Reno Video Poker Heaven

Flew into town late Thurs night June 20 @ 12:30AM. Well, June 21 technically. Flight was an hour late. Shared limo to Peppermill with a quiet other VIP. Driver Jared is an old friend. Checked into 18th floor tuscany tower suite at 1:20AM. My welcome gift of Baileys, Fiji waters and cheese/crackers/fruit tray was predelivered waiting for me. YAY. too tired to go gaming, I opt for a good night’s sleep.

I had SO many Big Jackpots during this 12 day stay that I’m gonna organize the photos in TIERS, grouped by Total screen payout (W-2G).Photos have captions at bottom to help explain what yer lookin’ at.

TOP JACKPOTS

I stare at this first one for long minutes at a time.

It’s my current pinnacle dream video poker hand.

MID-TOWN JACKPOTS

LOWER jackpots, ALL handpays still

SAMPLER OF other JACKPOTS

OTHER GLIMPSES

Many of you got my trip reports during my Tour which varied from every other day to that one big day where I sent out 3 in one day. The unbelievability of my continued good fortune for many days at a time was evident when I began to run out of new exclamations for what was happening.

I seem to be limited to three photos per email due to the memory limitations. This blog post should show more than my combined daily report and this has them not in chronological order.

Whilst most of your replies echoed my enthusiasm, I appreciated the cautionary comments also, which mirrored my own swirling thoughts. Things like “come home NOW”, “don’t go play PaiGow”, “don’t bet higher stakes”, were all good advice. I didn’t go home because I was comfortable to stop playing if I began downturns that threatened my fortune. Got to say that stashing my pocket roll of excess hundreds and bundles of thousands in the safe in the room whenever I hit a jackpot or two in the top two tiers helped me hold my winnings and limited the amount I could lose in a possible downturn as I would only keep $4000 in my pocket when I went back down to the machines. But there were a number of days where that downturn never came. And my safe got fuller. Way cool.

A couple times my laptop charger failed to recharge, which it I did not figure why until the last full day. The chord right at the plug was cut and frayed. Two days prior I was holding the chord and the plug while pulling it out of the outlet. I got zapped !! And that was about the day my luck changed from pretty good to amazing. Coincidence? Just sayin’…. By the way I got a new charger the day after I got home, so all is well.

Mike & I got into video poker seriously I estimate around year 2000. We enjoy playing on adjacent machines, sometimes sharing stories, but we stop playing if it’s more than a sentence or two so that we don’t mess up our concentration on holding the correct cards. SO while we are playing we only say things like “quads” or “bonus quads” and we may or may not look up from our screen to look at the other’s screen. It’s kind of a shared “pulse” of how it’s going without undue interruption. There’s the moments you can’t help but notice when one of us sighs or mumbles a profanity when having to reach into our pocket for more hundreds to feed the machine when one has a “credit situation:” meaning 0 credits. Then there’s the announcement of “the night before Christmas!”, a mandatory announcement when you are dealt 4 parts to the Royal Flush, there’s a brief hesitation and imagined drum roll as two pairs of eyes watch to see if the 5th Royal Flush card comes in on the draw. Even being dealt three Aces is a stop and watch type announcement as that 4th Ace plus possibly the kicker is a very lucrative jackpot in the games we play. Anyhow this synchronization is what we’ve developed over this last quarter century. And Lin has become part of our group think too since she’s been playing for 15 or more of those years.

So yeah, Mike was there in Reno, solo, for 4 days of the 12 on my tour. We had a dinner or two together and many shared adjacent sessions. Mike has honed in on a favored playing area, the bartop machines at the Cube Bar, while I tend to flit around a circuit of a dozen or more banks of machines. Many of the machines have the whole range of denominations and a wide range of game types to select from on the home screens. It’s a different mood at every location: fellow players, wait staff and service frequency, neighboring machines have a cornucopia of mostly annoying slot noises and jingles when they are turned up too loud, and how close the machine is to an aisle, to a restaurant, to the pissers, to table games, etc. So lots of influences to your choices all the time.

My story of being zapped causing my luck to change is just one attempt to figure how this trip was so different from others. I hope to do a detailed analysis of my play on this trip from the index cards here I scrawl details of EACH session listing my jackpots and session $ results. I’ll see how I did on the dozen or more different games I play. I’d like to count the number of DEALT made jackpots as opposed to the usual jackpots that I have to work form by holding some cards and DRAWing replacements to create a jackpot. If you know anything about probability, and I know a little, I have done result analysis on previous trips to see if my win or loss is within a few % points of expected results. As an example, let’s say the average of all the games I play may be 99.0%. Maybe I have an error rate of 1% less than the perfect hold strategy. If all my bets by estimate add up to, say $300,000 for a 5 day, 40 hrs of gaming trip, and I lose $6000 , well my return is 98%, exactly as expected (99% minus 1%). If I lose $12000, that is 96% return. Which could well be within a ONE SIGMA variance, so it is not unusual. The positive side of ONE SIGMA (perhaps) is to Break even (98% +2%). I’ll stop there with this example but that’s the kind of analysis I may delve into. Winning $60,000 on a 12 day trip at the bet size I am at has to be a 10 or more sigma event. Rare indeed. I may well graph each session up or down for the whole trip and if I get into it, put a dot for each jackpot. It all sounds worky, but I’m a math guy and I want to try to find snippet insights of understanding into any things that helped me succeed. I mean you can’t write it off to luck for the whole 99 hrs of gaming. But gambling is not something pure science can predict. I’ll share results maybe by editing this blog post in weeks to come.

I have a slight reservation that doing so well this trip may set a high performance mark which I may tend to compare my future trips to: ALL my previous trips fell well short of this trip’s result. It could be like Muhammad Ali should have retired from boxing before he got the snot beat out of him by his opponents. I know I have a tradition of not getting flustered by losing sessions, days or even entire trips, which is admirable. Not to lose your nerve. And not to gamble your rent. But my next trip should reveal how much I will continue to enjoy video poker gambling…

All for now, thanks for reading and comments, if any, via email preferred.