Video Poker A Grinder's Story

Frank-WOW! I never even thought of this. I'm going to give this a try. Its mind boggling and very cring inducing. But it does take away the reward part of the action. With no reward, no pleasure. Might work.

 

Yes, good advice if you consider playing video poker to be a job rather than a profitable recreation.

 

Job, punishment. Those two are the same thing, yes?

 

If you need the money and can tolerate the fluctuations then it's a job (i.e., that obscene word w**k). If you enjoy playing and can tolerate the fluctuations then it's recreation. If you don't have sufficient bankroll, or if you can't handle the fluctuations emotionally, then you shouldn't be playing at all. Playing with money you can't afford to lose leads to compulsive gambling and financial ruin.

 

I don't need the money. I can financially tolerate the variance (but I don't like it) hence the punishment. When I can't take it emotionally, I just do something else for a while. I have an ability to wait anything (my emotions) out. Being a female I'm pretty emotional about EVERYTHING. Though I know not ALL female are like this. I cry at commercials. I recover quickly and go back to what I was emotionally jostled by. I'm pretty sure you don't watch this sitcom called The Middle, but one of the characters is a high school girl named Sue. She's a great character. She just keeps plugging along, no matter what. I get angry for a little while then go one. She never lets anything upset her-she goes on like nothing gets her upset. I'd like to be like that. I've got half of that down naturally. Quick to anger, quick to get over it. I'm a work in progress on the rest.

 

On most machines, hitting any button while it's counting up a payoff will stop the counting and give immediate credits. Also, on most machines, hitting deal/draw deals the next hand with the same number of credits as your last bet. Therefore, you can just hit deal/draw two or three times; once for the draw (after which you must wait for the machine to display the draw cards), a second time get immediate credits (if there's a payoff), and a third time to deal the next hand.

If you're interested in what the payoff was you should be able to recognize it in the fraction of a second between the draw cards being displayed and then changed to card backs for the next hand.

Caution, don't use the deal/draw button to deal the next hand if you're playing two machines. It's too easy to make a mistake and draw without holding any cards. Instead, after hitting deal/draw for the draw, just hit the max bet button repeatedly. I don't recommend this because it immediately alerts any passing suit that you're a pro. Also, playing two machines is definitely work!

 

I can too "imagine" someone playing VP for fun. What I can't imagine is why it's fun to anyone.

Pushing a button that activates a RNG and then looking at the results of that RNG should not be interesting to any sane person. Watching grass grow should be more entertaining.

It would be like rolling a 6 sided die all day long and getting excited about what numbers were coming up. Who cares?

The difference apparently between myself and recreational gamblers is that I find the result of the roll of a die no more or less interesting because I have a bet on the outcome. It's still just the roll of a die to me.

 

That's why restaurants have apple, blueberry, lemon, choclate, etc pies.

 

I think everyone has something that they can't understand about other people. For a silly example, I can't understand why so many people like boysenberrys. I don't like the taste, but I love one of the berries it was bred from, the loganberry. I suspect that there are more people who would agree with me than with you, but who cares? The point is, we shouldn't think less of people just because their likes and opinions are different from ours.

 

Absolutely! And I spent hundreds of hours picking the wild berries in the fields behinds my parents' house. I think the ones you like grow on trees and not bushes. Is this right? If so, we picked them, too

 

We're getting off subject here, but to answer your question I love mulberries (which grow on trees so technically they're not berries), and I love loganberries which grow on bushes else they could not be cross-bred with raspberries to create boysenberries.

 

Food preferences are not in the same category. We're talking about something completely different. Finding a particular food tasty and another type of food unpalatable is indeed personnel preference. Food is a requirement of life.

Finding something like the output of an RNG, over which one has no control, entertaining, is in my opinion a form of human wide mass insanity. It should not be interesting to anyone.

In my opinion the only reason anyone finds games of chance interesting is because game designers have designed the games into fooling our brains into triggering evolutionary survival related responses.

I'm not alone in this opinion. I recommend a good book entitled, "Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas Natasha Dow Schüll".

 

There is no difference between a RNG, a roll of the dice, the turn of a card from a shuffled deck (as in blackjack or in the internal workings of a VP machine) or betting which cockroach will crawl out of a circle first.
Although, as you say, casino games are intentionally designed to be addictive, that is not necessary to draw people to gambling. The attractiveness of gambling in an innate human trait, going back many thousands of years, long before anyone designed a casino game.

I like to play a wide variety of games, and in most cases there is no money involved. I especially like to play bridge. The difference with video poker is that a few games (a very few) offer over 100% expected return, which makes them attractive to me. There are also situations where a promotion pushes a nominally sub-100% game into the positive realm, including but not limited to progressive royals, but those feel more like a job and thus are not as attractive to me.

 

Dan-LOL at "...those fell more like a job to me" I know what you mean. I'd like to add that I often discover the progressive I want to play when I'm headed out the door just about broke. argh!

 

Yes I agree that risk taking evolved long before casino games...but actually that's my point. Current casino games take advantage of people's evolved desires to take risk as a survival mechanism and instead channel them into time wasting and or destructive behaviours. The reason it's "fun" or just dissociative, is because it harkens back to our evolutionary drives. Since risk taking is no longer necessary for survival in modern society the entertainment it offers is simply a false pleasure.

Of course that's just my opinion.

I'd be curious to see how many people still "enjoyed" video poker if instead of cards all you saw was the numerical output of the RNG???

 

Not too many, I don't think

 

That's all a craps player sees, and lots of people seem to enjoy playing craps.

 

According to the book I'm reading VP/slot addiction is roughly 10 times as prevalent in the US as all other forms of pathological gambling (much more so if you compared it to only craps). And it takes about 1/3rd of the time to become an addiction as other forms of gambling.

So while I agree that people enjoy craps, it does seem to pose much less of a threat.

Now I'm wondering how many people would enjoy craps if there were no dice they got to roll, and instead only had to push a button and the "roll" got displayed on a screen???

 

I have about 9 books on compulsive gambling and vp/slots as opposed to tables games and sports betting. Women have it more frequently than do men. there is another reason for mine, but that's for the OT graveyard.

 

That's what triggered this fracas, was all about -
> http://www.gamblingforums.com/threads/been-missing-everyone-finally-been-hitting-some-hands.1078/