Last week, I wrote about Four Card Poker and mentioned
how I would cover it's 'crazy' cousin - Crazy 4 Poker in an upcoming column. I started to work on this column this past
week when I got to the point of discussing why a Player would choose to play
one of the games over the other. The
overall paybacks are fairly similar. The
reality is, that I can't really suggest to Players to play one of these games
instead of the other. This is because
casino games are (or at least should be) a form of entertainment and we can't
overlook this factor in our choices.
So much of what I write is all about the math. Years ago, my father, Lenny Frome, described
Expert Strategy as a three-legged stool, with each leg equally important. After all, we know what happens if one leg of
a stool is shorter than the other two!
These three legs were:
·
Know which game
to play
·
Know how to play
that game
·
Know what to
expect
The first of these legs essentially referred to the
payback of the game. Don't play
short-pay machines when you can find full-pay machines. On the surface, it might mean play only the
game(s) with the absolute highest payback.
But, if that were the case, everyone should be clamoring for the one
type of video poker machine in the casino with the highest payback - probably
some Deuces Wild variant.
If this were what my father intended, why did he bother
to write about all the other games in detail - not just video poker but all of
the proprietary table games too? This is
why a few years back, I added a concept to my father's three-legged stool. I called it the comfy cushion. It means you have to ENJOY playing whatever
game you choose as well. There are two
significant reasons why I added this explicity to Expert Strategy.
The first reason is because, as I said earlier, gambling
should be a form of entertainment. By
this definition, you should enjoy it your time doing it. Yes, I fully understand that it is a somewhat
unique form of entertainment in that you might walk away with more money than
you started, but with rare exception, these are not life-altering amounts of
money we are talking about. I'm sure no
one minds being miserable while they are winning thousands (or hundreds of
thousands of dollars), but more often than not, your win will be far smaller
than this and you will lose more often than you will win. No one likes to lose, but if you're
absolutely miserable while you are losing $20 over 3 hours, something is very
wrong. When you go to a movie theater,
there is a good chance you'll spend $20 too.
You'll have no chance of getting that money back. You probably won't mind if the movie was
good. If the movie was a rotten tomato,
it might bother you a bit more. This is
the same attitude you should take with you to the casino.
The second reason is that if you're not having any fun
while playing, there's a pretty good chance you are going to forget all about
the other two legs of the stool. You may
know how to play a game, but in your frustration you'll start doing things you
shouldn't be doing. You may know what to
expect, but while you're not having fun, you'll start imagining the cards are
all against you or that the casino must be cheating and again, you'll go away
from the strategy that you are supposed to be using. So, on a theoretical level, you might be
playing a game with a higher payback, but if you don't adhere to the strategy
you may find that on a reality level, you've lowered the payback to the point
where you'd be better off playing a different game.
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