, many of you, and people like Shadowman too, were telling me "Oh pish posh, what you are seeing is simply RANDOMNESS at work, that your 78% return on these 8/5 BP machines is simply you catching the part of the cycle in the 99.3% return that is bad, etc"       So, choosing to believe you guys and trust math I kept playing but soon I read the regs and started talking and listening to others, and finally visited to NJ gaming offices........ Does anyone remember all this or are you just selectively accessing the history you want?  

[olds442jetaway]

Believe me I get it. My results in Ct almost mirror yours. However, I have noticed that the dud rates are particularly high on 9/6 job games. I have almost ended my job play now, and am playing the tougher deuces games and a little joker kings and Double Down stud. Had a little success on all of them tonight and unfortunately, in my last hours of play decided to play a quarter job machine. Dud city, and no quads. I was finally able to just barely bail out of it by letting the duds run their course with 1 unit in. They would run 10 straight all along, a couple of 20 something duds etc. When at least 2 pair hit, I doubled my bet for 2 hands. If they were duds too, back to playing 1 unit. After the next dud cycle and there were many, I would play 3 units for 2 hands and so on. Finally, caught a couple on full house hits and flushes with 10 to 14 quarters in before the dud cycles started repeating. At that point I bailed out with most of the hundred I had started with. Wish I had never played it though. Had a lot more fun on the other games and believe it or not, the dud cycles were shorter on the tough games. I realize this is only a very short run test, but I haven't caught anything good on a job game in months and am now well over 200k hands without a Royal on any of the games.

[Tedlark]

  I don't get it. With people being able to post exactly how many hands they've played over any number of years and then breaking it down further to how many "dud" hands they've had and how many hands have had a high pair, or two pair, or trips, or quads, I don't get it. Do these people actually take the time to write down or record the hands into a recording device of some type?
 
  I must be stupid because I don't do any of this; I go to a casino and play video poker. I play many hundreds of hands per hour and it's easy for me to know how I did in any particular session: if I walk out with more than I walked in with then it was a winning session.
 
  I'm not knocking those people who do this but to me they are making video poker harder than it really has to be. My degrees are not from, ahem, Harvard but when I reflect on that too I realize that I learned more from my parents and the street than I ever did in college. Those that can only operate by theory confound me. 

[olds442jetaway]

Ted. I probably don't have the exact detailed records that DaBurglar has, but I know appx how many hands/hr I play and just keep track for the most part of any unusual streaks one way or the other. The only game I have been doing this on lately is job because that is the only one that seems to me to be way out of the norm where I play. As a matter of fact, in my last session on job, in 4 hours of play, I didn't have 3 to a Royal Dealt once. That would be 2400 hands or so. I wonder what the odds of that are. I do have a weird almost photographic memory in some areas. For instance, since I am a car buff, I know the odometer readings of every car we ever had in the family since I was about 12 years old. That would be for both getting the car and when we got rid of it. My memory is not as good for vp, but it is pretty good. Keeping track of this stuff on vp does take some of the fun away unfortunately. But when you see the wierd stuff happen over and over I have to wonder. Again, this seems where I play to be specific to 9/6 job games only for now. The other games I play seem to be right on spec or average, except for not hitting those Royals.

[Tedlark]

  I share your passion for cars; the first one of my own that I built was a 1977 Cutlass Supreme Brougham that I stuffed a 455 into that I got from a 1973 Olds Custom Cruiser station wagon. I put all new wheet metal on it, man did it look nice. Black exterior with the burgandy/red interior. I've helped many friends build their cars too, ranging from 1970 Olds Cutlasses to 1962 Ford Fairlanes. 1975 Pontiac Trans-Ams and Corvettes too. I had a 1989 Corvette that I traded in my 1988 Camaro IROC Z for, I traded in my V-8 powered 1985 Camaro Berlinetta for the IROC Z. I've owned a couple motorcycles too, almost died in 1984 when an 85 year old man fell asleep at the wheel and hit me head on when he drifted into my lane.
 
  Getting back to video poker. I remember those "mega" hands such as the dealt royals, etc. but I don't record hands in any way. Heck I can't even tell you how many royals I've hit since I began playing video poker in the 1980's but its well into the hundreds. Forget about the quad aces count but over the last few years I have gotten better at recording some of the nice hits and thats solely due to the camera phone. There have been some times recently when I just plain didn't think to take a picture but such is life.
 
  I am all about the fun when playing video poker and I don't play over my head nor do I chase losses. I do tend to get focused when playing but thats mainly a concentration thing. I will get distracted by the occasional attractive lady that may be walking by but I'm quite sure that I'm not alone there.

[olds442jetaway]

I may put up some car stuff on the anything and everything section. If I get going here, I will hog up the site lol. I am going to try and cut my session times back some and enjoy the game a little more. Speaking of distractions, if you are ever up at Mohegan Sun on a Friday nite, the club has what they call " Little Black Dress Nite ". The cover is waived for the little black dress crowd. It is quite the scene when the club gets out around 2 AM. I'm sure I make a few mistakes on my vp around that time and one of my favorite machines just happens to be in that high traffic area!

[BillyJoe]

As a matter of fact, in my last session on job, in 4 hours of play, I didn't have 3 to a Royal Dealt once. That would be 2400 hands or so. I wonder what the odds of that are.
Assuming the game is fair and random, the odds of getting 3 to the Royal on hand 2401 are EXACTLY the same as they were on hand 2400.
 
Video Poker is a game of 'independent trials', which, unlike Blackjack, means that what happened the hand before has no effect on the next hand.
 
People seem to think that they are 'entitled' to a good hand, since they haven't had one in a while. It is possible to play VP your entire life, and never get an RF. The odds of an RF are the same each hand you play.

[ko king]

  I don't get it. With people being able to post exactly how many hands they've played over any number of years and then breaking it down further to how many "dud" hands they've had and how many hands have had a high pair, or two pair, or trips, or quads, I don't get it. Do these people actually take the time to write down or record the hands into a recording device of some type?
 
  I must be stupid because I don't do any of this; I go to a casino and play video poker. I play many hundreds of hands per hour and it's easy for me to know how I did in any particular session: if I walk out with more than I walked in with then it was a winning session.
 
  I'm not knocking those people who do this but to me they are making video poker harder than it really has to be. My degrees are not from, ahem, Harvard but when I reflect on that too I realize that I learned more from my parents and the street than I ever did in college. Those that can only operate by theory confound me. 

Many years ago I was just like you, I'd keep up with how much I won or lost each trip and that was all. For about 18 years I've carried a little pad into the casino with me and kept up with my results for both personal and tax records. I'm glad I did because I've been audited twice and had to prove my losses. I had a couple of years that I came out ahead but that was several years ago, I never really lost much money during the corse of a year but the last few years have been really tough.

[ko king]

I may put up some car stuff on the anything and everything section. If I get going here, I will hog up the site lol. I am going to try and cut my session times back some and enjoy the game a little more. Speaking of distractions, if you are ever up at Mohegan Sun on a Friday nite, the club has what they call " Little Black Dress Nite ". The cover is waived for the little black dress crowd. It is quite the scene when the club gets out around 2 AM. I'm sure I make a few mistakes on my vp around that time and one of my favorite machines just happens to be in that high traffic area!
I have to have my toys also, my work is seasonal and I love to get my hands on a fixer upper and bring it back to life. Sold my 79 CJ-7 after I fixed it up like new and bought a 1990 Miata, fixed it up and let my wife and daughter drive it for a while, I'm thinking about putting it up for sale now and still looks and runs great. I bought a convertable Vette last year and I've got it looking pretty now, i'll probably hold onto it for a while.

[Tedlark]

  ko I keep records of trips to the casinos but I don't diary or otherwise keep a log of every hand played. Because I usually prefer playing multiple line games this would be a bit of a burden and to me it would slow the game down way too much for me to get any kind of enjoyment out of it.