Table your Hunches

            Last week, I described how all casino game strategy is based on expected values.   You hit or stick in blackjack not because you hope the next card is of a certain value, but because there are certain probabilities as to what the next card will be and how it will affect your hand and your chances of winning or losing.   If you're dealt two face cards, you don't give much thought to strategy.  Hopefully, you're not one of those Players who even thinks about splitting 10's! 

            But, if you are dealt a 16 and the Dealer has a 7, you start giving thought to the strategy.  With a 16, you have 5 cards that will help you and 8 that will bust you.  The odds don't look to good and this is why a lot of people stick on this hand, albeit incorrectly.  You can stay put, but with a 16, the only way you can win is if the Dealer busts, which will happen only 26% of the time.  So, your choices are a 61% chance of busting right away or sticking and having a 74% chance of losing that way.  Of course, by hitting you also have an opportunity improve your hand.  All of the 5 possibilities improve your hand.  If you pick up an Ace, you'll be most likely to push.  Pick up a 5 and you'll win more than 92% of the time.  Don't get me wrong, it is not a strong hand and the decision to hit is not an overwhelming one, but it is still the right move.  In the simplest form, if you face this situation enough times - which you will if you play for a few hundred hours, you'll find that you do better by hitting than by sticking.

            In blackjack, you don't have to memorize all of the math behind the game.  You don't have to figure out how many cards will bust you or bust the Dealer.  To learn to play blackjack, many Players use a simple strategy table.  It is a simple little chart that shows every possible Player hand and each possible dealer upcard.  It then shows what to do - hit, stick, double, split, surrender, etc..  Guys like me have already done all the number crunching for you.

            Video poker is no different than blackjack except the decision making process is far more complex.  In blackjack, the result is essentially binary - you win or you lose (okay, you can tie also, so it is not really binary).  In video poker, you can have 1 of many results - ranging from a Royal Flush down to a High Pair or you can lose.  Since each of the different winning hands pays a different amount, the specific result must be taken into account.  If someone invented a game of video poker in which all hands above a certain rank paid a fixed amount, then we'd be able to lump all the hands into win or lose.  But, we need to know the probability of each final outcome with a different payout in order to appropriately determine the value of getting that hand.  Surely, it is more valuable to wind up with a Straight Flush than just a Straight.

            Video poker is also more complex than blackjack in that there is more than just a handful of different possibilities for each hand.  The Player can hold all 5 cards or discard all 5 cards or anything in between for 32 different possible plays.  Yes, most of these possibilities will be quickly discarded, but they still must be considered from a mathematical perspective.  They are only discarded because the human mind can quickly recognize possible draws that would clearly not be the best strategy. 

            Despite the extra complexity of video poker, the similarities are still stronger than the differences.  In the end the decision still comes down to the expected value.  Like in blackjack, you don't have sit there trying to figure out how many cards you need to complete a Straight or the like.  Again, guys like me have already done the job.  We have looked at every possible deal, every possible draw for every possible deal and summed up all of the final hands.  Using this distribution, each possible draw is assigned an expected value.  Whichever draw has the highest expected value is deemed the right play.  The last step in the process is too try and categorize the way each hand is played into a format that a human can use to play the hands.  We call this a strategy table.

            Unlike blackjack where the strategy is a matrix that crosses Player hands with Dealer hands and tells you what to do, a video poker strategy chart lists all the possible playable hands in order in a simple table.  The table usually contains the expected value of each hand too, but this is just for information.  To use the strategy table, you basically work from the top and find the first hand that your dealt hand can make and that is the way to play the hand.  So, if you are dealt a hand that is a 4-Card Straight and a Low Pair, you start at the top of the table and work downward.  If a 4-Card Straight appears first, you play that.  If a Low Pair appears first, you play the hand that way.  If you can't find any hand that matches the hand you were dealt, then you fall to the bottom of the table and find a RAZGU which means throw all five cards.

            Next week, we'll begin breaking down a strategy table for full-pay jacks or better.  You'll be on your way to becoming an Expert Player.

Surrender and Insurance

            As I’ve described many times, the concepts of Expert Strategy apply to more than just video poker.  Essentially, they apply to every game in the casino (except slots of course).  You should always know which games to play, what strategy to play them with and what to expect.  Most games in the casino do not require learning very significant strategies to play them properly.  Two that do – video poker and blackjack (and its variants Blackjack Switch and Spanish 21 – require some serious effort to learn them correctly.  The reward for doing so is a payback that is above 99.5%.

            In order to achieve the theoretical payback, you have to learn ALL of the strategy including the less well-known parts and even the parts we might find ‘offensive.’  For blackjack this would be the concepts of insurance and surrender.  The idea of ‘surrender’ is the one that you may find to be ‘offensive’, but there are times it is the right play.

            First let’s begin with the definition of the Insurance bet.  When the Dealer has an Ace up, he will offer everyone at the table the option to make an Insurance wager (which must be ½ of your base blackjack wager).  In reality, it is nothing more than a proposition bet.  If the Dealer has a blackjack, then you win 2 to 1.  If he doesn’t you lose your Insurance wager.  Assuming you have not been counting cards, then the odds of the Dealer having Blackjack is roughly 4 out of 13 (I’m ignoring his upcard ‘Ace’ and any of the cards you can see).  Paying 2 to 1, gets us back 12 out of every 13 units wagered for a payback of about 92.31%.  Obviously, you can do some light card counting and only make this wager when it is more in your favor, but it will take a lot of non-10s/Faces to turn the deck in your favor.

            Sometimes you will hear a Player who has a Blackjack to ask for ‘even money’ when the Dealer has a Blackjack.  This is really the equivalent of the Player making the Insurance wager.  If he makes it and the Dealer does NOT have Blackjack he will win 3 for 2 on his base wager, but would have lost 1/2 unit on Insurance leaving him having won even money.  If the Dealer DOES have blackjack, he pushes his blackjack wager and wins his Insurance wager, which will pay 2 to 1 of the INSURANCE wager which is equal to his base wager – in other words, even money on the base wager.  To keep things moving along, most casinos will just allow the Player to call “even money” and get paid 1 to 1 on his blackjack wager. 

            In reality, this is no better a decision than making the Insurance wager under any other situation.  However, from an emotional standpoint, many Players hate the idea of a total push when getting a Blackjack.  This would be the outcome if you don’t take the Insurance Wager AND the Dealer has Blackjack.  The proper play is to stay unemotional and never take even money.  This situation should only occur about 1 in 275 hands (approximately) which would mean once every 9 hours of play.  For some strange reason, I seem to get it about 3 times an hour?!

            Next up is the Surrender rule.  Many of you may never have heard of it.  The casinos don’t really advertise it much.  You have the right to Surrender your hand before you take any other action by forfeiting half of your initial wager.  Once you hit, split, double down, etc… you can no longer Surrender your hand.  There are two different variations of Surrenders.  The first called Early Surrender is rarely offered.  It allows you to Surrender BEFORE the Dealer checks for a Blackjack when he has a 10/Face or an Ace up.  Thus, even if the Dealer has a Blackjack, you would have forfeited only half of your wager.  This is a big advantage to the Player which explains its rarity.  The other variation is called Late Surrender.  This version has the Dealer checking for Blackjack and only after it is confirmed that he does NOT have one can the Player opt to Surrender.

            Unlike the Insurance Wager, this is not a proposition wager better left ignored.  If that were the case, the casino would have it on the felt in big bold letters “PLEASE SURRENDER!”  Instead it is an option you need to take on occasion and you almost have to ask the casino permission to do so.  From a mathematical perspective, the decision is easy.  If you are going to win less than 25% of the time with your starting two cards, you Surrender.  At a 25%, you would win back exactly half of your initial wager which is what you’ll have left after Surrendering.  Hence, that is why this is the decision point.  There are slightly different strategies depending on whether the Dealer hits or sticks on  Soft 17. 

            You should always Surrender a Hard 16 to a Dealer 9, 10 or Ace.  You should also always Surrender a Hard 15 to a Dealer 10.  If the Dealer hits a Soft 17, you also Surrender a Hard 15 to a Dealer Ace and a Hard 17 (yes, I said 17) to a Dealer Ace.  If the Dealer has a 6 underneath, he gets to keep going and is that much more likely to wind up beating you.   These rules apply to larger shoes of 4-8 decks. 

            The impact of properly Surrendering is that the payback is increased by 0.07%.  This may not sound like a lot, but looked at differently, it can cut the house edge by about 15%.