Video Poker Bankroll

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Since video poker features fast gameplay and if a player has chosen high denomination and a multi-hand machine, it is staggering how easy they can run through a sizeable bankroll in no time. In case a player intends to spend only a day at the casino, then they may gamble up to the limit of their bankroll and abstain from going even a cent. Bob Dancer (Born 1947) is a video poker expert and gambling author best known for his book Million Dollar Video Poker, which recounts six years of video poker experiences.The book details a six-month period, Sept 2000 to March 2001, when Dancer and his wife parlayed a six thousand dollar bankroll into over one million dollars playing video poker. Bankroll Management Explained. In the simplest terms, your poker bankroll is the amount of money you have set aside for poker. This doesn't include money you have in your bank account for bills.

Quite often, people use the well-known normal distribution toestimate the kind of results that you should expect whenplaying video poker. But, this estimate is off by quite abit unless you are talking about a very largenumber of hands (around 4,000,000 should do). For a smallernumber of hands, we need to be more careful. On this page,I will examine four popular video poker games with quitedifferent characteritics. Note that variance is measuredin units of bets squared.

Video poker games tend to have high variance, and most of that variance is carried in the high payoff hands (typically Royal flush and special bonus hands such as Four Deuces). Although these hands.

Video poker games tend to have high variance, and most of that varianceis carried in the high payoff hands (typically Royal flush and specialbonus hands such as Four Deuces).Although these hands have a majoreffect on the EV, for short term play, the probabilities of the common hands are more important. The followingchart shows the probability distribution of ending bankrolls afterplaying 1000 hands of the four games specified.

Although the area under each curve is the same (they all integrateto give 1.0), they have different shapes. The Jacks or Bettercurve is sharpest because JB does not have a second high payinghand besides the Royal. Ninja craps review. On the other hand, Deuces Wild hasa distinct 'knee' at around 200 units, which corresponds to the200 unit payout of the 'mini-jacpot' of four deuces.Also notice the little 'blips' at around 800 units on each curve.All of the games pay 800 for a Royal, and those blips representthe chance of getting a Royal in 1000 hands.

Looking at these curves alone, it is hard to see that Deuces Wildhas the highest EV and Jacks or Better the worst.In fact, for such a short session, you are more likely to benear even, and to avoid a large loss, play JB rather than the othergames, even though it has the worst EV.So, what happens if we look at a larger session?

Probabilities - 10,000 Hands

After 10,000 hands, things start to smooth out quite a bit.It is apparent that the lower EV of JB is starting to dragit downward -- the long term expectation is to lose yourbankroll playing any negative expectation game. Also noticethat the 'four deuces' knee has been completely absorbed inthe Deuces curve, and the Royal kneeis starting to merge for Jacks (itwill take about 30,000 more hands before the Jacks kneeis no longer apparent). Also, Deuces is starting to looka good bit better than Double Bonus (especially on theleft hand side, where the losses are!).

But, 10,000 hands may be a bit long for a session for mostplayers. I picked 5,000 hands as a good intermediate valuethat is close to what I expect most players would plan fora short trip.

After 5000 hands, the left hand Jacks peak is almost perfectlynormal --- but it matches a normal curve with a variance (and expecation) corresponding to subtracting out the Royal.Because cases where a Royal does occur (represented by theright hand peak) are well-separated from the first case, here we can get a good approximation of the distributionby combining two normal curves. But that is not truefor Deuces or Double Bonus (Pickem is quite close to normalby this point because the very high paying hands are sorare). Notice that both Deuces and DB are not symmetric-- the right hand side of the curve has 'lifted its foot'considerably.

So, what does this mean to the player? I'm glad you asked.We can redraw the same curves to give the cumulative probabilitiesand read off what to expect on a session of 5000 hands.

Cumulative Probabilities - 5000 Hands

For any given ending bankroll (starting from zero, remember), thecurves indicate the percentage of the time that you will end upat or below the indicated point after 5000 hands of the chosengame. Looking at the vertical line at zero ending bankroll, we cansee that you should expect to lose at Jacks or Betterabout 72% of the time, but only about 55-56% of the time at theother games.From the other angle, the 50% horizontal line show that halfthe time we should lose 102 units or more when playing JBfor 5000 hands, but only 32-51 (or more) for the other games.

From a trip bankroll perspective, the 5% and 10% lines maybe the most interesting.For a 5000 hand session, Double bonus can be cruel -- youwill end up losing over 400 units one trip in 10, and 488or more 1 in 20. The other games aren't quite so bad, butyou must be prepared for the variance.

Be careful of one thing --- the curves assume you play thefull 5000 hands. So, you might dip below the ending bankrollon the way to getting there. You really need a bit more thanthe curves indicate (ballpark estimate: 10%) to be sure you don'tend up with playing more before the end of your trip morefrequently than you had planned for.

I hope these curves will help you to understand the cruelyet enticing game of video poker. We can't get rid of thevariance, but we can understand and prepare for it.

--jazbo

Video Poker Bankroll Comments From The Free Video Poker Forum

The following comments about video poker bankroll are segments from the Free Video Poker forum connection. It's a service directly from ITG and Action Gaming that allows you the opportunity to learn, practice and play your favorite video poker and keno games with free credits. So you'll have endless video poker bankroll to test your skills and to just have a lot of fun. There's no real money involved – it's just for fun.

If you've played in a casino at all, you'll be familiar with all the games. What's really cool is that each game has the total look and ‘feel' (including the sounds) of the actual games that you would play in the casino. As they should because it's operated by the same company that make the games. You can play video poker classics like Jacks or Better and Double Double Bonus and dozens of others. Including the new games that haven't shown up in the casino yet.

All your keno favorites are there too. Like Caveman Keno, Power Keno and my personal favorite, Four Card Keno. Plus you can play 20-card keno and other multi-card keno games as well. They're all there. I'll often sign on late at night and play Keno while I cruise the internet in other browser tabs. Available member benefits can also include playing and critiquing new video poker and keno games before they are available to the public in local casinos.

Well, enough about the Free Video Poker connection. Let's get some insights into video poker bankroll views from people that play a lot. These excerpts are from the forum section and are the opinions of video poker players and not necessarily of the managers of TheMysticGambler.com. The topic is:

How big of a video poker bankroll is needed?

Question from wildman49: I have been playing .05 video poker for 6 years now. The last few years I've been playing a lot more often.

I play 10 to 20 coins (.50 to 1.00) per hand. I feel like for every 5 coins ( .25 ) I play I need $100.00 to play on. So if I am going to play 20 coins $1.00 per hand I need $400.00. Is this too much or to little? I want to work my way up to $5.00 a hand over the next year but not sure how much to take per trip. Does anyone have something for me to go by that seems to work for you?

Reply from Minn. Fatz: Great question, welcome to the Free Video Poker Forum.

As a rule of thumb, the Playboy Guide to Casinos recommends a total bankroll of 3000 bets playing full-pay VP with perfect strategy. So that'd be $3000 playing $1 per spin and $15000 playing $5. Figure one-tenth of that per session and you're pretty close.

Poker Bankroll App

Mathematically, the problem is called Gambler's Ruin. It's been studied for a long time. Short answer, how much money you should set aside for gambling depends on where you choose to set your risk of losing it all. A lower risk of ruin requires a larger bankroll.

The classical solution says that if:

B is your bankroll, in bets
Var is the variance of the game or games you're playing
p is your chosen risk of ruin; ln(p) is its natural logarithm
R is the expected return for the game or games you play

then:

B = [Var * ln(p)] / (-2 * R)

(Note that the expected return of a game in which you get all your money back is 0; so the expected return here for Double Bonus paying 10 for a full house and 7 for a flush would be .0017. Win palace play. Also note that if the games you're playing do not have a positive expected return then your risk of ruin is 100 percent; you will eventually lose everything regardless of your bankroll amount.)

The most recent work I know of is the late Michael Canjar's paper 'Gambler's Ruin Revisited: The Effects of Skew and Large Jackpots.' It's 31 pages of advanced stuff that I admit I don't get. But the short story is that the formula above overstates the required bankroll for 'well-behaved' games like full-pay VP.

For full-pay Deuces Wild returning .007620, Canjar calculates a 5 percent risk of ruin bankroll at 4586 bets versus 5078 given by the conventional method.

Bottom line, if you're looking to win money — or at least not to lose your roll — stick to full-pay VP, play perfect strategy and set and stick to your limits.

Reply From Quad Deuces: Except that I think OP is talking about a weekend stake and you're talking about a lifetime bankroll.

OP needs to be more specific.

You will need to take a lot more cash into the casino if you are planning on playing $1 NSU Deuces than do if you're going to play 10c 10-line 9/6 jacks. Both are $5 bets, but a $1500 downward swing in $1 NSU will probably happen over the course of a weekend (say 10-15 hours of play), and is a lot less likely on the 10c 10-line JoB. That -$1500 swing might just start when you first sit down and by 8:00 the first evening, you'll be paying ATM fees – if you can withdraw more than $500 which can go like *that* at $1 VP. It'd be a lot better to have, say $5K cash for the weekend instead.

I play at a casino with machines that have 10c 10-line NSU Deuces (99.73%) and 10c 10-line 8/5 Super Aces (99.94%) Slot club is the same (.25% or .50% (2X)) for both.

I used to feel comfortable I could play all night on $500 when I played NSU. After I switched to Super Aces I found I needed $1000 – $1500 when things ran bad. Both are $5 bets. Even though I know it's worth it to get the extra .2% playing Super Aces, I have to prepare for the inevitable bad nights when quads, especially in Aces, are simply nonexistent. It just means I walk in with more cash (or at least access to more cash).

Reply by billyjoe: Whatever bankroll you choose to put at risk, I suggest setting loss limits on each playing session of your trip. That way, you will still have some gaming money to play on throughout your visit.

Video Poker Bankroll Requirements

Reply by royal flush: A video Poker Bankroll, as in life, is a 'continuous session' and one must not play more money then they can afford to risk!

Live Poker Bankroll Management

Comment by Minn. Fatz: I used to feel comfortable I could play all night on $500 when I played NSU. After I switched to Super Aces I found I needed $1000 – $1500 when things ran bad.
The key here is variance. Your variance for Super Aces 8/5 is 63.36; for NSUD it's only 25.78; the expected returns are not that much different. Playing a higher variance game requires a bigger bankroll for the same risk of ruin.

Video Poker Bankroll Calculator

Don't forget to visit the Free Video Poker connection to see how long you can make your pretend bankroll last. But don't worry, you'll always get more free credits before you lose anything. Thanks for visiting TheMysticGambler.com