Colorado video poker experts play for those 'rare royals'

No doubt you‚ve heard that certain skilled players — blackjack card counters and video poker experts — can swing the math and gain an advantage over the house.

This is true. Card counters with sufficient skill, discipline and bankroll can beat the house. Well-funded video poker players who stick to the best-paying games can be long-term winners.

But skilled play is no guarantee of winning at any individual session. The elements of chance are still too strong for that. Some days, it’s just going to seem like every blackjack hand’s a bust and the dealer pulls a 5 to turn every 16 into a 21. Even the famed MIT card counting team had some large losses before getting on a roll.

In video poker, losing sessions outnumber winners, no matter how good you are. Royal flushes account for about 2 percent of our long-term return — a bit more or a bit less depending on the specific game and pay table.

When we say 10-7-5 Double Bonus Poker returns 100.17 percent with expert play, we’re including a normal frequency of royal flushes. Since royals come up an average of only about once per 48,048 hands and account for 1.67 percent of our payback in 10-7-5 Double Bonus, we’re only playing about a 98.5 percent game between royals.

It’s possible to win while playing a 98.5 percent games. Heck, there are a lot of games worse than 98.5 percent in casinos, and players do have winning sessions. All it takes are a few four-of-a-kind hands. If one can be four Aces for an 800-coin payoff on Double Bonus, or four 2s, 3s or 4s for 400 coins, so much the better.

But the video poker expert trying to get an edge on the game isn’t looking for an occasional winning session and a long-term bankroll drain. Winning sessions during non-royal periods are welcome, mind you, but the experts are counting on those rare royals, worth 4,000 credits for a five-credit bet, to overcome a slew of small losing sessions.

In the pro’s world, there are more losing sessions than winners, but the big winners more than offset the losers. The long-term payback percentage cracks 100 percent.

To get to that profitable long run means being able to sustain the short-term losses. It takes money.

How much? I ran the numbers through Bob Dancer’s Video Poker for Winners software. If you start with a $100 bankroll on a 25-cent game, the chance of losing it all on 10-7-5 Double Bonus comes up as 99 percent.

Hey, you might get extremely lucky, hit a quick royal and have a bigger bankroll to work with. But as a rule, if you’re just starting with a few hundred dollars and play long enough, the house will take your money.

To reduce the risk of ruin to even 50 percent requires a starting bankroll of $6,974. In other words, if you’re a pro playing with an edge on this game, you’re betting five quarters at a time, you still have a 50-50 chance of going broke. For a 10 percent chance of going broke, increase the bankroll to $23,168. For 1 percent, the necessary bankroll is $43,336.

No matter how good you are, giving yourself a shot at long-term profitability means you need to be backed by plenty of cash. It takes money to make money.

~ John Grochowski has covered the casino industry for 15 years in newspapers and magazines, and is the author of six books on casino games. Readers can e-mail him at casinoanswerman@casinoanswerman.com.